Soft paternalism and subjective well-being: how happiness research could help the paternalist improve individuals’ well-being

Martin Binder

Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2019, vol. 29, issue 2, No 1, 539-561

Abstract: Abstract Soft paternalists claim to respect individuals’ preferences by trying to nudge them towards actions that would satisfy said preferences if they were suitably informed and debiased. This paper argues that soft paternalists neither respect preferences nor credibly improve individuals’ welfare through their nudges, as these are based on ad hoc judgements of what individuals’ informed preferences would look like. Recourse to an evolutionary economics methodology and empirical research on subjective well-being can solve the problem of establishing individuals’ interests and offers an “ex post” welfare test to find out to what extent revealed preferences are actually distorted or not. Individual welfare should always be based on ex post liking, not “ex ante” wanting, both of which do not necessarily coincide. The (evolutionary) process-view of well-being defended in this paper focuses on a number of important issues regarding the dissociation of wanting and liking and how nudges will be affected by this distinction (including phenomena such as faulty affective forecasting, hedonic adaptation and induced preference change).

Keywords: Subjective well-being; Soft paternalism; Libertarian paternalism; Wanting; Liking; Ex post (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D18 D63 D91 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00191-019-00604-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joevec:v:29:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s00191-019-00604-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/191/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00191-019-00604-3

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Evolutionary Economics is currently edited by Uwe Cantner, Elias Dinopoulos, Horst Hanusch and Luigi Orsenigo

More articles in Journal of Evolutionary Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().