then promptly shot full of holes by promoters who understand how real human beings think and behave

TO BE NOTED: From the WSJ:

"About Time: Regulation Based On Human Nature

• By JASON ZWEIG

Franklin D. Roosevelt sent Wall Street to the torture rack. Barack Obama is sending Wall Street to the psychology lab.

A key component of President Obama's financial-reform package is its proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would apply findings from the science of human behavior to ensure "transparency, simplicity, fairness, and access" for borrowers, savers and other financial consumers.

That could make it a lot harder for a part-time worker to end up with an exploding mortgage that eats all her take-home pay. It might even mean that regulators will finally pay attention to the visual presentation of financial data -- color, graphics and other factors that exert powerful sway over your decisions.

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Heath Hinegardner

The proposal is an outgrowth of "Nudge," the brilliant book published last year by two University of Chicago scholars, economist Richard H. Thaler and law professor Cass R. Sunstein. A longtime friend of President Obama, Prof. Sunstein has been nominated to head the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a job often described as "the regulation czar."

In my view, a behavioral approach is decades overdue. Financial regulations always have been written mainly by lawyers and legislators -- then promptly shot full of holes by promoters who understand how real human beings think and behave.

Lawyers think that the mere disclosure of risks and conflicts of interest provides the information that investors or consumers need. That is a fantasy. Faced with 47 pages' worth of "Risk Factors," investors come away with a warm glow of safety; risks that seem hard to understand appear unlikely to happen, and people who provide you with lots of detail seem likely to be honest.

To inform anyone, information has to be accessible. The central idea in "Nudge" is what Profs. Thaler and Sunstein call "choice architecture" -- the context, format and framing of how decisions are presented to consumers. You will eat more nuts from a big bowl than from a small bowl. You will choose surgery if you are told it offers a 90% chance of survival; you will reject it if you are told there is a 10% chance it will kill you. The same people who would skip investing in a 401(k) if they had to "opt in" to the plan will participate if they have to "opt out" in order to skip it.

Prof. Sunstein, who is awaiting Senate confirmation in his post, declined to be interviewed. Cautioning that he can't speak for the Obama administration or Prof. Sunstein, Prof. Thaler discussed the new regulatory model. "The standard beer can is 12 ounces," he said. "That makes it pretty easy to compare beer prices. So now consider mortgages. It's not that you regulate the interest rates or the fees. But one way to make shopping easier is to make comparing the products simpler."

Thus, suggested Prof. Thaler, every bank or mortgage broker would have to offer two "safe-harbor" products with "standard terms that are easy to understand": a 30-year fixed mortgage with no points or prepayment penalties, and a five-year adjustable-rate mortgage. The market would set the interest rates. "By having these generic, simple mortgages," said Prof. Thaler, "you make everything else comparable."

Banks and mortgage brokers would remain free to offer more complex kinds of loans. However, added Prof. Thaler, "If the broker sells you a teaser-rate mortgage that you can't possibly afford once it resets, then as Ricky Ricardo used to say, he's got some 'splainin' to do" -- including greater potential penalties from regulators. Mutual funds, 401(k)s and brokerage accounts wouldn't be regulated by the new agency but might well be influenced by its rules.

The proposal is about making regulation intelligent, not intrusive, said Eric Johnson, an expert on decision-making who teaches at Columbia Business School. "If you really do want a complicated, high-cost, high-risk mutual fund, you'll still be able to get it. But making sure that at least one option is not a disaster gives people an anchor."

Regulation that recognizes the limits of human rationality is an idea whose time has come. Like any good psychology lab, the proposed new agency will gather reams of data on how real people actually behave and adjust its rules accordingly, in real time. Of course, the financial industry will adjust its own behavior, trying to outsmart the new rules as fast as they are printed. But the war between the regulators and the regulated might finally be based on a realistic view of human nature, not fantasy.

Write to Jason Zweig at intelligentinvestor@wsj.com"

embedded deep in the foundations of modern economic and political thought

TO BE NOTED:

"Metamodern

The Trajectory of Technology

The Paradox of Choice

by Eric Drexler on June 3, 2009

Why More is Less

In standard theories of rationality, it is practically axiomatic that having more choices is always better. It should come as no surprise that this isn’t true of real human beings: Too much choice can make us miserable.

In The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Barry Schwartz unfolds a broad picture of the perversities of choice, and these are more extensive than I would have guessed. His examples range from shopping to life-changing decisions, and his angles of view on the subject range from personal experience to human history, psychology, and economic theory. The themes overlap with those in a book I reviewed and recommended earlier, Predictably Irrational.

The insights presented in The Paradox of Choice should influence choices about choices at many levels. At the broadest level, they call into question assumptions about aspects of freedom, abundance, and happiness that are embedded deep in the foundations of modern economic and political thought. At a personal level, Schwartz distills research about choice, attitudes, and psychology to suggest how we might live our lives with more satisfaction. (Do you approach choices as a maximizer, or as a satisficer?)

The Paradox of Choice, like Nudge and Predictably Irrational, is a book about a topic of general importance, written by a leading researcher in the field, and highly readable. I recommend it.

"they believe they are doing good and so not constrained by what they themselves would consider proper principles of morality and honesty "

From David Friedman:

"Rationality, Nudges and Slippery Slopes

In order to explain and defend the economic approach to human behavior one must justify the assumption that individuals are rational, that they tend to take the actions that best achieve their objectives. One argument I have long made is that, while rational behavior is not a complete description of how humans act( TRUE ), it describes the predictable part of their action( CAN'T IRRATIONAL ACTION BE PREDICTABLE? ). In most situations there is one correct way of acting to achieve an objective and lots of incorrect ways someone could act. Unless one has a theory of what particular mistake someone is going to make, the best approach is to treat the mistakes as random error, to predict his behavior on the assumption he is rational while realizing that the prediction will sometimes be wrong.

