"The New Paternalism"

I found myself thinking a lot about an article by Evan R. Goldstein in The Chronicle Review section of last week's Chronicle of Higher Education about "new paternalism."  In the article, Goldstein interviews economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein about their new book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which argues that because, in Goldstein's words, "In reality human beings are lazy, busy, impulsive, inert, and irrational creatures highly susceptible to predictable biases and errors," certain "correctives" are enacted by policy makers in order to "nudge" people into making better decisions.  A nudge is  "any noncoercive alteration in the context in which people make decisions" that seeks to correct for "people's cognitive limitations." Setting a default policy that forces you to opt-out of your company's 401K plan instead of opting-in is an example of nudging; if employers know that their employees tend to be lazy about starting their 401K's, then they craft a policy using that laziness to the employees's benefit, literally. Employees are free not to start a 401K, but failing to act in a timely fashion won't hurt them, and will likely help them. Thaler and Sunstein call this philosophy "libertarian paternalism," a term they contend is "not an oxymoron." "We are not for bigger government," they claim, "just for better governance."

I have not yet read their book, so I'm in no real position to critique the potential brilliance and/or sticky-wicket-ness surrounding libertarian paternalism, but I found this part of their interview, a quotation from Sunstein, interesting, and perhaps pertinent to my own project:

For too long, the United States has been trapped in a debate between the laissez-faire types who believe markets will solve all our problems and the command-and-control types who believe that if there is a market failure then you need mandate . . . The laissez-faire types are right that . . . government can blunder, so opt-outs are important. The mandate types are right that people are fallible, and they make mistakes, and sometimes people who are specialists know better and can steer people in directions that will make their lives better.

Sunstein's evocation of specialists interests me because it seems to suggest a fairly typical acceptance of, and reliance on, what scholar Douglas Walton calls "cognitive authority." So-called 'nudge' policies are crafted by people with specialized knowledge and skills in whatever fields are influenced by the policies in question: if Mary Poppins does her job just right, not only will a spoonful of sugar help the medicine go down, her charges won't even know they're being medicated. Walton's book, Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority (1997), attempts to methodically parse the authoritative logic and potency underwriting expertise, especially of the legal, legislative, and technical sorts that seem to interest Thaler and Sunstein. Walton's point, greatly reduced, is that most people are "intimidated by experts." "[W]e quite rightly feel powerless," he continues, "and feel we lack the resources necessary to deal with this kind of problem" (p. 22). Walton's advice, again greatly reduced, is for nonexperts to learn to ask of experts better questions. Thaler and Sunstein, I assume, would agree with Walton that citizens's best bet is to evaluate experts's arguments using "judgment and reasoning," but unlike Walton, they don't seem particularly concerned with a dialogic gap between experts and citizens. Poppins does not have to announce to her charges that the sugar masks the medicine.

To be fair, I'm not knocking Thaler and Sunstein's libertarian paternalism, despite my use of a nanny metaphor; from what I know about their philosophy, I find their argument compelling, especially the notion "that understanding human irrationality can improve how public and private institutions shape policy by increasing the likelihood that people will make decisions that are in their own self-interest . . . while protecting freedom of choice." Their state is not a nanny state: but it is a state where pragmatic conceptions of human behavior allow policies to be tweaked so people's interests are best served. That the sort of persistent adherence to self-interests purported by pure economic theory isn't really part of most people's actual applied mental calculus is well established, including by behavioral economists like Thaler in his The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life (1994). Similar 'myths of rationality' are documented in the political realm by, among others, Samuel Popkin's The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns (1994), Arthur Lupia, et al's Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality (2000), and Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (2007). The fact that UWA members overwhelmingly voted for unionbuster Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 (because, I presume, he made them feel patriotic) provides an anecdotal example. So, while I suspect that libertarian paternalism cannot keep someone from voting themselves out of a job, it does seem logical that it can unobtrusively help her not forego retirement saving because of negligence.

Whether or not Walton would approve of Thaler and Sunstein's emphasis on experts who "know better" to "steer people" towards making their "lives better" is debatable, but I suspect he'd caution us to proceed slowly at any rate. As economist Bryan Caplan points out in a sidebar to the Chronicle Review article, "politicians suffer from the same problems voters suffer from." For Walton, the 'danger' of expertise is what he calls the "inaccessibility thesis" (p. 110), that is, the difficulty nonexperts have in tracking down the premises on which experts's judgments are rooted. Coupling Caplan and Walton's concerns with the validity of expertise (at least of the unquestioning acceptance of expertise's validity) offers legitimate anxiety over paternalism (libertarian or otherwise) trusting in intellectual oligarchies.

What we're talking about, of course, is ethos (again). That economists are the best able to craft economic policy, doctors medical policy, lawyers legal policy, urban planners traffic patterns, etc., etc. is, to my mind, completely logical and difficult to contest. American life revolves around expertise, anecdotally evidenced by the professionalizing-focus of most departments in our universities, the range of judgment-based reality shows on our televisions, and the ubiquitous coven of on-air pundits circling overhead during elections. We trust people who have the authority to speak on a topic. Or, more accurately, we trust people whom we perceive to have such an authority to speak. What if our perception is accurate, but our trust violated? Thaler and Sunstein acknowledge that "incompetent or corrupt government nudgers can do a great deal of harm by directing people towards bad choices." Goldstein writes, though, that "they emphasize that in many areas--from personal finance to health--people are ill informed, inexperienced, and therefore ill equipped to make the choices that are in their own self-interest." The government, they conclude, "has the resources to hire experts who can help demystify an increasingly complex world." For them, the risk of experts manipulating us via their ethos outweighs our nonexpert understanding of complex social issues. Besides, given expertise's current cachet in our culture, it's likely that in the near future everyone will be an expert on something for fifteen minutes. Less flippantly, a potential avenue this project may take would explore the ways people's understanding of expertise's form and function has sharpened recently, making them savvier readers of expertise, which Walton advocates, even if they lack 'cognitive authority' in any particular area touching policy creation. Similarly, and similarly speculative, increased reliance on, and recognition of, expertise may allow for a more refined collective understanding of the expert's intentions, thereby avoiding ethotic malfeasance: current work on collective understanding and action is being done, including Gladwell's Tipping Point (2002), James Surowiecki 's The Wisdom of Crowds (2005), and Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams's Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2008); a historical perspective on the rise of ethos as expertise can be found in Kenneth Cmiel's Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (1991). Whether or not citizens really are issues ignorant and susceptible to ethotic manipulation is less interesting to me than the discussion about how we figure out whether or not that ignorance and susceptibility is real.

What if our perception of expertise is just plain inaccurate? How could we know? What would be our response, and would it be appropriate? Certainly, Walton's concern would be justified. And his solution, generally speaking, would be worth considering. Walton aligns himself with a strand of rhetoric/communication theory called pragma-dialectics that focuses on arguments as performative and constructive, meaning that the best way to study rhetorical conflict is to understand that argumentative acts are always purposeful and responsive to prior acts; there's always a reason for the act, and it always builds on an earlier act. Walton's book is largely a stiff taxonomy, pragmatic in spirit, for how people can better evaluate the authority derived from expertise by asking better questions of experts, dialectic in spirit. In prepping juries to deal with forensic scientist testimony, Walton's process proves useful. But it's difficult to generalize Walton's taxonomy to broader discussions about the ways people and experts interact. Part of this difficulty is illustrated by Walton's argument's inability to anticipate and engage Thaler and Sunstein's libertarian paternalism, with its "principle of transparency" in implementing "noncoercive alterations" to policies that provide "better governance" by tricking people into doing what's good for themselves. I'm hesitant to pit Thaler and Sunstein against Walton, however, without first reading Nudge. For now I think it will suffice to raise some potential questions about that matchup: if Walton's pragma-dialectical approach is valid (I think so), if audiences ought to engage in dialog with ethos-heavy rhetors (in this case experts), how does that process work when the ethos lives in a paternalistic policy?  Policies are, of course, created entities, but they are rarely the creation of a single person. They are the children of many individual parents working together (and not). Perhaps we can say that they are the products of the government, but what does that mean to say that the institution has an ethos, especially when we're concerned with the ways audiences negotiate ethos with rhetors. Natch: how can you be in dialog with an institution?

