Getting lost in a field: a personal history in behavioural public policy
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Welcome everyone. My name is Alex Vohoruka. I'm a professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method and an old colleague and friend of our speaker today, Adam Oliver. We're here to celebrate the

him getting lost in a field. And it's his inaugural lecture as Professor of Social Policy. It's a great pleasure to attend an inaugural lecture because these are moments not just a celebration for the person in question, but also for all of us as academics and colleagues, because what we're celebrating is

a person who's achieved the standards that we all set for ourselves in our disciplines. Standards of doing path-breaking research, trying to shape a field in line with our vision as academics of where research should go and what counts as excellent research. But also people who are wonderful colleagues who meet the standards we set for ourselves that we aspire to as conveners

organizers of networks of colleagues who stimulate other colleagues to do their best work, who persuade them, cajole them to join in with their own research projects, and then help us find the energy to develop new ideas of our own, and excellence in teaching. People who, despite their own natural inclination to be curmudgeonly northerners, managed to

go past their own care and worry about whether what they're communicating is all that interesting and inspire their students in seminars and inspire colleagues in research seminars to take up the ideas that they're putting forward, to criticize it, to develop their own perspective on the fascinating work they're developing. And finally, people who know how to reach out beyond academia

to the world of policy and society at large to try to shape the debate and the ideas in their fields and the policies that determine our lives. And one of the wonderful things today, why today can really be a moment of joy for all of us and we hope also for Adam, is that Adam exemplifies all these qualities that we look for in colleagues that we want to become professors.

as a researcher, as a convening colleague, scholar, as a teacher, and as someone who engages those outside academia, especially in policy, in their work, listens to them in a dialogic manner, doesn't just preach, but has ideas, but also listens to others. And those are also the qualities that I found, personally, I've known Adam for, I think, well over 15 years now.

It started because Adam invited me and many others at the school to contribute to seminars which eventually became his first book, edited Behavioral Public Policy. And what was wonderful about these seminars was they brought together scholars from psychological and behavioral science, from social policy, but also Adam is

Eclectic in his tastes, he brought in philosophers like me and another colleague, Luke Bovens, economists and policy makers, and he forced us all to be in dialogue with each other. The seminars took place at regular intervals, there was a paper, and he always forced someone from a different discipline or a policy maker to respond to the paper and then provide the response in written form

so that we would take it seriously, he would provide editorial comments and eventually a wonderful book, the first in his development of the field of behavioural public policy emerged from this. So there's a lot to celebrate in his work and my own celebration is especially of him as a colleague and an inspiring presence in his field. Now the main contributions that Adam has made beyond lots of papers looking at

the degree to which we are or are not rational in our decision making or conform to particular axioms of rational choice, especially in the area of health, is this programmatic work, the development of a field, behavioral public policy, which is done by the book I mentioned, by founding a journal with other leading thinkers in the field, which is edited for many years, and by developing three books which set out its origins,

the core of an idea of reciprocity in behavioral public policy and its future. And in recent years, I've heard him develop, including in philosophy department seminars, an inspiring vision of a non-paternalistic perspective, a more million perspective on behavioral public policy. Now, just before I get him to the stage,

I wanted to say that inaugural lectures are not just moments for us to celebrate as academics, but also to celebrate with your loved ones. And I know that Katie and Charlie are here. Adam and I became fathers at more or less the same time. And so it's especially wonderful to have you both here and celebrate Adam. Please join me in welcoming him to the stage. Thanks, Alex.

I don't think I need to give a lecture now. I think Alex said everything I was planning to say. Before I start, I have got a few things to say, I'm just kidding. I just wanted to thank Alex for chairing tonight's lecture. I've been at the LSE for 24 years and Alex joined not too long after me, I think. And we connected through some shared interests, as he said, I think longer ago than you indicated there, Alex. But he's always been one of the most...

collegial of all of the LSE academics and professors that I know over the years here. He's always looked out for staff within other departments and with me personally he's always engaged as well and supported all of the initiatives that I've done. And that's great and Alex is going to be one of the big bosses now at the LSE next year going forward so congratulations on that Alex. On to the lecture itself.

I didn't, when I thought about this lecture, I thought, what can I present that might be vaguely interesting to people? And I'm not sure whether I've come up with the answer to that. But I wanted to do something a little bit different from a sort of a typical lecture, I think. So in this particular lecture, I'm not going to, it's more almost like an autobiographical sketch for most of it.

It's an autobiographical sketch about how I think I contributed to the development of a new field of public policy. As Alex indicated, behavioural public policy. So for the majority of the lecture I'm going to talk about that. I'm really sorry if you find it really boring. And obviously if you do, I've pitched it wrong. Towards the end of the lecture, I'm going to say a few words about how I think the field should develop going forward. Okay. So that might sort of, you know, raise a lot of points.

for you to disagree with and to sort of throw questions and comments out at the end. Okay, so this is the title of the lecture. I thought this was clever, but, you know, maybe I'm too clever for my own good most of the time. Just the early foundations, how I got involved in this particular field, going back to my time as an undergraduate sort of 35 years ago. Some of you will know Bob Sugden. I think he might be here. Here's Bob here. Robert Sugden, Bob Sugden.

