Final thoughts on Nudge

The subject of Wednesday's Moral Maze was Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein. They argue (compellingly) that it would be nice if we could set society up so the things that 99% of people want to do were the default setting, but if you don't want to do them, it would be a piece of cake to opt out. For example, companies in the US (the authors are from America—this is important) might offer free health insurance but you have to opt in to claim it. Thaler and Sunstein suggest changing things round so you're automatically given the insurance but can opt out if you want.

Who could complain? Pretty much nobody, right? And who could complain at the idea of having sunbeds switch themselves off after 10 minutes in case you fall asleep under them, or driving license renewal forms that ask you if you would like to give your organs to someone who needs them should you perish prematurely?

I consider myself to be basically a libertarian and I can't muster up any arguments against these things, and this really is as far as Nudge (the book) goes. The authors spend several page fretting over whether governments have the right to force motorcyclists to wear crash helmets, for God's sake. These people would be considered virtually anarchists in Britain.

All this seems to have passed a lot of people by. It nearly passed me by. As I mentioned in my review of it in August, the very fact that 'nudging' has been adopted by the likes of Julian Le Grand was sufficient to put me off it for several years. I'm very pleased I finally relented since it's a good addition to the library of behavioural economics. It's also 95% libertarian and only 5% paternalism.

Whilst I would never be so indelicate as to suggest that not everybody involved with the Moral Maze on Wednesday night had read the book, the whole format did rather hinge on its co-author Richard Thaler being an authoritarian wolf in libertarian sheep's clothing.

This was apparent from the choice of guests. With the panel broadly splitting in half, with Portillo and Phillips roughly in the libertarian camp (yes, very roughly - don't write in) and Taylor and Longley roughly in the paternalism camp. Since Delingpole and I are fairly obviously with the libs, and the lady from the Roy Castle Foundation with the paternalists, to even up the numbers the other witness would have to be a paternalist.

The trouble was that the other guest was Thaler himself and—as very quickly became apparent—he is anything but. Accused of trying to change people's goals, he said:

"I don't think we could have possibly been any more clear that that's completely wrong." 

Lest that still not be clear enough, the sublimely incredulous Thaler responded to further insinuations of social engineering by saying:

"Absolutely not. There is nothing that could be wronger than that." 

Listening in the green room, I said to James Delingpole that I didn't think they were quite going to get the argument they wanted out of this discussion. (Towards the end of the show, Michael Portillo drily noted that Thaler "didn't stand for some of the things we thought he stood for.") Thaler went on to strongly deny wanting presumed consent for organ donation, and when asked about plain-packaging, explained once more that he didn't approve of bans at all.

There may be tea-partying parts of America where this sort of talk is considered paternalistic, but then Americans take their liberties a bit more seriously than we do. By the standards of British politics, let alone European politics, Thaler would be classed a loony libertarian. Nevertheless, the format of the show assumed that Delingpole and I would violently disagree with him and his supposedly authoritarian-by-the-back-door ways. This we could not do. Delingpole praised Thaler's sensible book and lamented the way it had been perverted by politicians. He also quite rightly picked Matthew Taylor up on his elitist assumption that the world is divided up into "sophisticated and intelligent" people who are capable of making informed decisions and a lumpen mass of imbeciles who are constantly manipulated by malign institutions for profit.

When it was my turn to be interrogated, Longley wondered with exasperation why I was so opposed to Nudge. I wasn't, I said, although by this time I was tempted to add "... but I can pretend to be if it would help things." Some readers of this blog noticed that I was interrupted quite a bit by Longley and Taylor (the latter chaired The Spirit Level debate at the RSA), something which is more apparent to me listening back than it was at the time. I can't say that I thought the questioning was any more aggressive than in the average Moral Maze. The whole point is to have a bit of an argument and for all three of us, this was more than a rhetorical contest.

