Coaxers and coercers on common ground It was only natural that Barack Obama and David Cameron should have read Nudge and loved it. What could be more alluring to a politician than a book full of recipes for turning sceptical voters into allies? Published in 2008 by economist Richard Thaler and law professor Cass Sunstein, Nudge used the insights of behavioural economics about how unreliable and irrational people's choices are. It suggested ways to coax people into doing what was best for them - displaying bananas more prominently than biscuits in school cafeterias, say. "Choice architecture" was a hit. The US president hired Prof Sunstein, his old friend, as a senior regulatory adviser for a time. The UK prime minister fell hard for the concept, consulting Prof Thaler and setting up a Behavioural Insights Team. Christopher Caldwell But this system of "libertarian paternalism" is ambiguous, and its record mixed. Maybe its libertarianism part will rally the public behind a new vision of 21st-century government. Maybe its paternalism will strike its target audience as not just bossy but sneaky, too. US state schools, at the instigation of the federal government and with the blessing of Michelle Obama, are offering healthier lunches, but the kids cannot stand them. Bureaucrats recently beat a humiliating retreat back to peanut butter sandwiches. In Britain, the "Nudge Unit" has solicited organ donors at driving licence renewal time. But much of its work involves new ways to shake people down. When a request for unpaid car taxes is accompanied by a photo of the car, delinquents snap to attention. While Profs Sunstein and Thaler sold their system as a way to effect big change incrementally, they left hanging most of the philosophical questions about liberty that have preoccupied us since the days of John Stuart Mill. Liberals felt uncomfortable about nudging, without quite being able to say why. Late last year Sarah Conly, a philosopher from Bowdoin College in Maine, published Against Autonomy , which confronts these questions head on. In so doing she delivered a challenge to the whole Sunstein-Thaler system. Prof Conly is not a liberal. She has a low opinion of autonomy and what people do with it. She notes that Mill was writing in ignorance of our "natural, even biological, tendency towards social conformity." Nor is she too concerned about the state's invasions of privacy since "the truth is that we evolved in circumstances where privacy was impossible." Her next book is tentatively titled One: Do We Have a Right to More Children? You might call her a hardliner. Prof Conly defends "coercive" paternalism, so-called to distinguish it from the libertarian version. She accuses nudgers of believing "people can't generally make good decisions when left to their own devices." Would it not be simpler and less manipulative, she asks, just to ban things? In a respectful review of Against Autonomy in The New York Review of Books this month, Prof Sunstein found an area of common ground - the cognitive biases that make government action necessary. Prof Conly, like Prof Sunstein, reads an awful lot into these biases. Behavioural economists have tended to use homo economicus as a straw man. Yes, we have a "present bias" - you need to pay us to defer gratification. Banks behave similarly. Yes, we are biased towards the status quo - a great safeguard against getting ripped off by fast talkers. We should have followed that bias more in the past two decades. Yes, we are unduly optimistic - that is because the voice running in one's head must not only describe reality but also motivate one to get out of bed in the morning. The Nudge system is the more humane of the two paternalisms. Profs Thaler and Sunstein are closer to the empirical economic research than Prof Conly, more alert to the places where our ordinary reasoning works perfectly well. She sometimes trusts regulators too much. Still, there is a surprisingly clear kinship between her coercive paternalism and the "libertarian" kind embraced by Messrs Obama and Cameron. What the two paternalisms share is a loss of the liberal faith in an educable public, an impatience with the pace at which citizens change their minds. Where does the authority to coax or coerce stop? Prof Sunstein reassures us that "because hers is a paternalism of means rather than ends, [Prof Conly] would not authorise government to stamp out sin (as, for example, by forbidding certain forms of sexual behaviour) ." But on what principle could a practical politician draw that line? Prof Sunstein sees that one man's means are another man's ends. It is only recently that sexual behaviour has been thought of as an end at all. Once statistics show divorced people living shorter lives than married ones, say, isn't banning divorce as defensible as banning trans fats? Isn't it at least a signal for the choice architects to get to work? The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard