Fat Chance: An Analysis of Anti-Obesity Efforts

Paternalistic policymakers intend to improve social welfare by implementing a set of prescriptive policies designed to remedy systematic mistakes made by individuals. In recent years, some paternalists 1 have relied increasingly on the findings of behavioral economics research—a rapidly growing discipline that studies individuals ‘ systematic biases—to justify paternalistic policies. The paternalists focus on devising ―nudges ‖ (soft paternalism) or ―shoves ‖ (hard paternalism) that steer individuals toward choices more in sync with their best interests. In effect, paternalists argue that policymakers can exploit individuals ‘ departures from rationality in ways that correct what paternalists see as irrational individual mistakes. The paternalists aim to fix individual failure by introducing interventions devised by better-informed, benevolent policymakers. Government paternalism has a long and storied history in the United States. Originating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, paternalistic government policies aimed to prevent people from smoking, 2 consuming alcohol