Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. You fasten your seat belt without thinking about it. Somebody made you do that, and you almost certainly agree with them. So where exactly is the line where being made to do something stops being an insult to your freedom?
Think about the last time you were in a car. You probably reached over, clicked that metal buckle into place, and kept your eyes on the road. You didn't have a deep conversation with yourself about the nature of liberty before you did it. You just did it.
Someone, somewhere, made a rule that told you to do that, and you didn't feel like a slave. You didn't feel like your spirit was being crushed by a piece of nylon and a buckle. In fact, you probably felt safer. This happens every day in places like a busy airport or a city street.
We see signs telling us to walk on the right side of the sidewalk or to wait for the light to change before crossing. We follow these instructions almost like a reflex. Most of us wouldn't call these rules an insult to our freedom. We see them as common sense.
We recognize that there is a difference between a rule that stops you from doing what you want and a rule that stops you from doing something that will likely hurt you. But this is the part worth stealing. If we can agree that a seat belt is a good thing to be forced to wear, we have to ask what makes it "good." Is it just because it saves lives?
Or is it because we have reached a point where we are willing to trade a tiny bit of our independence for a guaranteed bit of safety? If we can't define that trade clearly, we run into a real problem. We might end up living in a world where we are constantly "nudged" into behaviors we didn't choose, and we won't even notice the cage until it's already locked. The stakes here are high.
If we get this wrong, we lose the ability to tell the difference between a helpful guide and a subtle master. We need to figure out who actually gets to decide what counts as a "better" way to live. That is what we are going to look at.
This brings us to a strange situation. There are people who believe in absolute free will. These are people who think that every single choice you make is yours, and that no one should have the right to tell you what to do.They are the ultimate champions of the "do what you want" lifestyle.
But even these hardcore free-willers want to be told that fastening their seat belts will prevent them from preventable death, and that they should probably not smoke too much because smoking kills. So, freedom to live trumps to the freedom to live in the dark. These hardcore free-willers may even argue that they're "living even more freely" because they are accepting the "forced better way of life," which they otherwise wouldn't have known. When I say they are "living in the dark," I mean they are making choices without the facts.
If you choose to jump off a bridge because you think you can fly, you are exercising your will, but you aren't really free to live. You are just choosing your own destruction. The people I'm talking about argue that freedom isn't just about being able to do whatever you feel like in the moment. They argue that true freedom is the ability to act on accurate information.
This leads us to a very specific way of thinking. There were two scholars, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, who were worried about how people make decisions in a world full of bad information and confusing choices. They wanted to know how we could help people make better choices without taking away their power to choose at all. They came up with a concept called libertarian paternalism.
Now, that sounds like a contradiction. Paternalism is the idea that someone acts like a parent, making decisions for you because they think they know what's best. Libertarianism is the exact opposite; it's the belief that you should be left alone to make your own choices. So, libertarian paternalism is the idea of being "liberty-preserving."
It means designing the world so that it nudges you toward a better life without actually stopping you from doing what you want. If I were a libertarian paternalist, I would look at the way a cafeteria is laid out. If you put the fruit at eye level and the cookies in a hard-to-reach corner, you aren't forcing anyone to eat an apple. You are still free to grab the cookie.
But you are making it easier to choose the thing that is better for your health. You are acting as a guide, not a master. I find myself leaning toward this. I don't know everything.
I have a PhD in anthropology, but I know almost nothing about food science or medicine. I would actually prefer it if someone I trusted told me, "Hey, this is bad for your body, do this instead." But does that mean I'm less free? I'd argue that I'm more free.
Because I'm finally able to make a choice based on the truth, rather than a choice based on my own ignorance. But here is the catch. If we accept this, we have to admit that someone has to be the one to decide what the "better" life looks like. We have to admit that we are letting experts—people we think know what they are doing—lead us.
And that is where the real question starts.
You might be right to be suspicious of this. If we start saying that we are "more free" because someone we trust is nudging us toward a "better" life, we are stepping onto very slippery ground. A smart person looking at this would point out that "better" is not a neutral word. It is a value judgment.
When we talk about health or safety, we are often talking about what a specific society decided is important. Who gets to sit in the room and decide what the "correct" path is? If the government or a corporation decides that a "better" life involves a specific diet, a specific type of exercise, or a specific way of spending your time, they aren't just providing information. They are shaping your desires.
They are deciding what you should want before you even get a chance to think for yourself. This is the danger of the "nudge." It assumes that the person doing the nudging has a clear, objective view of the truth. But history shows us that people in power often mistake their own preferences for universal truths.
If we let experts decide what is best for our health or our happiness, we are essentially handing over the keys to our own lives. We are saying that our own messy, complicated, and sometimes "wrong" choices are less valuable than a curated, "correct" life designed by someone else. It feels like a soft form of control. It’s a cage with the door left open, but the room is so well-decorated and the path so clearly lit that you never think to walk out.
Fair enough. That is a powerful and necessary pushback. If we aren't careful, libertarian paternalism can become a way to manage people rather than help them. But here is the turn.
I would argue that we are already living in a world of nudges. Every time you walk into a grocery store, the layout is designed to influence you. Every time you see an ad, it is trying to shape your desires. We are already being led.
The question isn't whether we are being influenced—we are. The question is whether we can consciously choose who is doing the leading. I am personally particularly partial to the very last idea (i.e., "libertarian paternalism" in case you missed it), as it speaks to my own being. I, too, believe in free will, but I also want to say, please help me if you can tell me how to live a better life. Please tell me what's bad for my health; and, please, please, please, tell me what I should do to live a better life.
For instance, although I have a PhD in anthropology, I don't know much about food sciences. When I say this, I mean that I recognize my own limitations. I am a human being with a finite amount of time and a limited amount of knowledge. I cannot be an expert in everything.
To claim that I must know everything to be truly free is, in itself, a kind of impossible standard. It’s a perfectionism that leads to paralysis. I would rather be guided by someone who actually knows the mechanics of food science than stay "free" in a state of total ignorance about what I’m putting in my body. The goal isn't to find a perfect, unbiased guide—because that doesn't exist.
The goal is to be honest about the fact that we are already being guided. And to try to find the guides who are looking out for our well-being rather than our submission.
In case I wasn't clear what I meant earlier (since "libertarian paternalism" may sound oxymoronic), here's the passage from Thaler and Sunstien's best- seller Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth. And Happiness: The libertarian aspect of our strategies lies in the straightforward insistence that, in general, people should be free to do what they like—and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so.
To borrow a phrase from the late Milton Friedman, libertarian paternalists urge that people should be "free to choose." We strive to design policies that maintain or increase freedom of choice. When we use the term libertarian to modify the word paternalism, we simply mean liberty-preserving. And when we say liberty-preserving, we really mean it.
Libertarian paternalists want to make it easy for people to go their own way; they do not want to burden those who want to exercise their freedom. I mean this as a commitment to the idea that we shouldn't have to fight for every inch of our autonomy against every single life choice. We want to be free to walk out the door, not be forced to choose the exact shade of white for the curtains. But if we accept this "liberty-preserving" model, we are admitting that the path of least resistance is being engineered for us.
It leads me to a question that I haven't quite settled. If we are always being led by the smartest people in the room, how do we know if they are actually looking out for our well-being, or if they are just making it very, very easy for us to become exactly who they want us to be?