Longley believed that the government had decided that smoking was abnormal and anti-social and was going to do something about it. Essentially, he espoused absolute democracy, in which once a government had been elected, it had a mandate to do whatever it wants. Obviously I disagree, since I believe in liberal democracy, which accepts that since democracy is imperfect, elected governments should work within limits (eg. unwritten limits in Britain, written limits in the USA). In any case, using the absolute democracy argument is particularly weak when talking about contemporary Britain where you have a government nobody voted for, made up of two parties which promised less regulation and the overturn of the tobacco display ban.

Anyway, you don't need me to explain what was said as you can listen here, but I hope that the message came over on Wednesday night that Nudge does not in any way justify the kind of lifestyle policies that all the main British political parties have been going along with in recent decades. The Nudge philosophy is totally at odds with every public health initiative that goes beyond giving accurate advice and information to people who want it.

'Nudging' is not a cute name for 'do what we say'. As Thaler and Sunstein consistently stress, any nudging must have a cost to liberty that is close to zero and a financial cost that is close to zero. In other words, goodbye smoking ban, farewell minimum pricing and adios fat tax.

If the coalition is serious about cutting regulation, adopting Nudge would be a sound textbook to work from. But as we have already seen from plain-packaging and the farce of the YourFreedom website, they have no intention whatsoever of doing that. So, if anyone in politics ever gets round to actually reading the bloody book, it much more likely to be farewell Nudge.

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Hire me

Thanks to all who listened to and commented on last night's show, which can be listened to here for 7 days. I'll have some final thoughts on libertarian paternalism later today but first I have a broken boiler to attend to.

As a quick aside, however, I see the BBC has described me on its website as:

Chris Snowdon: Smoker and author of 'Velvet Glove Iron Fist; A History of Anti-Smoking'

Does this suggest that smoking is now so rare and exotic that it's worth calling attention to? (There are only 1.2 billion of us after all.)

Or is smoking now classed as an occupation? If so, I'd just like to say that I'm available for work, I have my own lighter and I'm prepared to travel.

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Nudge and the Moral Maze

Tomorrow evening I'll be appearing on BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze programme which will be discussing 'libertarian paternalism' and the so-called 'Nudge agenda'. Details are here:

How far should we go to stop people doing something that's bad for them?

We know cigarettes are very likely to cause you serious illness and could even kill you. The tricky thing is many people find them extremely enjoyable and they're perfectly legal. The government, frustrated that some people still persist in choosing to exercise their right to pursue a perfectly legal activity, despite decades of health education, bans on advertising and smoking in public places, are looking at forcing tobacco manufacturers to sell cigarettes in plain packaging.

The problem is that all those people exercising their freedom to smoke are then clogging up the NHS demanding that the rest of us pay for the treatment of their self inflicted illnesses. It's a question not just for smokers. How do you feel about a fat tax, or a minimum price for alcohol?

Tax is a bit of a blunt instrument and unpopular with voters, so it's not surprising that politicians have latched on to "nudge economics". Behind the doors of Number 10 there's a unit called The Behavioural Insight Team that talks about finding intelligent ways to encourage people to make better choices for themselves.

Is this an example of paternalist libertarianism - preserving people's freedoms while at the same time minimising their impact on the wider society? Or a worrying Orwellian development where politicians have given up trying to win the political argument and have instead just resorted to employing teams of psychologists and marketing executives to manipulate our behaviour?

If we're too stupid for our own good, why should we worry if politics becomes the equivalent of potty training? How far should we go to stop people doing something that's bad for them?

Expect plain packaging, smoking bans, temperance crusaders and other frequent offenders from this blog to get a mention.

I discussed libertarian paternalism in Chapter 14 of Velvet Glove, Iron Fist and also in the review of Nudge I wrote back in August. From the latter:

If politicians stuck to both the spirit and the letter of Thaler and Sunstein's philosophy, the nudge agenda would be largely benign and almost certainly beneficial. Far from supporting the kind of policies being pursued by the UK Faculty of Health, any British government that was genuinely committed to the Nudge agenda would have no choice but to repeal whole swaths of legislation that already cross the line between libertarianism and paternalism.

