"In Conversation" Series
Location:
Zoom:
https://huji.zoom.us/j/81725291295?pwd=yBUb9kML1Eaxab2cu95NmlzxvK46iF.1
Lecturer:
Prof. Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard)
Title:
Paternalism After Behavioral Economics
Abstract:
Is paternalism legitimate? Might it increase welfare? When would it compromise autonomy in some impermissible way? The outpouring of empirical work on cognitive biases, and on departures from perfect rationality, has led to a wholesale rethinking of paternalism and its limits. Over the last decades, three camps have emerged: (1) coercive paternalists, who urge that behavioral findings undermine John Stuart Mill's Harm Principle and greatly strengthen arguments for paternalistic mandates and bans; (2) libertarian paternalists, who urge that behavioral findings justify a host of paternalistic but freedom-preserving interventions or "nudges," such as warnings, reminders, labels, and automatic enrollment; and (3) antipaternalists, who urge that behavioral findings justify only, or at most, efforts to strengthen or "boost" people's competences, or their capacities to make good choices. On welfare grounds, it is possible to identify the assumptions under which one or another approach would be best. Libertarian paternalism often has significant advantages over coercive paternalism, at least in circumstances in which choosers are heterogeneous. But when all or most choosers err, the welfarist argument for coercive paternalism is strengthened. And when choosers are not only heterogeneous but also adequately informed and free from behavioral biases, antipaternalism makes a great deal of sense.
Short Bio:
Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He has served as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.
Prof. Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, “sludge” (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, and freedom of speech.
He served as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security during the Biden Administration, where he focused on resilience against weather-related risks (such as flooding and extreme heat) and on reduction of administration burdens; he was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Department’s highest civilian honor, in 2024.