I know zero about epidemiology, so have nothing of value to say whatsoever about whether the BIT should be involved or not (that doesn't seem to stop a lot of people having an opinion though...). But I do bristle a bit when I see people on the Left attack the idea of looking at things like social psychology and behavioural economics when formulating policy. I also find it jarring when people who apparently have no science background describe this as 'pseudoscience'.
To be clear, there are important critiques of a lot of this kind of stuff. There is a big question mark over the replicability of some 'findings'. Stuart Ritchie has a decent thread on this topic here. And I'm happy to defer to people who have the expertise to say that there is no meaningful role for the BIT. But it's a big jump from this to the 'pseudoscience' sort of attack I see on Twitter, and apparent distaste for the BIT on the part of some people on the Left. I think this is a bit mistaken, so I thought I'd set out a few points in defence of this kind of work.
First, one line of attack is that the BIT is a gimmicky outfit that should have died with David Cameron's gimmicky government. But actually behavioural economics had an impact on policy even under Tony Blair. If you go back to the Pensions Commission's first report there's a section on what behavioural economics says that could inform savings design. This had a direct influence on decisions like auto-enrolment.
It also had an impact on the design of NEST. For example, one of the papers on Personal Accounts (what the NEST scheme was called initially) cited various bits of behavioural economics research in the discussion about default design and number of fund choices.
Now some people on the Left don't like auto-enrolment or NEST, so for such people this is irrelevant. But if you think it's a good policy (and one developed and initiated by a Labour government) then you should at least be aware of the role that behavioural economics played in framing it. This stuff is not 'Tory' or 'Cameroon'.
Secondly, on a related point, there seems to be a bit of confusion about what the big idea is. I think that's because there isn't one. FWIW from what I've seen/read I don't really think there is a 'theory' that sits behind the work of the BIT. If you read David Halpern's book on the work of the BIT it boils down to some pretty basic principles, rather than some overarching theory. This is a page from it where he summarises the key ones:
A lot of the work of the BIT seems to be applying these kinds of principles combined with randomised testing. Big wows, as I think the young people say. "Make it easy for people to do things you want them to do" doesn't strike me as a particularly ideological position. If there's a decent attack to be made on this, surely it's more that this is 'common sense' and actually probably just good sales and marketing tricks. I think I'd still take issue with that, but at least I'd feel it at least comes somewhere near the target, as opposed to suggestions that there is some malevolent right-wing anti-regulation agenda at play.
Another reasonable attack on this kind of work is perhaps that it seems to promise technocratic 'solutions' to political problems. I can remember someone making the point when Nudge came out that it was trying to take the politics out of politics, which does feel sorta kinda fair.
But I wonder if that's mixing up policy design/implementation with policy objectives a bit. Take that 'make things easy' point, it could be used to design policy interventions with wildly different political objectives. In terms of savings design it has influenced the decision to change the default from opt in to out out. But you can reverse the point - make things harder if you don't want people to do them. Which is what I thought the Conservatives might have been doing by removing payroll deduction of union subs. (I was wrong, or, at least, my FOI did not return anything!)
Which leads onto my third and main point - I don't really get why the Left would want to attack this kind of stuff anyway? It can be used for purposes we like or don't like, but we could say that about comms, or other elements of policy delivery. But some of it surely reinforces Left positions. I first came across behavioural finance when I started reading more about financial markets (Robert Shiller etc). And it was obvious to me then that this literature was problematic to those who argue that markets are efficient. Similarly behavioural economics suggests lots of ways in which markets do not operate in the way that stylised accounts of them suggest. Going further, it was reading around this kind of stuff that lead me to critiques of performance-related pay - something a lot of people on the Left are uncomfortable with.
This is not to say that behavioural finance / economics is 'left wing'. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein used the godawful term 'libertarian paternalism' to describe their approach (though again that tells us something, as they were attacked for using evidence of market inefficiencies as a way to propose paternalistic policies). But I don't see the value in not looking at what we can learn from this stuff.
To establish that when X happens people do Y, and not Z, does not mean you must adopt a certain policy, or that you should rely on non-regulatory interventions. All that it means is that if you have a certain policy objective it's useful to take account of this stuff to design your interventions. I find that basically uncontroversial. It doesn't mean don't look at other information to form decisions, or that you must reject certain types of intervention.
I am sure that some of the interventions that are 'behaviourally informed' will fail, and that some of the 'findings' that underpin them will be disproved. That's all fine. When the facts change and all that. Equally some of it will prove to be robust and simply become 'economics', or whatever else. Some people seem to have forgotten how much has already entered the mainstream. (Let she who is without a copy of Thinking Fast And Slow cast the first diss). I am also sure that people will be able to find things that David Halpern and/or the BIT have said/done that people on the Left (including me) would find objectionable.
I'd just urge some caution. What are we really arguing with? If it's actually the policy objective I think we're missing the point. If it's the science I'm happy to let the academics fight it out and tell me what I should think once they are done. I just fear a baby/bathwater outcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment