Re: Why Paternalism?

Seth David Schoen (schoen@uclink4.Berkeley.EDU)
6 Dec 1997 22:54:56 GMT 

Robin Hanson writes:

>I'm a postdoc in health policy, and a main research area of mine
>is understanding regulatory paternalism, where governments don't
>seem to trust people to make their own choices, even when most of
>the consequences of those choices are personal.
>
>Some abstracts of some of my work on the topic are included below.
>I'm interested in what others here think of what explains paternalistic
>behavior, by both governments and actual parents.   Why do parents
>forbid their children (over 10) from driving, sex, drugs, etc., rather
>than just giving advice?  And is the reason governments act similarly
>toward adults any different?
>
>Regulators ban many products, via professional licensing,
>safety codes, and required approval of food, drugs, and
>securities.  But if bans are to protect uninformed consumers, why
>don't regulators just require warning labels?  And if bans are
>hidden regulatory capture, what do voters think bans are for?
>
>A careful analysis of fully rational but ignorant consumers and
>ideally motivated rational regulators, however, predicts high
>rates of product bans.  Warning labels are cheap talk, so
>weak regulator incentives to lie (such as to correct for
>market failures) induce strong consumer skepticism about
>regulator advice.  Expecting the worst products to be banned,
>consumers will simply not believe severe warnings.
>
>Consumers will interpret warning labels differently if a
>regulator is not allowed to ban a product.  There are cases where
>this change reduces consumer welfare, but for an identified
>general class of cases, consumer welfare improves.  Thus product
>bans can be seen as a commitment failure, a loss due to an
>inability to commit not to ban.

>When governments with a long-term view are rare,
>paternalism becomes the rule and liberalism the exception.

I think this is a very compelling explanation, and it's (in considerably
more detail) similar to some of my own views on anti-drug propaganda.
Would you be interested in coming to a Cal Libertarians meeting to discuss
some of these ideas?

I do have a few speculations about paternalism as applied to actual parents:

There is an interesting issue in whether people are rational at all and
whether they can recognize a common view of a problem.  When I was much
younger, I was unhappy that kids didn't realize that parents and teachers
were concerned about their well-being -- and one thing which seemed to
create some of the animosity was that, because the kids were uncooperative,
the parents and teachers would resort to strong and/or authoritarian
measures to try to produce the desired effects.  But it seemed to me that
these authoritarian measures were one of the main reasons the kids were
uncooperative in the first place!  Sometimes I thought that there was sort
of an attitudinal war going on between the parents and the kids, even though
they had almost identical interests.  When I was younger, I favored the
parents in that war; now I favor the kids.  But it still frequently seems
that most of this war is unnecessary.

A. S. Neill suggested in _Summerhill_ that (in effect) if parents weren't
so paternalistic, children would be better disposed to work with the
parents toward personal growth and making good choices; Neill thinks that
parents' authoritarianism alienates children and constrains their choices
along unnecessarily narrow axes.

But most people think that Neill's view of children and of human nature in
general is hopelessly naive and too optimistic.  I often wonder whether this
is just because his alternative is seldom tried (and expectations of the
status quo are hard to get rid of) or because people have some streak of
perverseness which makes them behave self-destructively and even anti-socially.

-- 
   Seth David Schoen L&S '01 (undeclared) / schoen@uclink4.berkeley.edu
Magna dis immortalibus habenda est atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori, antiquissimo
custodi huius urbis, gratia, quod hanc tam taetram, tam horribilem tamque
infestam rei publicae pestem totiens iam effugimus.  -- Cicero, in Catilinam I