So far as I know, neither Cass Sunstein nor Richard Thaler ever read either of the books in which I made that argument. But their recent book Nudges offers a rebuttal. Using evidence from behavioral economics, they argue that irrational action is not merely random error. There are patterns to it, predictable ways in which individuals act that are inconsistent with the economist's assumption of rationality( I AGREE ). Thaler and Sunstein propose that those setting up alternatives for someone else to choose among—"choice architects" in their terminology—can and should take advantage of those patterns to nudge the chooser into making the choice they think he ought to make, the choice he would make if he were fully rational. This is the approach that I described in an earlier post as "soft paternalism" and that has been described elsewhere as "libertarian paternalism." It is paternalism because it is getting people to act as someone else thinks they ought, libertarian because it leaves the individual free to act in a different way if he wants to—a nudge, not a compulsion( YES ).

The argument as stated is persuasive and interesting. As the authors point out, any time you are offering someone else choices—whether "you" are a government agency, an employer, or a firm selling something—you are necessarily deciding in what form to make the offer, hence engaging in choice architecture. If you are going to do it, you ought to know what you are doing and do it in a way designed to produce the result you want to produce—in their case, choices that result in the chooser better achieving his own goals.( A GOOD POINT )

The libertarian part of the proposal depends on leaving the individual free, at no significant cost, to make the choice you don't want him to make. But if you don't want him to make that choice, it will be tempting to make it more and more difficult—to require him to fill out forms, file them in the right place, perhaps even to neglect to tell him that forms exist to be filled out, that the alternatives you don't want him to choose are available. There is thus a serious slippery slope problem, making it possible for libertarian paternalism to be used as the justification for government actions that end up as paternalism, or compulsion for other purposes, that is far from libertarian. The point occurred to me when I read the book. It was reinforced by a real world experience at about the same time.

It was the beginning of my daughter's first year at college and the college sent us a bill, a list of charges and a total we were to pay. One of the items in the list, included without explanation, was ten dollars for the "Green Edge Fund." Being curious, I did an online search to find out what it was. It turned out that it was a fund to subsidize environmental projects by students. It had been voted in the previous year—as an optional ten dollar per pupil payment.

"Optional" means that you don't have to pay. We sent in our check minus the ten dollars and I sent an email to the president of the College, pointing out that he was billing parents for money they did not owe. I received back an apologetic email from an administrator, explaining that the program was a new one and they had not yet gotten everything set up properly.

A month or so later I received a bill from the College for ten dollars. I wrote back to the office that sent the bill, pointing out that they had billed me, and all other parents, for ten dollars we didn't owe, that rather than my owing them money they owed money to all of the parents who had paid the ten dollars. I also sent an email to the administrator. A few weeks later, I received second bill for ten dollars—shortly followed by an email from the administrator telling me that the matter had been taken care of and I could ignore the bill.

Recently we got our bill for the second semester. It included a form for our daughter to sign and hand in during the first two weeks of the semester requesting a waiver of the charge for the Green Edge fund. The form contained a description of the fund—put in terms of how the money would be used, not how they hoped it would be used—that I suspect most students and faculty at the college would regard as fraudulent advertising if it were the product of, say, the phone company.

The bill did not include any mention of the fact that the College had, in the previous semester, charged parents for some tens of thousands of dollars that they did not owe, nor any offer of a refund to any parent who wanted it.

As it happened, my wife went to the same college thirty-some years earlier—and had had a similar experience. In her day it was a one dollar per student charge to support one of Ralph Nader's PIRGs. A student could get out of it by going to the right office on the right day and telling them he didn't want to pay it. On further enquiry, we discovered that the one dollar per student "donation" was still there, although there did not seem to be any effort to inform parents or students that they had the option of not paying it.

An optional charge where the default choice is to pay it is the sort of thing Sunstein and Thaler propose, a nudge in the direction of doing what those responsible believe, possibly correctly, that most of those nudged would want to do if they took the time to think about it. But the people constructing the choice architecture know what result they want to get, they believe they are doing good and so not constrained( HOW DOES THIS FOLLOW? ) by what they themselves would consider proper principles of morality and honesty in a commercial context, so it is very easy to make the "wrong" choice more and more difficult and obscure until what is optional in theory becomes mandatory in practice."

There is a difference between a nudge and misleading or fooling someone. In order for slippery slope arguments to be valid, the two terms held to be equivalent need to be indistinguishable. A nudge and a ruse seem different and distinguishable to me.It is always tempting for people to exaggerate or fudge or blur their arguments, even when purporting to be based on reason or experiment. The answer is to hold people to standards of fairness and decency. We might want to begin with the financial industry.

A Review Of "Nudge"

Will Wilkinson reviews the book "Nudge" on Reason. The conclusion:

"All Nudge really offers is the idea that we should use what we know about how people act in order to design policy that will help them. And we shouldn't take away their choices. Well, I'm for all of it. If some policy makers really are misled by unrealistic economic models of rationality, then they should cut it out and bone up on psychology. Behavioral economics provides valuable new information about what will and won't work, and why. Thaler's work on savings plans is a great example of what can be done by taking into account new findings in psychology.

But it's no source of ideological realignment, no basis for what Thaler and Sunstein call a "Real Third Way." This book offers some whiz-bang behavioral economics that can be used for any ideological end, and it gives us the agreeably banal doctrine of choice-preserving helpfulness. The whiff of paradox in "libertarian paternalism" may have set up hopes for a category-defying revolution, but Nudge is the book where those hopes, and that tiny monster of an idea, prove flightless."

I consider Sunstein and Thaler to be proponents, more or less, of my agenda, so I'm going to have to read the book myself. However, Wilkinson does make some good points.