Posted on 09/15/2015 2:37:31 PM PDT by conservativejoy
President Obama announced a new executive order on Tuesday which authorizes federal agencies to conduct behavioral experiments on U.S. citizens in order to advance government initiatives.
“A growing body of evidence demonstrates that behavioral science insights — research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them — can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people,” reads the executive order, released on Tuesday.
The new program is the end result of a policy proposal the White House floated in 2013 entitled “Strengthening Federal Capacity for Behavioral Insights.”
According to a document released by the White House at that time, the program was modeled on one implemented in the U.K. in 2010. That initiative created a Behavioral Insights Teams, which used “iterative experimentation” to test “interventions that will further advance priorities of the British government.”
The initiative draws on research from University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard law school professor Cass Sunstein, who was also dubbed Obama’s regulatory czar. The two behavioral scientists argued in their 2008 book “Nudge” that government policies can be designed in a way that “nudges” citizens towards certain behaviors and choices.
The desired choices almost always advance the goals of the federal government, though they are often couched as ways to cut overall program spending.
In its 2013 memo, which was reported by Fox News at the time, the White House openly admitted that the initiative involved behavioral experimentation.
“The federal government is currently creating a new team that will help build federal capacity to experiment with these approaches, and to scale behavioral interventions that have been rigorously evaluated, using, where possible, randomized controlled trials,” the memo read.
That document cited examples from the U.K. which showed that sending out a letter to late taxpayers which read “9 out of 10 people in Britain pay their taxes on time” led to a 15 percent increase in compliance.
The new executive order encourages federal agencies to “identify policies, programs, and operations where applying behavioral science insights may yield substantial improvements in public welfare, program outcomes, and program cost effectiveness,” as well as to “develop strategies for applying behavioral science insights to programs and, where possible, rigorously test and evaluate the impact of these insights.”
To jump-start the programs, agencies are encouraged to recruit behavioral science experts to join the federal government and to develop relationships with researchers in order to “better use empirical findings from the behavioral sciences.”
A fact sheet sent out by the White House on Tuesday shows that researchers at numerous universities and think tanks — from MIT, Harvard, and the Brookings Institute, to name a few — have signed on to the program.
The executive order specifically directs federal agencies to develop nudge programs that help individuals, families, communities and businesses “access public programs and benefits by, as appropriate, streamlining processes that may otherwise limit or delay participation.”
This can be achieved by “administrative hurdles, shortening wait times, and simplifying forms,” the order suggests.
The initiative also urges agencies to tinker with how information is presented to individuals, consumers, borrowers, and program beneficiaries.
The “content, format, timing, and medium by which information is conveyed” should be taken into consideration as those characteristics affect “comprehension and action by individuals.”
In programs that offer choices for consumers, agencies are instructed to “consider how the presentation and structure of those choices, including the order, number, and arrangement of options, can most effectively promote public welfare.”
The order also suggests that agencies fiddle with whether to label certain expenditures as “benefits, taxes, subsidies” or other incentives to “efficiently promote” programs.
President Obama’s federal health care law, Obamacare, is replete with “nudge” language and experimentation.
In its fact sheet, the White House noted that reminding individuals who had started to sign up for Obamacare led to a 13 percent increase in completed applications.
To help determine which presentation was more effective, the Department of Health and Human Services “sent one of eight behaviorally designed letter variants to each of more than 700,000 individuals who had already begun the health insurance enrollment process but had not yet completed an application.”
The most effective version of the letter generated the 13 percent improvement. Other less effective letters only increased enrollment rates by around four percent.
Another nudge contained in Obamacare was brought to light in the debate over whether the individual mandate contained in the law was a tax hike.
Republicans insisted that it was a tax increase, but the White House portrayed it as a penalty on the logic that the word “tax” has a negative connotation.
While the Obama administration touts nudge policies, others are hesitant to get on board.
“I am very skeptical of a team promoting nudge policies,” Michael Thomas, an economist at Utah State University, told Fox News in 2013.
“Ultimately, nudging…assumes a small group of people in government know better about choices than the individuals making them.
Can their be any doubt he is insane on a very real level?
Sunstein is pure evil and has not heart. That is why he is one of Obama’s most dangerous men in and to America. His wife is the witless Samantha Powers.
bookmark
He has got to be the craziest mother##cker to ever occupy the Oval Office.
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No way I could have said it better my brother!
Doctor Megele will be conducting the experiments.
I wish it was restraint. The reality is more along the lines of apathy and cowardice.
Wiki says we already have a White House “Nudge Unit”!?! A group of behavioral scientists and bureaucrats who test our behavior and responses in order to design “nudges” to bend our choices and behavior to THEIR preferred outcome. So exactly WHO gets to decide what the best choice is, a rational vs irrational choice, a good vs bad choice??? Resistance is futile -— you will be manipulated. Don’t worry little citizen, the government will make sure you make the best choices, the choices THEY have already made for you and nudged you into.
Quote Wiki: “The choice architecture term was originally coined by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their 2008 book ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness’.
This approach is an example of ‘libertarian paternalism’, a philosophy endorsed by Thaler and Sunstein that aims to ‘nudge’ individuals toward choices that are in their best interest without limiting choice.
Libertarian paternalism is the idea that it is both possible and legitimate for private and public institutions to affect behavior while also respecting freedom of choice.
[A]dvocates of libertarian paternalism and asymmetric paternalism have endorsed the deliberate design of choice architecture to nudge consumers toward personally and socially desirable behaviors like saving for retirement, choosing healthier foods, or registering as an organ donor.
These interventions are often justified . . . to improve consumer welfare.
These techniques have consequently become popular among policymakers, leading to the creation of the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team and White House ‘Nudge Unit’ for example.
While many behavioral scientists stress that there is no neutral choice architecture and that consumers maintain autonomy and freedom of choice despite manipulations of choice architecture, critics of libertarian paternalism often argue that choice architectures designed to overcome irrational decision biases may impose costs on rational agents, for example by limiting choice.”
Cite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice_architecture
We need the Gobbels photograph.
FLUORIDE.
I tried not to go there, but I lost - - -
Fluoride is the by-product of the aluminum industry - big bucks there.
Yep - 1984 - - -
For years I watched 1984 come closer and closer, not knowing what to expect.
It came, and passed - - long ago!!!
Bttt (shaking head)
NUDGE
‘Not Understanding Da Gob’mint Explanation - - -’
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