De overheid als keuzearchitect? - Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het ...

public policy nudges: the government as choice architect
Now the final aspect of behavioral economics that makes behavioral
economics different from psychology and some of the other fields it
draws upon, is that it is bad economics. I spent much of my career and
the last 20 years studying financial markets and how they differ from
the perfect markets that some of my University of Chicago colleagues
write and dream about. I am not going to talk about the official market
hypothesis today, but I am instead going to merely show a single
picture that I claim is the single best evidence against the basic principle
that drives the official market theory, which is the law of one
price. Let me just show you this photo, which was taken in Buenos
Aires. It shows identical oranges with different prices. Some of my
economists claim that this is not a violation of the law of one price,
it is rational discrimination against Americans who are too stupid to
know the Spanish word for orange juice and too stupid to notice that
the photographs of the oranges are identical. But at least until the end
this is all I am going to say about financial markets.
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So the approach that Cass and I take is what we call libertarian paternalism
or might in Europe better be called liberal paternalism. And at
least in the us both halves of this expression are quite unpopular. So
why do we combine two unpopular, contradictory terms and write a
book about that? We think that when combined, the terms are compatible
and may be even lovable. So by libertarian or liberal, all we
mean is we try to devise policies that maintain freedom of choice. We
don’t tell people: you must do this or you must not do that; we try to
give them a choice. By paternalism we simply mean devising policies
that are aimed at making people better off, as judged by themselves.
It is not that Cass and I think we know what is best for other people
or that we think Barack Obama or David Cameron know what’s best
for other people. We think we can help people make the choices they
would make if they had all the information and time necessary to
make a good choice. How do we do it? We do it using ‘choice architecture’,
which is a phrase we coined while writing this book.
So what is a choice architect? A choice architect is anyone who designs
the environment in which choices are made. Suppose you go to
a restaurant and the chef has decided what things he is going to cook
that night. There is someone else whose job it is to produce a menu