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Undone by the facts once more

In yesterday's post I quoted the say-anything anti-tobacco shill Martin Dockrell (of ASH, natch) saying:

"By helping smokers who want to quit and protecting our children from the tobacco ad men this will be an enormous leap forward for public health, perhaps even bigger than the smoking ban," he said.

He was talking about the crazy plain-packaging ruse, but he would have said the same thing whatever the policy was. Fair enough, that's his job. If he weighed up the pro's and con's of each policy and then gave a reasoned and intelligent assessment, he'd soon find himself in a smokefree Jobcentre.

But by saying that plain-packaging could be an "even bigger" leap forward for public health than the smoking ban, he is clearly suggesting that the smoking ban was itself a leap forward. This is frequently stated by all sorts of people, and it is often assumed that the smoking ban led to a surge in people giving up smoking. But has it?

"Encouraging" smokers to give up was, of course, the true (and barely concealed) motive for bringing in the ban in the first place and woe betide anyone who cast doubt on whether this would really happen back in July 2007. In ASH's hilariously premature and ill-founded Myths and Realities of a Smokefree England document (which I wrote about at t'old place) they said that the idea that mass abstinence wouldn't happen was a "myth".

We haven't heard much about smoking prevalence since (the statistics for such thing are always slow in coming forth), so I'm grateful to regular reader Dave Atherton for sending me the Office of National Statistics' Life Style Survey 2008 (published 2010), which concludes:

The overall prevalence of smoking among the adult population was the same in 2008 as it was in 2007 at 21 per cent.

A similar phenomenon was found by the EU's Eurobarometer which found the UK's total proportion of smokers (all forms of tobacco) to be 28% in 2009, which is—again—exactly the same as it was in 2008.

And all after the biggest, most controversial, most costly and most socially divisive piece of tobacco regulation in British history. Good work guys. Have the rest of the day off.

The other thing the ONS's report shows is something that Dick Puddlecote and I often point out—drinking is not on the increase in the UK:

Following an increase between 1998 and 2000, there has been a decline since 2002 in the proportion of men drinking more than 21 units a week, on average, and in the proportion of women drinking more than 14 units 

That's yer "hazardous" consumption. This is overall consumption:

The average number of units of alcohol consumed in a week rose steadily in the 1990s and achieved a peak of around 17 units for men and 7.5 units for women in the period 2000 to 2002. These levels fell to 14.8 units for men and 6.2 units for women in 2006. The revised methodology shows that the average number of units consumed is continuing to fall from 18.7 for men and 9.0 for women in 2006 to 16.7 and 8.4 respectively in 2008.

So, to summarise:

• Rates of drinking are falling and have been for years

• The smoking ban had no impact on the number of people who smoked, unless by "impact" you mean "put an end to a ten-year decline"

I mention this just in case any journalists or single-issue activists accidentally give you completely the opposite impression.


(Coming up in your soaraway British Medical Journal next week: '"The smoking rate plummetted after the smoking ban and our computer can prove it", says Professor Anna Gilmore and Professor Jill Pell'.)

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The children! The children!

Readers will recall that in May this year, a new British government was elected that promised to cut unnecessary regulation and put an end to Labour's nanny state. How do you think they're getting on?

From the Beeb:

Make cigarette packaging plain, government urges

I think it was Roger Daltry who sang something about meeting the new boss. Other people have said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I'm not so sure. I think scoundrels can sink much lower than that when they need to. See if you can see a theme running through the feeble claims for this latest piece of Sovietisation...

The government is currently planning to ask retailers to cover up their displays of cigarettes from next year to protect children. But now cigarette packets could also be made a standard colour like grey, rather than the existing bright colours.

