President Obama’s Budding Nanny State

Parents often try to motivate their children with rewards, from stickers to ice cream to toys. Thousands of books and websites offer suggestions for how to get kids to do homework or clean up their rooms. But is it a mayor’s job to motivate you to drink less soda? Is it government’s job to urge you to sign up for health care by way of schools stealthily sending messages home through your children? Should bureaucrats find ways to change your mind about which washing machine you buy?

Whether you realize it or not, this so-called “nudging” of consumer choice, at the hand of government, is underway: Earlier this year, the White House revealed that it is establishing a task force dedicated to studying how to motivate you—just as parents do—to do what the government thinks is best for you. Maya Shankar, a senior adviser in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy who is assembling the team, recently told the New York Times the task force will use “evidence-based policymaking” so that “government services are efficient, effective, and serve the needs of the American people.” To be clear, Congress did not pass legislation authorizing such activity; this is something dreamt up by bureaucracies to force their own preferences on citizens, whether by combatting obesity or discouraging procrastination when it comes to saving for retirement.

If the idea of federal government officials treating you like a child makes you squeamish, you must first understand the rise of “behavioral economics” in politics—a practice that is expanding rapidly with very little public involvement, transparency, or oversight.

Behavioral economics—the study of how psychology affects people’s decisions—most recently became a buzzword when former White House official Cass Sunstein co-authored, with University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler, the book Nudge while Sunstein was still a law professor at Harvard. In 2009, Obama appointed him as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, where Sunstein championed cost-benefit analysis of regulation, as well as “nudges.” Sunstein left government in 2012 to return to academia, but the “nudge” school of thought has clearly lingered in the Oval Office: The newly created behavioral economics task force is the most prominent—and most disconcerting—example yet.

In May of this year, the White House convened a group of experts for a workshop—along with the National Institute on Aging (part of the National Institutes of Health), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Association for Psychological Science—to discuss how behavioral economics can better serve public policy. The NIA says that while it “does not support policy research per se, findings from the basic behavioral and social science research that it does support are an important resource for informing policies.” Much of this research is now featured on the NIA’s website, under its Division of Behavioral and Social Research.

According to a government document obtained by Fox News, the task force is modeled after Britain’s Behavioural Insights Team, or “nudge unit,” which is itself based on Sunstein and Thaler’s ideas. The American version will consist of four to five behavioral science experts working with more than a dozen federal departments and agencies to “help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals.” While most uses for behavioral economics fall to regulation, the task force has not announced exactly how it will function or whether it is confined just to the regulatory process. In fact, there is very little public information about the team at all.

But behavioral economics carries serious risks, because it’s not really about helping you achieve your own goals. Think about the range of questions you might ask yourself when buying a new car: Which is the safest, or the cheapest? Which gets good gas mileage? Which is the best fit for your family? Which has enough payload capacity to meet your small-business needs? Now think about what would happen if, instead of you answering these questions for yourself, it was government bureaucrats nudging you away from your preferences and toward theirs.

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