I should probably read the book first. It's on order...

Comments

[chester]

You say, "Would him being authentically a good guy change people's minds about the invasion, the economy, and his handling of them? Conversely, would him being inauthentically a good guy change people's minds?"

I think so. I think it shouldn't, but I think it would have a huge impact on the few people who continue to support him. It's a kind of "intentionalism" gone wild (which is why it seems like antinomianism to me--I can never remember whether it has a hyphen or not); if he lied, that's okay, because he meant well. And "by meaning well" he meant to enact a kind of world that "good" men want--an ordered world in which people like them are in control, doing what is obviously right, fighting what is obviously wrong.

[Eric]

Absolutely, it makes perfect sense.

I wasn't trying to dodge your initial question, though I realize I answered it only obliquely near the end of my response. I agree that Bush exerts--more so five years ago than today, and more so still eight years ago--an authority, an 'expertise,' if you will, in being a 'good' guy. This kind of expertise, if we were to map it onto Walton's argument, comes closer to the power behind celebrity endorsements than any actual authority rooted in specialized knowledge, etc. Anti-nomian is a good way of putting it.

The rub, I think, is that what constitutes Bush's 'good-guy-ness' is extremely malleable, and depends mostly on the audience for its value. I use the word "being" above, but "seeming" is probably more accurate. He is the 'brushclearer,' the 'MBA president,' the 'guy you wanna drink a beer with,' etc., but since most voters have never actually had a cold beer with Bush (esp. since he's a teetotaler), the accuracy of that description, and the associated character judgments, is questionable (esp. since he's a teetotaler). But the perception of its accuracy is certainly not questionable: it's real and really puissant.

Similarly, when I said before that I wasn't sure whether to describe Rove's process of characterizing Bush as an erasure or merger of his own expertise with his boss's, I meant that I'm not sure whether or not to call Bush a 'good' guy. If he is an authentic good guy, then Rove's ethotic characterizations are amplifications of an actuality: if Bush is 'all boots, no cattle,' then Rove's rhetoric is propping up an already established, but inauthentic, perception.

My point is, how can we ever know whether or not Bush is authentically a good guy? Probably at times he is, and at times he's not, just like the rest of us. But unlike the rest of us, his authority as president has been made to depend heavily on whether or not he is a good guy. "Has been made" suggests conscious construction, at least in part, even though audiences seem immensely concerned with what's actual.

My larger point, then, is that, since we (audiences) can never really know for certain what is authentic, or even the line where authentic bleeds into inauthentic, why do we worry so much about whether or not Bush is a 'good guy?' Why do we worry about whether or not any candidate's characteristics are authentic? Would him being authentically a good guy change people's minds about the invasion, the economy, and his handling of them? Conversely, would him being inauthentically a good guy change people's minds? Would we be in a different place in our national discourse at the end of his term if we had viewed him differently and/or talked about him differently at the beginning of his term? Because I suspect that most people would shift their positive and negative opinions of the man's actions to continue dovetailing them with whatever new evidence presented itself about the man's character, what we might call the 'confirmation bias,' I'm skeptical of calling political candidates authentic, especially since we all accept the reality that candidates are largely campaign constructions by committee. Moreover, I'm skeptical of saying that their authentic self even matters. It's audience authority that gives candidates authority. At least I'd argue that the relationship is highly negotiated.

My largest point is that discussions of authentic character obscure the fact that Bush's expertise isn't really his at all, even if it's real; it's granted by audiences who accept it. If that's the case, I wonder if there's a way to resist discussing ethos as authentic character in order to discuss candidate ethos in ways more applied and practical.

[Chester]

That's a brilliant answer, and it answers a smarter question than I was asking. You're looking at Rove as an "authority," and why the questioner defers to him, and I think you're absolutely right. But, I was trying to ask about the "authority" Hitler/Bush which Goebbels/Rove are trying to give to them by describing them as "good" men. They (G/R) have the authority to say who H/R *really* is, but that "who" (good man) is supposed to have authority as well.

