Free The Food Police by Jayson Lusk

along.
    These kinds of findings have led behavioral economists to call for a host of paternalistic regulations to override our preferences. Nobel Prize–winner George Akerlof doesn’t even want to give us a choice in the matter. He says, “Individuals may be made better off if their options are limited and their choices constrained.” 7 Writing in
Nudge
, Thaler and Sunstein say they want to give government the power to nudge us into making the decisions some bureaucrat deems desirable. They seemingly want the government to assume the power to tell restaurants how their menus should look and tell cafeterias how they should be organized. They justify their paternalism by saying that it is “quite fantastic to suggest that everyone is choosing the right diet, or a diet that is preferable to what might be produced with a few nudges.” 8 A USDA report says behavioral economics “expands the array of possible ideas” for new food policies and can license the government to alter “elements of the product, such as package size and shape, the amount of variety, the number of calories, or the default options on a menu.” 9 Writing for
Forbes
, Duke Universityprofessor Dan Ariely says, “Behavioral economics could help us take steps toward designing a better world.” 10 I don’t know about you, but I’m more frightened than comforted by a psychologist confidently asserting he can
design
a better world with new regulations.
    It would be absurd to assert that we never make foolish decisions that, in retrospect, we regret. But despite what we’ve been told by those Ivy Leaguers who have traversed the well-worn highway between academia and Washington, behavioral economics cannot justify the actions of the food police.
T HREE M YTHS OF B EHAVIORAL E CONOMICS
Myth 1: The findings from behavioral economics are really important .
    If you want a depressing afternoon, spend some time scouring the psychological and behavioral economics literature. There you will find that we are prone to a plethora of decision-making biases that are apparently limited only by the researchers’ abilities to find catchy new names for them. You might begin to wonder how it is we are even able to make it out of bed in the morning and find our way to work. If we are
truly
as irrational as the behavioralists suggest, wouldn’t they have to have some way of accounting for the success and prosperity most Americans enjoy? It is a bit odd that we are just now getting around to finding out that our decision-making abilities are so poor that new regulations are needed to improve our lot in life. If we aren’t truly more innately irrational than our grandparents, how can the case be made that there is a
new
need for paternalism?
    The answer lies, in large part, in the peculiarities of the academic publishing world. We academics are rewarded for novel ideas. One cannot publish by repeating what everyone already knows. The rise in behavioral economics can be explained in large part because the field offered an alternative: a novelty. But it is important to keep in mind that what sells in academic journals does not necessarily possess real-world importance.
    Consider a striking comparison. At about the same time behavioral economists were making headway arguing that people were
ir
rational, a different group of economists were arguing that animals (rats, pigeons, and pigs) were rational. Whereas leading behavioral economists wrote papers concluding that people can’t figure out how to make themselves better off, another group of economists publishing in toptier economics journals concluded that, of all things, animals can! 11 The counterintuitive claims that were novel enough to fly in academic journals were that animals were rational and people were not. But no one in his right mind would claim that rats are more rational than humans, no matter what was published in peer-reviewed journals.
    If the findings of behavioral economics are really as powerful and