The Politics of Public Behaviour
More than ever, people expect the state to confront the public consequences of private decisions
Its seems the politics of public behaviour matters more then ever. From diet and smoking to household energy use, pensions saving to personal debt, recycling to transport use, we can now see clearly emerging a new set of political issues which have a huge and direct influence on quality of life for millions of people.
But as government attempts to grapple with these issues, two important sets of questions remain:
- Is there a legitimate role for government in seeking to change people’s behaviour?
- What are the practical ways in which both government and others across society can make a difference?
This project is a chance to explore the tensions in the current debate between fostering a 'nanny state' and finding a response to the most pressing social issues of our time.
The project is sponsored by Masterfoods.
- Authors
- Duncan O'Leary
- Publication Date
- 2008-05-08
- Publication Type
- Pamphlet
The personal has become political. Increasingly, governments find themselves drawn into questions about how children are parented, how household waste is disposed of, how people travel, how much they save for later in life, and how much they eat, drink, smoke and exercise.
Recycling taxes - what a load of rubbish | Dt Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph
Argues for incentives over penalties to avoid unintended consequences: 'Taxes and penalties invariably fail to deliver what the politicians imagine they will, whereas more of us respond positively to an incentive. It is about time that politicians, instead of always reaching for the fiscal stick, recognised the greater potential of the carrot'
The New, Soft Paternalism - New York Times
Exploring the ethics of 'soft paternalism': 'what if the government could somehow step in and nudge them in the right direction without interfering with their liberty, or at least not very much? Welcome to the new world of “soft paternalism.” The old “hard” paternalism says, We know what’s best for you, and we’ll force you to do it. By contrast, soft paternalism says, You know what’s best for you, and we’ll help you to do it.'
Overcoming Inertia (pdf)
Quote on 'liberal paternalism': 'Don’t seek to overcome people’s inertia, use it'
Dizzy Blog: Incentives vs coercion
'There is no incentive present when you use tax to punish people into changing their ways. Genuine incentives do not use negativity (in this case financial pain) as a means to an end. Attempting to draw a distinction between increased tax and incentives is like arguing in favour of torture because it provides an incentive to talk. Incentives are positive benefits that are acheived from a neutral status-quo position.'
PledgeBank
We all know what it is like to feel powerless, that our own actions can't really change the things that we want to change. PledgeBank is about beating that feeling by connecting you with other people who also want to make a change, but who don't want the personal risk of being the only person to turn up to a meeting or the only person to donate ten pounds to a cause that actually needed a thousand. You create a pledge...but only if other people will pledge to do the same thing
Production by the masses (pdf)
Charlie Leadbeater on public services: 'public services must promote motivation and cultural change. Motivation is the new medicine: motivating and equipping people to look after themselves better...Only a sustained programme of radical redesign, to shift public services and their professionals away from a perverted, semiindustrial format, in which they attempt to deliver solutions to waiting consumers, will deal with the deep sense of malaise that now afflicts most public service professions.
Wanless Review
Found that: 'The core difference between the health outcomes in the fully engaged and solid progress scenarios is not the way in which the service responds over the next 20 years, but the way in which the public and patients do.'
The pensions bill explained
Mentions Turner reccomendation for the introduction of a national savings scheme, which would see employees automatically enrolled in company pensions...and the white paper plan for a national pensions saving scheme in which employees will be automatically enrolled in workplace pension schemes unless they choose to opt out.
BBC: Shower. Save the water. Save the planet
A recent poll suggested only 28% of Britons thought the idea of setting mandatory limits on individuals' carbon emissions was socially acceptable, even though most feel lifestyle changes are needed to reduce the impact of climate change.
Planning: politics vs economics
'Part of the social cost a new airport is noise. How do we measure this cost? We could give residents rights to quiet skies. Then, the airport builders would have to buy these rights. If they could do so, the benefits of the airport would exceed the cost, so it would be reasonable for the airport to go ahead. But if residents demanded too high a price for the builders' liking, that would be a sign that the cost exceeded the benefit, so the project wouldn't go ahead.'
Spectator article on 'Social Responsibility'
Writes: 'How much does a hamburger really cost? Within this question, as one of David Cameron’s senior advisers explained to me, lies the Conservatives’ new driving philosophy. A Big Mac costs £1.99. But if children guzzle too many they become obese and inflict a burden on the National Health Service. The taxpayer funds this treatment — so the burger costs more than the child’s family originally pays. Might a responsible Tory government ensure the child pays what the burger truly costs?'
Oliver Letwin speech: 'Cameron Conservatism'
Argues that: 'government (apart from its perennial role in guaranteeing security and stability)… is conceived principally as an agency for enabling individuals, families, associations and corporations to internalise externalities and hence to live up to social responsibilities without the further intervention of authority.'
MORI: Citizens Have Their Say
Page with link to MORI polling, which finds that a majority of the public agrees both that: “The Govt should do more to protect people by passing laws that ban dangerous activities” ..and: “The Govt does not trust ordinary people to make their own decisions about dangerous activities”
Social costs of gambling nearly half that of drug abuse, new book concludes
Argues: ' The social costs of gambling, such as increased crime, lost work time, bankruptcies and financial hardships faced by the families of gambling addicts, have reached epidemic proportions, costing the economy as much as $54 billion annually, Earl L. Grinols, an Illinois economist, has written in “Gambling in America: Costs and Benefits,” published this month by Cambridge University Press. This compares with the estimated annual $110 billion cost of drug abuse'
Stern Review Summary (pdf)
'Putting an appropriate price on carbon – explicitly through tax or trading, or implicitly through regulation – means that people are faced with the full social cost of their actions. This will lead individuals and businesses to switch away from high-carbon goods and services, and to invest in low-carbon alternatives. Economic efficiency points to the advantages of a common global carbon price: emissions reductions will then take place wherever they are cheapest.'
Comment Central: Zero case for lying
The deputy chief medical officer, said that the change was meant to send “a strong signal” to the thousands of women...But she admitted that it was not in response to any new medical evidence. This is merely the latest instalment of an extremely dangerous development. The public health profession has long seen itself as having a political role in making us behave as it wishes, rather than simply providing us with information.'
System Failure (pdf)
Jake Chapman: 'A core systems idea is feedback, both positive (or self-reinforcing) and negative (or self-correcting), complexity can often appear mysterious because of a rich set of feedback loops between the components.'
BBC NEWS | Green taxes 'would hit poor most'
'Poor families would be hardest hit by "green" taxes designed to protect the environment, research suggests...poorer households used a higher rate of natural resources such as gas, electricity and water, meaning they would face a bigger tax bill'
House of Commons Hansard Written Answers
Figures for tax paid as a proportion of income: The lowest decile pay 42.6% of their income in tax. The highest decile pay just 34.9%.
'The right dialectic' | Danny Kruger | Prospect (September 2006)
Argues: 'fraternity is also the ghost in the machine of the debates about health and education, about housing and the environment, and about crime and its causes. In each of these areas the vital issue is how communities themselves, not the individual or the state, can address the challenges that face them'
David Miliband Spectator article
'From traffic to terrorism, the economy to the environment, our interdependence means that the extension of personal freedom relies on collective action (and if it needs underlining, not just state action)'
Matthew Taylor on Pro-social Behaviour (pdf)
Argues: 'Pro-social strategy therefore allies itself with three other sets of arguments: for participative forms of policy making, for devolved forms of decision making, and for co-productive forms of public service management.'
Professor Robert Cialdini on influencing public behaviour (RSA talk)
Argues that there are Six "weapons of influence": Reciprocation; Commitment and Consistency; Social Proof; Authority; Liking; Scarcity. Suggest social norms are as important as economistic hard incentives.
Guardian Unlimited Politics | David Cameron's speech to RSA on civility
Argues: - 'social responsibility' is not laissez faire but a framework of incentives - govt. cannot be neutral on the family - devolution creates ownership and responsibility (draws parallel with owning council houses)
Health strategy to take on obesity | Society | SocietyGuardian.co.uk
John Reid (as Health Sec) arguing: "We need to find the right balance, rejecting both the nanny state and the 'Pontius Pilate' state which washes its hands of its citizens' health."
RSA - Climate change study
80% of people believe they could personally reduce their carbon emissions. 65% think individuals should take responsibility. 21% govt; 11% Big Business. 61% support financially penalising/rewarding people using more/less than the average amount of energy. 22% oppose the idea. 53 would accept limits on their carbon use. 29% wouldn't. The rest don't think there is a problem or don't know.
Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour
A good tour of the literature and introduction to key theoretical perspectives on behaviour change and government. Argues role of govt could/should be 'helping people help themselves'.
Public Matters (Policy Network) Executive Summary-final (pdf)
Argues: 'There should be a new contract between citizen and state. That will require greater conditionality, for example in the benefits system.'
Irrational incandescence | Economist.com
Article discussing 'apparent irrationality' of people not changing their lightbulbs to (cheaper) energy-saving ones. Suggests: 'One policy option is to decouple the utilities' revenues from the amount of electricity they sell. That gives them an incentive to increase the efficiency of power usage rather than to produce
The final cut | Economist.com
'Not even 1% of passengers have taken up BA's very reasonably priced offer to offset the carbon emissions of their flights (£5 for London-Madrid, £13.50 for London-Johannesburg). That may be because people are selfish—or it may be because they are rational enough to know that their individual economic choices are not going to make a blind bit of difference to the future of the planet. Nobody is going to save a polar bear by turning off the lights.'
Don't force me. I'm open to persuasion-Comment - Daniel Finkelstein -
'Not even 1% of passengers have taken up BA's very reasonably priced offer to offset the carbon emissions of their flights (£5 for London-Madrid, £13.50 for London-Johannesburg). That may be because people are selfish—or it may be because they are rational enough to know that their individual economic choices are not going to make a blind bit of difference to the future of the planet. Nobody is going to save a polar bear by turning off the lights.'
Car wrecks and Hutus: a guide to good conduct - Comment - Daniel Finkelstein
Discusses Professor Zimbardo's book 'The Lucifer Effect'. 'Give us peer pressure or the cloak of anonymity or the need to adhere to a consistent philosophy or a group code, give us the right situation and its amazing what we will do, whatever our disposition.'
Philip G. Zimbardo - Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil - New York Times
Dr. Zimbardo explains his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 in which 23 volunteers were divided randomly into two groups. :“prisoners” and “guards” in a prison environment. The experiment was to run for two weeks...the guards became sadictic within days.
The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo
Writes: 'Solomon Asch and Muzafer Sherif have shed light on the determinants of conformity. Their research and that of others (Morton Deutsch and Hal Gerard) has demonstrated two main types of conformity: informational and normative.' i.e. we look to others because we don't know what to do, or because we want to fit in.
Brown's aspirations aren't those of Thatcher | Dt Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph
Janet Daly writes: 'No one can realise his ambitions or be successfully self-reliant without a public system of shared values. Private life is never utterly private. So far, so unexceptionable. But what does this mean for the mechanisms of everyday existence? The real question is, who will draw the line between the public good and private desire? Who decides what the limits are on personal fulfilment vs the common purpose? Is it central government, local institutions or the community? '
Conservative Party Health review
Argues for: 'a new Public Health Act designed to deliver separate public health budgets, a stronger Chief Medical Officer's Department, joint appointments of Directors of Public Health between the NHS and local authorities, a cross-government strategy which details actions to be taken by each department to tackle public health challenges, and annual reports by the Treasury on the effect of public expenditure decisions on the delivery of public health objectives.'
BBC NEWS | Poor 'do not have a worse diet'
'People on low incomes have similar diets to the rest of the population, a government report has said. The Food Standards Agency found that contrary to popular belief, nutrition, access to food and cooking skills are not much different in poorer families.'
Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense
Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter is cumulative...Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.
MORI research on Socio-Political Influencers
from blog post at Involve
Social Preferences and Public Economics: Are good laws a substitute for good citizens? (pdf)
Argues: 'Laws and policies designed to harness self-regarding preferences to public ends may fail when they compromise the beneficial effects of pro-social preferences. Experimental evidence indicates that incentives that appeal to self interest may reduce the salience of intrinsic motivation, reciprocity, and other civic motives.'
Half 'are smoking less' since ban | BBC NEWS
Half are smoking less since the ban on smoking in indoor public spaces in England took effect six weeks ago, a survey reveals. A third of 1,000 smokers polled by Ciao Surveys said they now smoked less when out in bars and clubs and more than one in 10 said they smoked less altogether. But only 1.8% said they had quit since the ban.