Campaign group ASH says this is "an enormous leap forward". The Department of Health is considering the idea of asking ['asking' as in "we'll fine, bankrupt and imprison you if you don't agree" - CS] tobacco firms to put only basic information and health or picture warnings on their packets.

Making the cigarette packets a plain colour would protect children from taking up smoking in the first place, it suggests. It would also help support people who are trying to give up smoking, the department said.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, said it was time to try a new approach. "The evidence is clear that packaging helps to recruit smokers, so it makes sense to consider having less attractive packaging. It's wrong that children are being attracted to smoke by glitzy designs on packets.

"We would prefer it if people did not smoke and adults will still be able to buy cigarettes, but children should be protected from the start. The levels of poor health and deaths from smoking are still far too high, and the cost to the NHS and the economy is vast. That money could be used to educate our children and treat cancer," Mr Lansley said.

"We will shortly set out a radical new approach to public health in a White Paper."

Martin Dockrell, director of policy and research at ASH, (Action on Smoking and Health), said the industry calls packaging "the silent salesman".

"They use it to seduce our kids and mislead smokers into the false belief that a cigarette in a blue pack is somehow less deadly than a cigarette in a red one.

"By helping smokers who want to quit and protecting our children from the tobacco ad men this will be an enormous leap forward for public health, perhaps even bigger than the smoking ban," he said.

I am so tired of this unceasing nonsense that I can barely summon up the energy to mention that children have not been allowed to buy cigarettes since 1906. It seems barely worthwhile to point out that 40% of cigarette packs are already made up of warnings which say 'Smoking Kills'. There is no use in saying that colours and logos alone cannot "seduce" anyone. And it is futile to note that any government that forms policy on the back of hysterical yelps about protecting children treats all its citizens as children.

The wish-list of anti-smoking extremists is long and publicly available. It should be no more a surprise that they want plain packaging of cigarettes than it is that Los Angeles is calling for a total ban on smoking outside the home. These policies have been discussed in hushed tones at tobacco control conferences for several years, and it is, of course, their job to come up with wild, new directions for tobacco control.

It is also—so we thought—the job of elected politicians to tell fanatics and nut-jobs where to get off. But that is no longer the case, and the anti-smoking fraternity must be pinching themselves when they hear their fruitiest schemes being discussed by a nation's Minster for Health.

In truth, the coalition of the unwilling, like every government in recent memory, will use "tough" (but ultimately pointless and counter-productive) measures on smoking as a distraction from its failure to do anything about real issues. It's pathetic and predictable, but that's how it is. Evidence, logic and ethics don't come into it. It's simple politics and those of us who didn't vote Conservative at the election should feel vindicated today.

UPDATE: A tweet from Leeds University's Faculty of Medicine of Health rather gives the game away:

That's first step, you will notice. Not even 'next logical step'. Truly, they haven't even begun.

(PS. You can follow me on Twitter at cjsnowdon.)

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Detoxifying the brand

The BMJ's Tobacco Control blog provides a good example of why top-down prohibitionist campaigns struggle on the internet. No doubt they've all seen the memo telling them about the importance of engaging with the online audience, but when your movement is fundamentally elitist, engaging with the wider world has its problems.

There is the issue of not having very much to say, even though—unlike 99.9% of bloggers—that is your job. To be fair, this is also true of corporations which decide it would be a swell idea to start a blog. More serious, perhaps, is the problem that you and your colleagues are less-than-typical members of society. This can be ignored whilst chatting over the salad bowl at a public health conference, where views differ by only small degrees, but when thrust into the wider world, the chasm between you and civil society suddenly becomes visible. If you start blogging, not only will people see you in your less guarded moments, but they will also be able to talk back at you.

A recent feature on the Tobacco Control blog highlighted these problems. 'Word wars and tobacco control: choose the winner' (the first entry for six weeks, natch) invited readers to suggest words to describe tobacco controllers and their opponents. This led to problems. Firstly, a number of smokers and libertarians offered up less-than-flattering words to describe the, er, tireless champions of public health, and, secondly, a number of supporters responded with such enthusiasm that they almost seemed to be doing a parody of the stereotypical swivel-eyed anti-smoking zealot.