I think one of the great thinkers, contemporary thinkers in economics. But fortunately for me, I just stumbled across Bob as a teacher, as one of my professors when I was an undergraduate. And about 1990, something like that, Bob was teaching a course, an introductory course of microeconomics to undergraduate students.

And he introduced some concepts that are, I think, part of behavioral economics. Bob and his team at the time, Chris and Starmer, et cetera, they used to call it experimental economics. So just to try to avoid any confusion, I'm just using those terms interchangeably here.

And when Bob taught the sort of aspects of behavioral economics, I sensed that he was interested in that. Because that's where he's one of the leading figures. And because he was interested, partly because he was interested, I think, I was interested too. It was also the material, but it was also sort of his... I could detect some enthusiasm that sort of infused me. A bit later on, I went to do a postgraduate degree at the University of York in health economics.

And Bob had had a collaborator called Graham Looms. Looms and Sugden, they wrote, up until that time, some of the great foundational papers, really, in what I'll now call behavioural economics. And that was entirely fortuitous to me. I went to another university and it happened that Bob's co-author was at that university. I didn't really search him out before I went there. And Graham and another experimental economist, John Hay,

They taught a course on experimental economics, which I chose because I was interested in the material. So entirely fortuitously, I was taught by probably the three leading, I'd say the three leading experimental economists in this country at that time and probably still now. The class in York was tiny. There was only four of the students. So it was almost taught like a tutorial. I'm not sure if we'd get away with that at the LSE these days with four students.

But it was really great and it was really rich discussions. John used to play classical music in the seminars and make coffee for all of his students during the seminars themselves. And I know that three of those students went on to become academics. At least three of the four went on to become academics. So if you think becoming an academic is an indicator of the success of a course, then it was a highly successful course in that way.

After I finished, there's a reason I'm whipping through this history. After I finished the master's degree, I worked in the Department of Health in London for a little while, but then I got a Monbusho Fellowship, Monbusho's Japanese Ministry for Education, and that enabled me to spend two and a half years at Keio University in Tokyo.

And it was meant for me to work on health economics. Health economics was a very new thing in Japan at the time, and the Japanese Ministry of Education was interested in that. But there was no real oversight or monitoring of what I was doing. And I was very heavily interested in sort of behavioral economics. So it gave me a lot of time to sort of read up on behavioral economic literature over that two and a half year period with no pressure on me at all, really. I did do some health economics as well, by the way.

But, you know, it stood me in good stead because Graham and Mike Jones Lee, who's unfortunately no longer with us, he passed away last year, the great Mike Jones Lee, they had a PhD studentship going around the time I was thinking about coming back to England. So I applied for that, I got it, and I produced this PhD eventually, Valuing Health Outcomes Under Conditions of Risk. And it's essentially a collection of essays and articles

that tries to apply behavioural economics in the health domain, the health policy domain. And that was quite unusual at the time. There was a few people doing it. Hanne Blycroft sticks it out at Erasmus University at the time. But there wasn't an awful lot of people doing it back then. There wasn't an awful lot of behavioural economists back then, generally, I don't think.

in the UK. And that's kind of like an important point, I think, in relation to what I'll come on to in a moment. Just to complete that particular circling to show you perhaps how incestuous the field was, Bob was my external examiner for my PhD, so I sort of almost come full circle. I promised myself today I wouldn't sort of say any, sort of try to dwell upon any negative experiences that I had, so I'm going to miss out a little bit on my history going through it.

But in January 2001, I joined the LSE and I've been here ever since. It was mainly through my contacts, I suppose, I joined the LSE with Julian Le Grand at the time. I was getting reasonably close to Julian. That's not why I got the job, but Julian indicated that there was a job that I could apply for. Now, when I joined the LSE, my main role really was meant to be, I think, working on sort of health policy reform, a little bit of health economics.

And I did quite a lot of that. But I also tried to focus, continue this focus upon trying to introduce, if you like, behavioural economics into the health policy field. As I said, there was a few people doing that, but there wasn't, you know, there were not many people doing that at the time. And I had some, I think I had some, well, in terms of getting some publications out, I had a success. I don't know if I got, I had success in terms of people actually reading me or taking notice, is what I'm saying. But in terms of the publications themselves...

I was making a little bit of headway there, I think, as were others, of course, as well. But my, by the end of the noughties, well, earlier than that, really, Alex has indicated this himself, my interest really extended beyond health policy. I was interested in, you know, I'm kind of interested in lots of different things. And my interest in more sort of conceptual, sort of, they are more sort of philosophical. I think that's why I've had close relationships with the philosophy department over the years.

So I'm somebody that sort of tends to... I don't know about Joe Wolf here, but he said this about me once. He said, "I'm somebody that tends to question the measurements of things rather than to measure things." So I was never really that interested. I'm glad that other people do it, but I was never really interested in assessing the effectiveness of a policy intervention. I wanted to sort of question the policy mechanism itself or the way in which they'd measured the effects of this particular policy intervention.

