by Glen Whitman
Mario Rizzo and I have recently published another article on the new paternalism, titled “The Knowledge Problem of New Paternalism,” in the BYU Law Review. (Mario briefly blogged about it here.) The article lacks an abstract, but here’s a lightly edited portion of the introduction:
The “new paternalism” spawned by behavioral economics faces a severe knowledge problem akin to the knowledge problem that Friedrich Hayek argued afflicts centrally-planned economies. If well-meaning policymakers possess all the relevant information about individuals’ true preferences, their cognitive biases, and the choice contexts in which they manifest themselves, then policymakers could potentially implement paternalist policies that improve the welfare of individuals by their own standards. But lacking such information, we cannot conclude that actual paternalism will make their decisions better; under a wide range of circumstances, it will even make them worse. New paternalists have not taken the knowledge…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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