The comments system were swiftly deleted, but the zealotry remains online (at the time of writing). And perhaps it is a parody. How else can we explain gems like this?

Tobacco company - Suicide facilitation organization.

Growth (noun) - A measurement of suffering and death achievement as well as mortal collateral damage

Passive smoking - Collateral human and animal carbon life form lethal damage

Tobacco executive - Government Licensed murderer

Or this...

Change tobacco industry financial reports to 'disease reports'

Or how about something from an ultra-PC feminist dissertation?

Lezak Shallat: In my experience, there is a real clash of discourses between the language we use in tobacco control and the language we should be using to reach out to potential (and much needed) allies in the women’s movement. This raises a linguistic and ideological barrier that impedes greater collaboration. A case in point is the concept of tobacco “control”. For the TC movement, the word “control” encompasses a strategy to focus on a product and not its users (smokers) by setting limits that protect the rights of non-users. Within the TC movement, there is little talk of “anti-tobacco” measures or policies. This abbreviated terminology is reserved for headlines and journalists. Among feminists, however, the word “control” raises hives. It is located at the opposite end of the spectrum from autonomy over one’s body and the right to decide for oneself about work, education, reproductive life and more. This idea is central to feminism, and has been successfully exploited by the tobacco industry as a concept to sell cigarettes. The discourses clash. Control vs. protection; freedom to chose vs. informed choice; promoting vs. exploiting aspirations of “autonomy.” These words carry ideological subtexts that hinder greater dialogue with the feminists about how to address smoking as a women’s health issue.

Keen to find out more about the author of this riveting prose, I did a quick Google search which turned up this page, which happened to be hosting a particularly unfortunate, but possibly apt, banner campaign.

I also turned up this page which—if you'll excuse another cheap giggle—explained that:

Although she was named Leza K. at birth, she dropped the space and changed her byline to Lezak Shallat after discovering that, in Spanish, the word "lesa," roughly translated, means "idiotic."

A wise move since she "writes about social justice issues from Latin America" and lives in Chile. Of course, if she lived in the English-speaking world, the name Leza wouldn't be funny at all, would it?

And how about this from the real-life prohibitionist "Terence A. Gerace, Ed.M., M.A., Ph.D." (Who feels the need to put that many letters after his name on a blog comment?)

The terms Big Tobacco, tobacco industry, and major tobacco companies should be eliminated in favor of “toxic-tobacco companies” or “toxic-tobacco industry”. None of the former terms provides the true negative denotation that “toxic-tobacco companies” and “toxic-tobacco industry” do. Placing “Big” in front of Tobacco blunts tobacco’s negative associations. “Big” has a positive connotation as evidenced by McDonalds Corporation’s using “Big” in front of “Mac” and Frito-Lay placing “Big” before “Grab” to designate its large bag of snacks for individuals.

The idea that calling tobacco industries 'Big Tobacco' "blunts tobacco's negative associations" is plainly nonsense. The whole reason why the term Big Tobacco was coined by anti-smokers in the first place was to (a) perpetuate the David vs Goliath myth which portrays the anti-tobacco industry as brave pygmies against a behemoth, and (b) to rally those who instinctively dislike big business.

Getting rid of the 'Big' in Big Tobacco is fine with me. I've never understood why cigarettes from large companies should be worse than any others. But let's not pretend this is anything other than rebranding for the sake of it, and rebranding is always a sign of failure. Whether it's the post office changing its name to Consignia or socialists calling themselves liberals, the purpose of rebranding is to move away from a toxic brand.

