behavioral economics

And where does paternalism end and manipulation begin? Who gets to determine what is the social good of these choices offered? Just asking... :o)

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The problem isn't the idea of universal health care - pretty much everyone agrees that it is shameful that a country that is willing to spend so much money on lavish lifestyles and military deployment beyond its own borders can still have millions of citizens without any health care at any cost. Many Americans think that systems like those in the UK and Canada may not be perfect, but everyone is reasonably well served and nobody goes without access to basic health care.

Some Americans get health care that is the best in the world, and far more health care than they actually want or need. Many people have minimal coverage in case of a catastrophic illness or injury but don't get routine checkups because the out-of-pocket for all the tests and diagnostics and preventative medications are too expensive. Still others depend on hospital emergency services as their only source of medical care.

Many Americans believe that the Obama health care reform will only make matters worse for most people. The level of government regulation, intervention and oversight are major concerns for the libertarians AND the paternalists among us.

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There is so much meddling by governments - federal, state and local, in all areas of the US economy that it is difficult to see how a genuinely free market economy would handle these social and cultural issues.

Health care is a great example. "Willingness to trust the private market" - well, no not really. Government regulation has played a large but largely un-noticed role in defining what health care and coverage is available. Only with government support could the few primary providers control most health care spending by individuals, companies and government.

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As a nutritionist who has been learning about libertarianism, the Austrian school and behavioral economics, this is a really complex problem. Do you solve the symptoms - obesity (big difficult problem) or try to get to the root causes (historic, regulatory and cultural)?

The US used to be about WIN-WIN - everyone was better off if everyone was better off. But the US sugar beet farmers were able to get legislation that kept imported sugar prices high. Then the food industry needed to find cheaper sweeteners and High Fructose Corn Syrup was invented - great for agra business and corn farmers in particular. Now lots of "empty" calories in attractive packaging with an infinite shelf-life cost next to nothing while real food (with actual nutritional value) is expensive and often not available in neighborhoods where obesity is most prevalent.

So where to start to fix this problem...

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interesting reference to Behavioral Economics as it relates to training and education ...

Behavioral Economics is about slight of hand

Behavioral Economics is actually the marriage of economics with psychology and sociology. Some programs use it to “improve the accuracy and empirical reach of economic theory“. One of the main premises of behavioral economics is that humans have bounded rationality – which means the rationality of individuals is dependent on the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make decisions (via wikipedia). This is a field with decades of research to back it up. Maybe a bit complicated to understand and explain, but deserving of a better description than a comparison to a magic trick.

... We’re at a time when the roles that would traditionally defend us against information imposters are being eliminated by the move to digital. What if defense of truth and logic is one of our new responsibilities as elearning and social learning professionals?

http://gminks.edublogs.org/2010/03/27/lets-get-real-about-analysis-starting-with-the-last-ls2010-keynote/

reference to the link above

...Same with "behavioral economics is about slight of hand." If this were true, we'd never know how long to make left-turn lanes (or even whether to make them at all), stores would always run out of stock, and restaurants would have no reason to close between midnight and 6:00 a.m.

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=52105