I know that Walton's book is really about "expert opinion," and I'm the one conflating expert opinion and authority, but I do think that, at least in the US, "goodness" is a kind of expertise. It's fundamentally anti-nomian, I'd argue--the sense that someone with grace 1) knows the right thing to do in every circumstance, and 2) can do no wrong because everything is done with grace.

Does that make more sense?

[Eric]

Walton's criteria does allow for audiences to assess good and bad arguments from authority, but he largely focuses on two poles, rhetors who are "learned," so difficult to discount, e.g., four out of five dentists say chew Trident gum, and rhetors who are not learned, but whose presence provides some other authoritative weight that may prove equally potent, e.g., celebrity endorsements. The usefulness of Walton's criteria gets fuzzier, I'd argue, when we look at someone who inhabits a grey area somewhere between being expert and being charming, and it is this area where I'd place most modern campaign consultants like Rove, et al. Rove has an expertise, to be sure, and that expertise gives him authority (or, more accurately, his expertise gave him two POTUS victories, and that gives him authority). I think the greyness stems from pinpointing exactly of what Rove is an expert. If we can't define his expertise, it is difficult to do the sort of investigatory questioning for evaluative purposes Walton advocates. How do we know what to ask?

Is Rove an expert in American political history and campaign management? Probably, but are these the avenues for engaging him pragma-dialectically if we want honestly to know what kind of president Bush will be? I think questioning him about campaign history and media markets in order to evaluate whether or not he exerts authority over voters is fruitless, because it isn't those areas of knowledge that most directly effect us. What effects us most directly has more to do with Rove's relationship with Bush than with Rove's political education. Besides, we all already know he exerts an authority, and because we know it, it is prudent not to dismiss Rove's comments discussed in my 29 April post as simple ipsedixitism, self-referential, and self-affirming, appeals to one's own authority, because, while his authority may be founded on logical fallacy, its potency is actual.

I'd argue that Rove's (current) authority stems from an expertise in George W. Bush. The slowpitch question the audience member asks Rove about what makes Bush such a good man that opponents perpetually underestimate reflects exactly the sort of consternation audiences have at asking tough and meaningful questions of people they perceive as exponentially more informed about a subject than them, especially when they tend to agree with the expert's opinions. Rove's response doesn't seem argumentative, though of course it is very much so, considering the speech about presidential greatness which precedes it, almost presciently. That it doesn't seem argumentative gets to the heart of Rove's authority, I think: Rove erases and/or merges (I'm unsure which is more accurate) his expertise, i.e., offering heuristic readings of Bush's character as necessary presidential qualifications, with his employer's authority. That is, the person who asks about Bush assumes, I suspect, that they are generating the parameters of the coming exchange, 'tell me, since you know him so well, Mr. Rove, what makes Bush such a good man?' But those parameters have already been established by Rove and treated as existing authentically outside of Rove's establishment, in the speech proper, and well before the speech in previous public presentations of Bush and 'Bushian' characteristics, not 'Rovian' machinations.

Walton's criteria, I'd argue, isn't the most helpful approach for deciding how Rove exerts authority, then, because his authority seems to stem from hiding rather than manifesting itself. Rove is most authoritative when audiences assume they are perceiving the authentic character of the candidate. If the candidate seems authoritative because of that perception of authenticity, Rove's expertise is validated, regardless of the audience's awareness of it. In other words, Rove is most authoritative when he, compared to his candidate, seems least so.

I'm sure all that ties into positivism (or not), though I'm still thinking about that. There's plenty more to say on the matter, but I think, generally speaking, the existence of Rove, et al. troubles Walton's language of good/bad arguments from authority directly evaluable by audiences, at least when we're looking at political consultants whose presence in public political discourse is largely shadowy, which I mean descriptively, not pejoratively. When we look at politicians themselves, I think it's easier to see useful applications of Walton's advice.

[Chester]

Isn't Walton's project to give effective criteria for assessing good and bad arguments from authority? Does it do that? (What would happen if you used Walton to look at the Rove/Goebbels' strategies for giving "authority" to Bush/Hitler?)

Before reading the Sunstein (who rocks, btw), you should look at Crosswhite's _Rhetoric of Reason_ and his attempt to use Perelman's concept of "universal audience" in order to critique arguments from a non-positivist perspective.