The desire to rebrand is particularly urgent amongst tobacco controllers, since they are gripped by the delusion that the tobacco industry invented the very terms they are forced to use. This is sheer paranoia. I have heard it said that the industry invented the word 'anti-smoking' as a pejorative term. Apart from the fact that it is an entirely neutral word for people who are against smoking, the enemies of tobacco called themselves 'anti-smoking leagues' a hundred years ago. Lennox Johnson called himself an anti-smoker in the 1940s (see Chapter 4 of Velvet Glove, Iron Fist). If anti-smoking has a pejorative context today, it is because the public have seen what anti-smokers say and do, and they don't like it.

The anti-smoking movement (sorry—'tobacco control movement') would prefer it if everyone called smokeless tobacco 'spit tobacco' because it sounds more disgusting. They would no doubt prefer the tobacco industry to be known as 'the swine' and cigarettes to be known as 'Satan's death truncheons'. Alas for them, 'tobacco industry' is a more informative, balanced and descriptive term for an industry that makes tobacco, 'cigarettes' are small cigars that gained popularity in Revolutionary France and most smokeless tobacco products don't involve spitting. And since language is there to describe rather than propagandise, that'll just have to do.

UPDATE: As Leg-Iron reported last week, Junican submitted a spoof suggestion which succeeded in being slightly less deranged than the genuine offerings and now seems set to win him the "prize" of a one year online subscription to Tobacco Control (God knows what the second prize is).

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The last anti-smoking volunteer walks on

Two weeks ago Smokles told us the tragi-comic story of Errol Povah (above). Povah is a very rare breed— a genuine unpaid anti-smoking activist. The 57-year old Canadian set off on a coast-to-coast run/jog/walk intending to raise $47,000 for his nutty pressure group and "put the entire smoking industry out of business."

Povah's ambitious plan involves arriving at Philip Morris's New York headquarters later this month where he no doubt intends to carry out some sort of protest (yes, he's one of those who dresses up as the grim reaper). As Carl Phillips pointed out, the choice of route holds certain problems since Philip Morris moved to Richmond (400 miles away) several years ago. And his problems don't end there...

Originally, he said, he wanted to raise $540,000 - a dime for each of the world's 5.4 million people who die from tobacco annually. But money has been tight.

This is so true. As of today, Povah has raised a little over ten percent of his reduced target, and when we last heard from him, the dearth of donations was becoming a burden.

“It’s a huge struggle,” Povah said from Ottawa Tuesday, adding the lack of support crew or sponsors is a major disappointment.

Forced to travel alone, Povah has had to conduct his marathan journey in a highly unsatisfactory, half-arsed manner:

Because he has to bring his van along, and has no one helping him, he has to walk forward a certain distance, then go back for his van. At the end of the day, having advanced 26.2 miles but having walked twice that, he drives the van another 26.2 miles forward to account for the miles he had to walk in the wrong direction.

Alas, things have only got worse in the last three weeks...

"I literally can't afford to buy new shoes," he said, after finishing a 26.2-mile walk on Tuesday from Warrensburg to Glens Falls. "I'm flat broke at the moment. I have to get some money organized."

This pitiful tale provides a stark reminder—especially to him—that the anti-smoking "movement" has not been funded by voluntary donations for a very long time. Aside from one or two sugar daddies (Povah hopes to rope in Mike Bloomberg when he gets to NY), it is funded by the state and Big Pharma while the public looks on in apathy.

Far from bringing down the tobacco industry, Povah's quixotic expedition is an embarrassment for anti-tobacco because it highlights the lack of support it has from civil society. If the public was supportive, they'd get their hands in their pockets and not let this man have to go back and forth to his van every day. You'd think the billion dollar anti-tobacco industry would throw him a few thousand dollars just to spare their blushes.

Instead this chump jogs his way towards an early grave to raise the kind of money that professional anti-smokers wouldn't bother to pick up if it fell in the street, while quack researchers pick up millions of dollars to sit around conjuring up voodoo science in California.

You'd need a heart of stone not to laugh.

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