From: Sunstein, Cass R., Simpler: The Future of Government. Kindle Edition. In a difficult economic period, what is the proper role of government? How should public officials proceed when they seek to stabilize the financial system, reduce air pollution, protect consumers and investors, safeguard national security, reform health care, and increase energy independence? Might creative approaches put money in people’s pockets, and maybe even save lives, without squelching innovation and competitiveness? Is it possible to protect public safety and health while promoting economic growth and increasing employment? Will it help if government is open and transparent and tells the public what it knows and what it does not know? These questions have produced a lot of debate over the past half-century. The debates are most prominent during elections and amid protest movements, but they occur every day. They can be found in corporate boardrooms, Washington think tanks, universities, and high schools, and over family dinners. For nearly three decades, I spent much of my professional life writing about them, mostly in obscure, technical publications in academic journals with such enticing names as Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Environmental and Resource Economics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, and Journal of Political Philosophy. One of my major claims has been that we need to go beyond sterile, tired, and rhetorical debates about “more” or “less” government and focus instead on identifying the best tools and on learning, with close attention to evidence, what really works. Nudges are especially promising in this regard. In government, I saw the immense importance of selecting good tools but also learned that however sterile, tired, and rhetorical, the “more” or “less” debates continue to matter. They have a lot of life left. They might be immortal. They might be vampires. Possibly zombies. Along with many others, I have also focused on the importance of considering both costs and benefits. Following President Reagan, who was largely responsible for making cost-benefit analysis a regular feature of American government, I have contended that regulators need to focus on net benefits, that is, benefits minus costs. If an energy efficiency rule costs $50 million but has benefits of $150 million, it is probably a good idea, at least if we can trust those numbers. I have urged that a disciplined analysis of costs and benefits is indispensable to deciding what to do, and as a nudge to move public officials in the right directions. Suppose that we are deciding whether to require trucking companies to install new safety equipment, airlines to give more rest time to pilots, farmers to reduce the risks of food safety problems, or power plants to impose new pollution controls. These decisions should not be resolved by focusing on a specific accident or incident that occurred two months earlier, or the supposed need for precaution, or the concerns and complaints of well-organized private groups, or the fear that if something bad happens in the next months, there will be hell to pay. Instead of exploring these less than productive issues, I suggested that we should try to catalogue the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action and choose the approach that would do the most good and the least harm. One of my central points was that cost-benefit analysis and democratic self-government are mutually supporting. Openness about costs and benefits can inform democratic decisions. Without a clear sense of the likely consequences, sensible choices become far more difficult, even impossible. Indeed, efforts to catalogue costs and benefits, and to disclose that catalogue to officials and the public, are themselves a kind of choice architecture— choice architecture for choice architects— and they can greatly improve public decisions. And if a rule or requirement is too confusing or complex, people are likely to complain. In that way, public scrutiny can be a great friend of sense rather than nonsense, and of simplicity rather than obfuscation.
Posted on: Mon, 27 May 2013 11:50:12 +0000
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