Why Choice Matters So Much—and What Can Be Done to Preserve It

Abstract

W hen you dig beneath the surface of the previous chapters in this book, everything comes down to autonomy: determining your own interests and making choices in pursuit of them. Not only do libertarian paternalism and nudges manipulate our choices, but more importantly, they claim to do so in our interests while furthering others. We’ve also seen that this disregard for people’s true interests is a natural legacy of the way that both mainstream and behavioral economists think about decision-making: a deliberative process, however complex, guided by an overly simplistic goal. These simplistic goals allow economists to build complicated models of decision-making, but economists neglect to question whether the goals and interests assumed in their models correspond to what real people value. They focus on the process more than the goal, and they end up missing the forest for the trees. In the end, they presume to know what people’s interests are and to act to promote those interests—which is the most distressing problem with libertarian paternalism and nudges. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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