Tyler: Let me tell you what I love about Nudge,
and see if I can pull you into greater love
of Nudge.
Cass: Even greater.
Tyler: Even greater.
Take the products today which governments
ban.
Put aside nuclear weapons, and violent products.
We should unban them and as my colleague Robin
Hansen suggests, put them all in a store called
the Banned Products Store, and the government
will spend a lot of big signs, saying, "These
are bad for you, don't buy them."
There will be all kinds of negative advertising,
but the store will be there.
We're going to nudge people a lot not to buy
these products, but in fact we could move
from current bans and mandates to having them
available but lots more nudges.
I want maybe more nudges that you do, or is
that not true?
Are you the nudge critic?
Cass: No, no, you may be right, but we have
to think of what the thing is, and then we
have to do...
Tyler: Everything banned that's not violent.
Heroin, cocaine...
Cass: I worry with respect to heroin, not
being an expert on heroin, but I worry that
it is nearly instantaneously addictive, and
extremely tempting to a wide range of people
in different life circumstances.
To be a heroin addict is really, really rough.
To nudge people, and not to take the step
we've now taken, might leave a lot of tragedy
around.
It is true that the heroin ban does eliminate
heroin, and it has ancillary consequences
that aren't good, but I would say with respect
to some product, let's say it's a food where
there's a one over X of death from consuming
it, and X is not that high a number, to say
to people, "You can have this, note that your
death risk is one over X."
Why is it so great to shift from banning the
thing to allowing people to have it when you're
going to see a lot of bodies on the streets?
Tyler: Say I'm dying of a terminal disease,
and there's a treatment that probably won't
help me, but there's a one tenth of one percent
chance that it will.
I want to use it, it's kind of a self‑defense
argument.
I say, "Self‑defense, that's kind of a minimal
value that we all agree upon, I love Nudge.
Let's take the FDA out of the picture and
put it in the Banned Products Store and have
big huge signs, bad music surrounding it,
disco, whatever we need to do, telling that
it's not any good, but let me buy it, so I
want more nudge that you do.
Cass: You might, but I'm open to these ideas.
In a case where someone has a terminal illness,
and there's a drug that has an extremely low
probability of working, there's a good argument
that on welfare grounds they should get that,
because the chance of death without that,
let's stipulate is one hundred percent, and
the chance of despair without that is also
a hundred percent, so if people tastes are
such that they want to spend their money on
a very small risk of living, it's plausible
to say that it's in the store, your store.
