Nudging the Nudgers

technorati tags: economy society freedom

The Free Exchange writer reports from a session at Cato Institute where Prof. Mario Rizzo criticized the new trend in behavioural economics, the "libertarian paternalism." (Is the oxymoron sound here deliberate?) One could debate the merits of the proposal and its critique at great length, but what caught my eye was this at the very end of this blog post:

Of course, we'd also want to ask how the deciders are overcoming those cognitive biases the rest of us suffer from.

This is, to me, the most important problem with such grand and well-meaning "programs" for doing good. If we set up a system to "nudge" poeple to be better than they would supposedly be otherwise, how and by whom should the nudgers themselves be so nudged?