Advocates of “libertarian paternalism” cite experimental evidence showing that people often make irrational decisions, and argue that we need government regulation to guard against such problems. Economist Richard McKenzie challenges part of this rationale by citing experimental evidence showing that markets actually give people incentives to act more rationally than they would otherwise, thus undercutting claims of irrational behavior based primarily on surveys or experiments that don’t mimic the incentives and other conditions of real-world markets:
People, including economists, are imperfect decision makers because of their mental limitations. But this fact does not mean that markets fail. Indeed, markets do far more than induce improved allocation of resources, given wants and resources. Markets induce market participants to be more rational than they otherwise would be because they must pay a price for being irrational. Thus, markets allow—no, require—economists to assume that people are more rational than they are likely to be found to be in laboratory settings, absent meaningful information and incentives and absent market pressures.
One underappreciated fact about the experimental and survey evidence relied on by advocates of the new paternalism is that it models voter decision-making far more closely than market decisions. Unlike market participants, voters have little or no incentive to either acquire information about the issues they decide, or to analyze the information they do have in an unbiased fashion. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of libertarian paternalist policies established by expert regulators insulated from democratic control (the “rule of experts” is often proposed as a means by which paternalist regulation can be enacted without being influenced by voter ignorance and irrationality). Such regulators may be more knowledgeable than voters. But unlike consumers, they do not have their own money at stake, and therefore don’t suffer any penalty if they [...]