Daniel Finkelstein: Show me the smoking gun
New figures suggest the smoking ban has produced a pretty small reduction in the number of people who smoke. But we are told that making people quit is not the point of the legislation...no evidence is provided about the impact of the ban on passive smoking.
Morals make people fat | Guardian daily comment
Argues: 'Today, common sense about diet points in the opposite direction. Nothing can be socially shaped. We're all free individuals swimming in an ocean of uncoerced choice. Yet those choices are shaped, every day, by the food industry, by the rhythm of our lives and by the architecture of the modern world, all of which induces us to snack, gobble and dash...The prescription for overweight Britain is clear: less bariatrics, more sociology; less morality, more politics.'
Public sceptical of green tax motives
Most members of the public believe ministers are using green taxes to rake in more money rather than protect the environment, according to new research...opinion was more evenly split over approval in principle for extra green taxes, with 46 per cent saying they did not and 45 per cent saying they did.
normblog: Rules, structures and individuals
'Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling is wrong to defend the statement that 'there is no such thing as society'. in the way he defends her. Chris says that she meant that 'it is only individuals who do things'. But one can assent to the claim that it's only individuals who do things, without agreeing to the thesis that nothing but individual action enters into the explanation of social facts and social outcomes.'
'A long look', Richard Reeves in the New Statesman
'The Turner commission on pensions ranked the common inability to make "rational long-term savings decisions without encouragement" as the top barrier to better pensions provision...This phenomenon is dubbed financial myopia, and it is the most important reason why the state has to intervene to encourage, or even compel, higher pensions savings'
Research report: 'Who benefits from Child Benefit?'
Finds 'We do indeed find that CB is spent differently from other income – paradoxically, it appears to be spent disproportionately on adult-assignable goods. In fact we estimate that more than half of a marginal pound of CB is spent on alcohol.'
Public atttitudes, sticks + Carrots // The Spectator Blog
Argues: 'Whenever there is a genuine combination of carrots and sticks proposed there is popular support for the ideas. So, 80 percent of people favour raising taxes on gas guzzling cars while reducing those on low emission vehicles. Equally, 83 percent support lowering stamp duty on energy efficient homes.'
Yes, money talks ? but sometimes nobody?s listening | - Times Online
Chris Dillow on incentives. Argues: 'incentives matter at the margin. But the margin needn’t be particularly wide. And many people aren’t on it'. Some good references and examples.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Should green cars get tax breaks?
Chris Dillow on some new research about 'image motivation': 'People act green in part because they want to be seen to be doing good - what Professor Ariely calls "image motivation." They buy the Toyota Prius in the hope others will think: "he's a good guy: he cares about the environment." But if you give more tax breaks to the Prius, others will stop thinking this, and instead think: "that guy's just taking advantage of a tax break." The signalling virtue of the Prius therefore falls.'
Obesity Policy and the Law of Unintended Consequences
Article from the USA skeptical about public health interventions. Argues that obesity may be a rational response to changing circumstances (technology/prices etc)
Unveiled: radical prescription for our health crisis - Independent Online Edition > Health
Julian Le Grand goes for Liberal Paternalism as the solution to public health issues: policies should be framed so the healthy option is automatic and people have to choose deliberately to depart from it
BBC NEWS | Scots smoke ban 'improved health'
'Professor Jill Pell, who headed the research team which made the findings, said: "The primary aim of smoking bans is to protect non-smokers from the effects of passive smoking. "Previous studies have not been able to confirm whether or not that has been achieved. What we were able to show is that among people who are non-smokers there was a 20% reduction in heart attack admissions. "This confirms that the legislation has been effective in helping non-smokers."'
Stumbling and Mumbling: Bansturbation: sub-optimal
Chris Dillow on Pigovian taxes versus bans.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Realistic policies
Stumbling + Mumbling post with good link to the number of time a 'change of culture' has been called for to solve social problems...
I'm fine. Stop curing me | Mick Hume - Times Online
Writes: 'As René Dubos wrote in 1960, “it is part of the doctor's function to make it possible for his patients to go on doing the pleasant things that are bad for them - smoking too much, eating and drinking too much - without killing themselves any sooner than is necessary”. There must be more to life than healthy living. Amid the talk of rights and responsibilities, one that gets ignored is the individual's right to make the “wrong” choices.'
Mill: timeless or timed out?
Roy Hattersley has a provocative peice in the Guardian today, in which he argues that J...