In Sunday’s New York Times, Katrin Benhold describes how the current UK Government has embraced “behavioral economics.” The Cameron Government has been influenced by Richard H. Thaler’s and Cass R. Sunstein’s book Nudge to adopt policies like telling people who are late with their taxes how many of their neighbors have already paid. A government can improve your behavior (citizen) by showing that it knows what you are doing, by sharing that knowledge with your fellow citizens, and by demonstrating your similarity or divergence from the norm.

Another example is Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on huge sodas. You can still buy as much soda as you want in New York, but limiting the individual portions to 16-ounces confronts you with an explicit choice if you decide you want to drink more than that. Proponents say the government can get better results with less force by using such techniques, and they call it “libertarian paternalism.”

Real libertarians are not happy. Sean Collins writes in the libertarian magazine Spiked:

This paternalistic approach changes the relationship between government and citizens. Instead of government representing us, working for us, government now works on us, trying to change our interests. It would be one thing if government sought to convince the public in open debate, but those who would nudge or ban do not want to have open debate or discussions. As the term ‘paternalism’ implies, citizens are essentially treated like children who do not speak; they are only spoken to.

Followers of Michel Foucault are not libertarians, but they should be equally concerned. They should recall Foucault’s discussion of the “panopticon,” Jeremy Bentham’s scheme for a prison designed so that each prisoner can be observed at all times but cannot tell whether he is being watched:

“So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations. Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks ….

The Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. ….

Although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.” (Foucault, Discipline & Punish)

In defense of the “nudge” idea, I would say that governments have always influenced how choices are presented. It makes sense to be deliberate about the design of choices. I am fine with making you decide to buy soda 16-oz at a time.

Yet there are good reasons to be skeptical about behavioral economics as a tool of governance. Your overall reaction will depend on what most deeply concerns you. You may think that our main problem is unhealthy or immoral personal behavior–people failing to pay their taxes, for example, or drinking 32 ounces of sugary soda at a time. You may, furthermore, believe that to change their behavior by banning or taxing it is often too costly in terms of individual freedom, burdens on the state, or sheer cash. Then it will be appealing to use behavioral economics to influence citizens’ choices, just as it was very tempting to build state prisons according to the principles of Bentham’s panopticon. One guard, very few beatings and executions, yet everyone behaves.

A different stance begins with the idea that modernity poses a threat to the human being as an end-in-herself. Modern rationality is means/ends rationality: we constantly develop and refine tools for getting other people to do what we want, whether those tools are laws and surveillance, bureaucratic files, surveys, advertisements of all kinds, payments and rewards, or taxes and penalties. Each of those devices whittles away at people’s capacity to decide for themselves how to live. From that perspective, manipulation is a fundamental problem, worse than obesity or tax-evasion, and behavioral economics is just the latest and most sophisticated version of it.

Benhold uses the verb “manipulate” in her basic description of the British behavioral economic policies:

Manipulating behavior is old hat in the private sector, where advertisers and companies have been nudging consumers for decades. Just think of strategically placed chocolate bars at the checkout counter. But in public policy, nudge proponents study human behavior to try to figure out why people sometimes make choices that they themselves would consider poor. Then they test small changes in how those choices are presented, to see whether people can be steered toward better decisions — like putting apples, not chocolate bars, at eye level in school cafeterias.

It is better to eat apples than chocolate bars. And it is appropriate for a school to shape students’ behavior. But the classical republican ideal is that no one may influence your thoughts and actions without giving you an explicit justification, and you must have the right to respond if you don’t agree. No one can say, “Do this because I say so.” Your response to being coerced may be as modest as voting against the people who are trying to regulate you, but the exchange of reasons (on their part) and actions (on yours) respects your dignity. Moreover, to the greatest extent possible, the citizens of a republican regime must decide how to constrain and improve themselves and create their own norms. Each is accountable to the others, and nobody manipulates us.

In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (pp. 60-2), I discuss more democratic ways to change our behavior:

Human beings are distinctive because we can have ordinary desires plus desires concerning our desires. For example, I may want to put down a difficult scholarly book that I am reading so that I can watch a trivial television show, and at the same time want not to have that desire. … If I turn myself into someone who enjoys scholarly books more and trivial TV shows less, I am not only entitled to believe that I have done the right thing with my time, but that I have also improved myself. In that way, the self (personal identity) is connected to second-order volitions.

I introduce this concept here because we are capable of assessing and altering our own second-order volitions in ways that produce conscious development, not just random change. In the words of the Port Huron Statement that inaugurated the New Left in America, we “have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.” The Statement proceeds to note that this process of self-cultivation is not individualistic, on the model of a Romantic artist developing his or her own genius. “This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism—the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own. . . . Human interdependence is contemporary fact.”

Indeed, most of the effective techniques for improving our second-order volitions are “relational” and collaborative. Religious congregations, Study Circles and other deliberative forums, internally democratic associations, and participatory social movements convene people to decide on what they should want and then to hold one another accountable for changing their identities by changing what they want. …

Meanwhile, as a whole country, we have both desires and second-order volitions. We want to drive our big SUVs to work, and we want to be the kind of country that does not want to do that. Whereas individual consumer choices elicit our ordinary desires, civic acts such as making arguments in public and voting make us think about our second-order volitions. A good law is not a reflection of what we want but of what we think we should want.

Again, I do not rule out the possibility that a democratically elected government might put apples on the lower shelves of school cafeterias, ban 32-oz sodas, or even inform tax scofflaws how many of their neighbors have paid on time. But each of these acts is a potential threat to the dignity of the persons being regulated, and so it requires explicit public discussion and careful review.

I realize, by the way, that I have combined allusions to libertarianism, civic republicanism, and Foucault in this post, even though they represent very different perspectives. But their differences emerge mostly in what they say about how we should govern. Presented with “libertarian paternalism,” I think they would converge on the same hostile response.

(See also “the new manipulative politics: behavioral economics, microtargeting, and the choice confronting Organizing for Action” and “qualms about a bond market for philanthropy” for similar concerns about another popular idea, social investing.)

Soon after the volume entitled Civic Studies is published, a daylong discussion of the same topic will take place at the Southern Political Science Association meeting (January 10 in New Orleans).

As Karol Soltan and I write in the volume, the phrase “civic studies” is quite new. A group of scholars coined it in 2007 in a collaborative statement entitled “The New Civic Politics: Civic Theory and Practice for the Future.” Civic Studies does not mean civic education, although it should ultimately improve civic education. Instead, in the words of original framework, Civic Studies is an “emerging intellectual community, a field, and a discipline. Its work is to understand and strengthen civic politics, civic initiatives, civic capacity, civic society, and civic culture.”

The framework cites two definitive ideals for the emerging discipline of civic studies “public spiritedness” (or “commitment to the public good”) and “the idea of the citizen as a creative agent.” Civic studies is an intellectual community that takes these two ideals seriously. Although new, it draws from several important strands of ongoing research: the Nobel-Prize-winning scholarship of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom on managing common assets; deliberative democracy; public work; the study of public participation in development; the idea of social science as practical wisdom or phronesis; and community-based research in fields like sociology.

Here is the agenda for the mini-conference:

Civic Studies “Conference Within a Conference”: Fri Jan 10 2014, 9:45 to 11:15am

Author Meets Critics for Peter Levine’s “We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For”

Author: Peter Levine (Tufts University)
Critic: Olivia Newman (Harvard University)
Critic: Ryan McBride (Tulane University)
Critic: Thad Williamson (University of Richmond)
Critic: Rumman Chowdhury (University of California, San Diego)
Chair: Susan Orr (College at Brockport, SUNY)
* Albert Dzur participating remotely via skype

Fri Jan 10 2014, 1:15 to 2:45pm
Roundtable “What is Civic Studies?”

Participant: Karol Soltan (University of Maryland)
Participant: Peter Levine (Tufts University)
Participant: Tina Nabatchi (Maxwell School Syracuse University)
Participant: Thad Williamson (University of Richmond)
Chair: Peter Levine (Tufts University)

Fri Jan 10 2014, 3:00 to 4:30pm
Teaching Civic Studies

Participant: Katherine Kravetz (American University)
Participant: Timothy J. Shaffer (Wagner College)
Participant: Alison Staudinger (University of Wisconsin, Green Bay)
Participant: Donald Harward (Bates College)
Participant: Susan Orr (College at Brockport, SUNY)

Fri Jan 10 2014, 4:45 to 6:15pm
Author Meets Critics for Paul Aligica, Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond

Author: Paul Aligica (George Mason University)
Critic: James Bohman (Saint Louis University)
Critic: James Johnson (University of Rochester)
Chair: Karol Soltan (University of Maryland)
Critic: Samuel Ely Bagg (Duke University)

(en route to Austin, TX) Yesterday, we heard an exemplary presentation on Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) by Berkeley professor Meredith Minkler, who is one of the leaders of the field. She told a perfect story of a research project that was a collaboration between university-based scholars and laypeople: in this case, workers in Chinese restaurants in San Francisco. The workers provided guidance that made the research interesting, original, and important. My colleague Sarah Shugars has a summary.

I was struck by a minor point that brings up a larger issue. The Berkeley researchers knew that non-fatal accidents are very common among restaurant workers. Their worker colleagues noted that restaurants’ first aid kits tend to contain only Band-Aids. The team therefore calculated the percentage of restaurants that do not maintain satisfactory first aid kits. In order to generate that statistic, they had to know how many Chinese restaurants there are. The City of San Francisco did not know. The restaurant workers contributed a precise count.

Now, a city could count its Chinese restaurants. It could send one of its paid employees to count, or it could hire a contractor for that purpose. But many of our political theories just assume that the state knows things. We take that for granted. On the contrary, knowing something as simple as how many Chinese restaurants exist raises layers of problems:

• The state must care about the topic in order to collect the data. (To be fair to San Francisco, its health department participated in this project. My point is a general one about the need for the state to care.)
• The state must pay for the data, which is not free. Collecting the data may be more expensive for the state than for other parties. For instance, Chinese restaurant workers can read signs in Chinese; most city government employees cannot.
• The state must define the concept, which almost always raises value questions. (What is a genuinely “Chinese” restaurant? Why separate Chinese restaurants into their own category?)
• The state must employ agents who act with integrity. For instance, a state employee who counts Chinese restaurants could take bribes to leave out some restaurants so that they would avoid scrutiny. That would ruin the data.
• The state must collect the information competently. As I noted recently, “The same US government that can apparently tap almost any telephone in the world cannot harvest information that people voluntarily provide on the government’s own website regarding their eligibility for insurance.”
• The state must pay attention to the data it collects. After all, “the state” is actually a whole bunch of human beings who do not automatically know what their colleagues know, let alone act on that knowledge.

Clearly, states should collect information as the basis of sound policy. We shouldn’t ask restaurant workers to do all the research about restaurants. But collecting good data is itself a political achievement. We can’t just presume it will happen. Nor is the best way to obtain it always for the state to buy it. For one thing, citizens can benefit from being the researchers. In this case, the same restaurant workers who collected the basic data also won significant reforms in city law. The process of data-collection took effort (for which they were paid on the grant), but it also gave them political power.

(See also “Why Engineers Should Study Elinor Ostrom“)