The paper analyzes the inherent risks of paternalistic economic policies associated with the newly established economic sub-disciplines of behavioral economics, happiness economics and economic psychology. While the authors in general welcome these sub-disciplines for enriching and critically...

Choice can be an extraordinary benefit or an immense burden. In some contexts, people choose not to choose, or would do so if they were asked. For example, many people prefer not to make choices about their health or retirement plans; they want to delegate those choices to a private or public...

For most people, control has some intrinsic value; people care about maintaining it and will pay something to do so. Whenever a private or public institution blocks choices or interferes with agency, some people will rebel, even if exercising control would not result in material benefits or might...

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that in some contexts and for identifiable reasons, people make choices that are not in their interest, even when the stakes are high. Policymakers in a number of nations, including the United States and the United Kingdom, have used the underlying...

For policymakers, the idea of active choosing has a great deal of appeal, not least because it avoids the charge of paternalism. In many contexts, however, an insistence on active choosing is a form of paternalism, not an alternative to it. The reason is that people might choose not to choose....

Many people insist on drawing a line between active choosing and paternalism, but that line is often illusory. Whenever private or public institutions override people’s desire not to choose, and insist on active choosing, they are likely to be behaving paternalistically, through a kind of...

Behavioral findings, demonstrating human errors, have led some people to favor choice-preserving responses (“nudges”), and others to favor mandates and bans. If people’s choices lead them to err, it might seem puzzling, or even odd, to respond with solutions that insist on preserving...

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith asserts that humans have an innate interest in the fortunes of other people and desire for sympathy with others. In Smith’s theory, sympathy is an imperfectly reflected combination of emotion and judgment when one observes someone (the agent) in a...

It has been recognized that the support for democracy seems to be increasing with the time spent in a democratic system. An individual's life experience living under democratic rule positively affects the support for democracy as a political system. Therefore it seemed inevitable that the newly...

It has been recognized that the support for democracy seems to be increasing with the time spent in a democratic system. An individual's life experience living under democratic rule positively affects the support for democracy as a political system. Therefore it seemed inevitable that the newly...