The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [86]
If, on the other hand, the realm of human autonomy is small, then nudges will not always be enough. If without nudges our decision making faculties are already a battleground, then a nudge isn’t a shift from neutrality. It is more like bringing a knife to a gun fight. Not enough.
Once we recognize the malleability of choice, and how we are already shoved in various ways by the market, authority, culture, and the like, we may need more than an occasional nudge to achieve important public policy results. To fight obesity, for example, we need to do more than put healthy food at the beginning of school lunch lines or disclose calorie counts. Perhaps we should engage in new and serious efforts to build public parks and maintain their safety. Perhaps we should ban fast food restaurants in new neighborhoods, as some cities and towns have done.13 Perhaps we should ban trans fats or end the subsidies that make corn sweeteners artificially cheap. Perhaps we should tax supermarket companies that build in rich neighborhoods, and subsidize supermarket companies that build in poorer neighborhoods. Given the host of cultural, commercial, and biological forces brought to bear on people’s food choices, an occasional nudge in favor of eating an apple will not come close to ending the obesity epidemic.
Moreover, once we realize the tenuousness of good decision making, we should be less sanguine about the power of disclosure. I do believe that the required disclosure of information can be helpful at times, especially when the information is about alternatives rather than merely costs. But disclosure is too often seen as an easily legislated panacea. Too much information can sometimes be worse than too little, since we are easily overwhelmed by details. Also, disclosure does little to alter the power relationships between the discloser and the disclosee, whether the disclosees are holders of credit cards, users of cell phones, or employees of coal mines.
Unlike the libertarian paternalists, I would not start with a presumption that whatever an individual has decided is necessarily correct. I would recognize that disclosure does not always do all that we want. I would be less skeptical of bans and mandates, especially with regard to choices that humans tend to make poorly, have high costs when made poorly, are difficult to learn from (for example, they do not repeat, or have effects that occur in the future), or are already subject to multiple malignant influences.
All in all, I think protecting a sphere where people can exercise their choice making powers is a laudable and important public policy goal, because protecting choice can be a good way to build it, and because sometimes even bad choices are better than none. But when we protect this sphere of human choice, we should not delude ourselves that we are preserving a natural space where autonomous individuals revel in their cognitive freedom. We should protect a sphere of human choice despite the fact it is a constructed, contested space where choices are sometimes manipulated and manufactured.
3.
We have come to the last and most difficult category of implications for the myth of choice. We’ve discussed what each of us can do individually to make ourselves better choice makers, and we’ve discussed how public policy can encourage better choices. We now need to talk about how public policy can be used to build the capacity to make better choices. How can we use external tools to get people to change their internal abilities? That is, how do we use nurture to change people’s natures when it comes to choice making?
Answering this question may seem like a fool’s errand. Why should we believe that public policy or legal tools can help people be better decision makers? The answer is that we already do it all the time, and sometimes it