‘Brits backing their locals are well aware that too many pints makes beer belly more likely. We don’t need government enforced calorie counts to tell us something we already know.’‘Ministers thinking up this madness should stop and drop the policy. Let the publicans and the punters do what they want in the pubs without Mr Hancock wagging his finger each time a pint is pulled.’
It is not paternalistic to require a seller to provide accurate information about his wares. Manufacturers and retailers usually know more about their products than do consumers, leading to information asymmetries. If they deliberately withhold important facts from consumers in order to make more sales it is arguably a form of fraud and is certainly a form of market failure. Free-market economists are therefore in favour of buyers being given the facts. Once equipped with adequate information, some people may decide not to buy, but that is not the economist’s intention. The aim is only to give the consumer sufficient information upon which to make his decisions. Information asymmetries due to consumer ignorance are a conventional market failure for which there is a simple solution: education.
The state can have a hand in this by broadcasting information to the public, or mandating certain lessons in schools, or forcing manufacturers and retailers to impart certain facts to customers. Even John Stuart Mill approved of the use of coercion if a person was ignorant of the risks. In a much discussed analogy in On Liberty, Mill argues that it is right to stop a man crossing an unsafe bridge if there is no time to warn him of the danger, but that no one should intervene if he is aware of the risks. When there is ‘not a certainty, but only a danger of mischief ’, he wrote, ‘no one but the person himself can judge of the sufficiency of the motive which may prompt him to incur the risk’ and so the person should ‘be only warned of the danger; not forcibly prevented from exposing himself to it’.
An informative warning for alcohol might explain that 11 million British adults drink at a ‘risky’ level, according to government statistics, and that there are 9,000 alcohol-related deaths a year, meaning that risky drinkers have a roughly 0.08 per cent chance of dying of an alcohol-related cause each year. If given this information, most consumers might conclude that a ‘risky’ level of drinking is not very risky at all. For that reason, such warnings are never issued. Instead, the public is told that alcohol has been ‘linked to’ more than 60 diseases and that there is ‘no safe level of drinking’.
If tobacco regulation is any guide, future labelling in the name of ‘public health’ will not lead to consumers being better informed. Graphic health warnings are less about education than they are about shock and disgust. Studies have shown that pictorial warnings are less effective in transmitting facts than written warnings because they literally repel the consumer. Cass Sunstein supports graphic warnings as a way ‘to persuade, not merely inform’, but when the evidence was independently reviewed, it found that ‘the impact of picture health warnings was negligible’ among young people in the UK and had ‘no discernible impact on smoking prevalence’ in Canada. The obvious explanation for this is that ‘individuals are very well informed about the consequences of smoking, and therefore benefit little from further messaging'. Once again, we have a legitimate market failure (or potential market failure) which paternalists have failed to solve – and may have exacerbated – because their intention is not to inform but to deter.
No comments:
Post a Comment