Escaping Paternalism Book Club: Part 1

Summary

Rizzo and Whitman (R&W) begins with a primer on the “new paternalism” – the influential policy reform movement powered by the engine of behavioral economics.

For most of history, paternalists have drawn their support from religious or moral notions of goodness. They have claimed special knowledge, from God or some other source, about how people ought to live. The overtly religious character of temperance movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exemplifies this kind of “...