Ipsos MORI: Public Opinion on Behaviour Change Policy

Ipsos MORI recently published a report detailing research carried out into the acceptability of governmental interventions, available here.

The poll assessed public perceptions of a hierarchy of policy interventions, from providing information to banning products outright. A majority of participants supported each of the interventions, though it did decrease as they became more severe. However, a substantial number of participants also felt that government should not get involved in individual choices. This 'cognitive polyphasia', a willingness to support specific interventions while also opposing governmental involvement, is seemingly contradictory. The authors suggest that it may point to a desire for government to tackle a particular issue while maintaining a level of suspicion about their involvement. It may also reflect a willingness to support legislation for the bad choices  of others, while maintaining a desire to retain your own freedom of choice.

There were differences in support for interventions between countries, with richer countries less likely to support the more severe interventions. In another seeming contradiction, within countries, richer respondents were more likely to endorse the more stringent interventions, perhaps because they do not feel themselves to be the targets of the policies.

Overall, the report suggests that public attitudes towards interventions like incentives, restrictions and bans is quite positive. Those who object to such measures may be in a passionate minority.

A Little Gem

The following gem is attributed to the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Andrew Montague, in today's Irish Times:

“The more people we can get to cycle, the calmer the city centre traffic is, and that actually reduces fatalities, and the research shows that the safest cities in the world are the cities with the most cyclists”

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/1111/breaking9.html?via=mr

Is this a shift in incentive prizes?

"The Wolfson economics prize invites the submission of ideas for the orderly exit of one or more members of the euro zone. The one-off award is worth £250,000 ($390,000), making it second only to a Nobel in value for an economics prize." - from the Economist.com Daily Chart accessed Oct. 19th 2011.

To my mind, the appeal of incentive prizes is that they draw attention to stumbling blocks in humanity's quest for knowledge. In 1714 the British government offered a prize to whoever could find a practical means to measure longitude at sea, which they eventually awarded in 1773. Charles Lindbergh claimed a prize of $25000 for crossing the Atlantic in 1927. The X-prize incentives private rockets to explore space. These prizes were awarded for projects that self-evidently knocked over barriers to progress.

Last I heard, the jury of experts was still out on the question of whether the orderly departure of certain countries from the Eurozone would advance progress. In the meantime, this prize encourages the public to design the most efficacious means of execution.

I do not know enough about the European Monetary Union to suggest its appropriate next step. But I am interested in judgment and decision making and my prediction is that the addition of this prize to the debate space will shift its centre of gravity. Once people hear the answer to the question 'how?' the logical next step is to think about 'when'? By that point, it simply doesn't occur to people to ask the question 'why?'

I was prompted to think more deeply about this topic when I learnt that the Wolfson Prize is sponsored by Policy Exchange, a British Euroskeptic think-thank.

The Science of Science Policy

I recently discovered the Science of Science Policy website, affiliated to the United States (U.S.) Office of Science and Technology Policy. The U.S. Congress established the Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1976 with a "broad mandate to advise the President... on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs". The goal of the Science of Science Policy community is to "provide a scientifically rigorous and quantitative basis for science policy. The website provides a central location with news, information and research to help inform the Federal Government's science management decisions".

Closely related, the Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program was established at the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2005 in response to a call from John Marburger III for a "specialist scholarly community" to study the science of science policy. The program has three major goals: "advancing evidence-based science and innovation policy decision making; building a scientific community to study science and innovation policy; and leveraging the experience of other countries. A recent Science article highlights some of the issues addressed by SciSIP researchers."

Seventy-five SciSIP awards have been made to date. The awardees include economists, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists as well as domain scientists. Some recent SciSIP awards (full abstracts available) which might be of interest to readers include Applied Visual Analytics for Economic Decision-Making and Universities, Innovation and Economic Growth. A report in the New York Times, from a couple of years ago, highlights a dataset that SciSIP funded jointly with the Kauffman Foundation, noting that it "tracks government-sponsored research for science and engineering and links it with government start-ups, patents, and other data. One goal of the research is to identify the characteristics of star innovators, scientists who are most effective in ushering research advances into the marketplace."

Behavioral Economics and the Next Government

Barring a very unusual set of events, the next Irish government will be a Fine Gael/Labour coalition with Enda Kenny as Taoiseach. The party has put forward its plans for reforming government and addressing unemployment and, as Kevin pointed out, they seem willing to embrace some of the innovative ideas coming out of modern microeconomics, in particular devoting a reasonable amount of space to early childhood education including the PFL project which involves some of our colleagues here.

It would be worth the time and energy of the policy advisors to the new government to look at the literature emerging from behavioural economics for ideas on how to reform key aspects of the tax, welfare and pensions systems of the country. Both the Obama and Cameron administrations have put a lot of energy into taking on board insights from behavioural economics, and a new government will have the advantage of being able to observe successes and failures of countries farther down this road. One advantage of the tight economic situation facing the new government will be that it will force it to address issues head-on rather than ducking issues by handing out money. There is arguably a stronger momentum for real reform of the operation of the state now than in any previous time, with both a dramatic downturn and a substantially more educated population than before.

Some things that would really be worth having a full national debate on in Ireland include:

- The growing literature on the importance of default options in determining behaviour even in important life domains is perhaps the most relevant to policy. The literature on automatic enrolment plans, in part, motivated the current governments decision to move to a system of automatic enrolment for the private sector in 2014. This is one of the boldest moves in this direction anywhere in the world and it is worth examining closely the extent to which this achieves its desired objectives and lessons that might be learned for other aspects of policy. In particular, the design of universal health insurance systems may benefit from the results of these analyses.

- FG plans to move all employment-related services into a single point of contact. At first glance, this would have a lot of advantages from the point of view of reducing complexity and potentially improving the outcomes of unemployed people. Sendhil Mullainathan and colleagues summarise some of the potential insights from behavioural economics in designing the interfaces that uemployed people interact with.

- There is a growing literature on how behavioural economics could be applied to more flexibly design tax policies. I gave a few presentations on this during the last couple of years including here. The Irish tax system is far too complicated and every move the new government can make toward simplifying it will be a victory for common sense.

- I have provided reading lists on this topic before (e.g. here) and my teaching website has a lot of links. The book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunnstein Nudge provides an accesible overview.

- In general, the financial health and stability of Irish households will be a key concern over the rest of this cycle. The development of the role of the financial regulator as being an advocate for sensible household financial decision making would be bulked up a lot by taking on board this literature as a complement to the traditional financial capability literature.

Westminister Forum Projects

Westminster Forum Projects (WFP) operates a "group of influential, impartial and cross-party forums: the Westminster Education Forum; the Westminster eForum; the Westminster Energy, Environment & Transport Forum; the Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum; the Westminster Health Forum; the Westminster Legal Policy Forum and the Westminster Media Forum."

"All the Westminster Forum Projects... enjoy substantial support and involvement from key stakeholders within Parliament, government, regulatory bodies, industry, consumer organisations and other interested groups. The forums organise senior level seminars on public policy in these sectors. None of the forums has a policy agenda of its own, other than simply to raise the quality of debate on public policy developments and so create opportunities for informed discussion."

The Westminster Education Forum aims to "provide the premier environment for policy makers in Parliament, Whitehall and government agencies to engage with key stakeholders. These include education professionals, parents and learners, industry representatives and their advisors, interest groups, local authorities, the voluntary sector and academia, along with members of the reporting press."