So my interests have always been more in that direction, the sort of conceptual and philosophical rather than the sort of strictly applied, I suppose. Okay, I think I've bored you enough on my early history. But there's a point of why I've said this, as I'll say in a moment. At the end of the noughties, I know a lot of you know this, but some of you probably won't.

But at the end of the... about 2008 onwards, there was kind of this explosion of interest in behavioural economics and behavioural science as applies to policy concerns. And that was kind of interesting, as I've indicated already, there wasn't that many behavioural economists around in this country in the 90s and the early 2000s, I don't think. You know, you could count who's on almost one hand.

And yet all of a sudden, everybody was a behavioural economist. I used to go to Sainsbury's on a Friday evening and bump into six other behavioural economists. They were everywhere, behavioural economists, all of a sudden. So why was this this sort of explosion of interest in behavioural economics around this time, as applied to policy? And I think there was a sort of almost like a confluence of circumstances, a conjunction of circumstances that I've said there.

There was a big financial crisis in 2007-2008, as a lot of you will remember. And when that happened, sort of neoclassical thought, which many people thought had driven the financial crisis, that's, we'll leave that to one side, but many people thought that neoclassical economics had driven the financial crisis. And they were looking for alternative sort of models and frameworks and philosophies in economics that could have explained it and maybe helped avoid it happening again.

And behavioural economics came out prominent amongst that. In 2008, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, my close colleague Cass Sunstein, they published this book, Nudge, that I'm sure many of you have even read. A very popular book, sold millions of copies probably. And the first issue of that came out in 2008. And people liked it. It kind of offered relative... Well, it offered the promise of relatively cheap policy solutions to many, many issues.

And together with the financial crisis, which if you think about it, emptied a lot of public sector budgets around the world, that gained traction amongst policymakers. Particularly in this country, it gained traction with David Cameron, who at that time was leader of the opposition. And I remember in 2009, David Cameron, every year I think the leaders, the Tory leaders, maybe both parties, they put a collection of books together

on the summer reading list for their own MPs. And David Cameron prominently put the nudge book on the summer reading list for his MPs to read that summer in 2009. So there was kind of this kind of, almost like this kind of gathering speed of interest around behavioural economics and policy. And when David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010, one of his first acts actually was

was to set up a behavioural insights team, a specific behavioural insights team, thinking about how you apply behavioural science to policy in the heart of his government, at that time in 10 Downing Street, I think it was originally. Yeah, it was right in 10 Downing Street, originally. And that was the first time, the first time there was a dedicated behavioural insights team in the heart of central government, anywhere in the world, I think. Now they're all over the place. Okay, so...

Already, loosely defined, you had this kind of behavioural insights in policy movement going on. And I kind of stood back, I suppose, if I remember rightly. And I thought, you know, given that history that I've just told you about, I'd been looking at behavioural economics for at least 15 years by then myself. And I was interested in policy as well.

So I thought I was kind of really particularly well placed to try to contribute to the development of this new, this potentially new subfield of public policy. So how did the term behavioral public policy come about? Behavioral public policy, the term that defines this new subfield, was originated here at the LSE. I'll tell you how.

In 2010, Julian Legrand, he kind of led this initially, this new course, but he asked my help. And he wanted to develop a new postgraduate course in behavioural insights and policy, something along those lines. And we were thinking about what should we call it then? So there was a teacher's meeting in the Department of Social Policy

and we sort of bashed around a few ideas. I think these were a couple that I mentioned there. At the time, Mara O'Rowdy, who was a lecturer, I think, she was a lecturer, part-time lecturer in our department, and she chatted up with the idea of behavioural public policy, right? We thought, OK, that's quite... That's the seat, right? Kind of... It sort of indicates what it does, right? So...

We settled on it and the name stuck, right? Behavioural public policy. We called the course that. How do you define behavioural public policy? That's a separate issue, I think, but I would define it very, very broadly. It's any sort of aspect of policy where behavioural insights may play some part in the discussion. So it's extremely...

wide definition. There's many people with very different ideological perspectives who disagree with each other that operate within that space. But I think they're all united by an appreciation that in some way behavioural science can have some relevance for public policy. So this course, I mean hundreds of students now have gone through this course.

In the last few years we've extended it beyond post graduates, undergraduates now take this course as well or can take this course if they want to. We've even tried to, I said I wouldn't say anything negative, but we did try to set up a master's degree and that would have been great I think, but anyway I'll leave that history to one side. Now moving on from that, so we had a name for it, behavioural public policy, this kind of new subfield of public policy.

Alex has sort of signposted this, but in 2010/11, Julian Patrick Dunleavy, Patrick's a professor in the government department, and Patrick actually is very sceptical of the use of behavioural science in policy. But he joined us to try to get some money out of the LSE to run a seminar series. And we had a seminar every month of the academic year, so I think we had nine seminars in total.

And we tried to bring in leaders in the field to present something and then as Alex said, we got a policy maker or somebody from another discipline to challenge that person's perspective. And the output of all that was this book, Behavioural Public Policy. I bet you're surprised by the title given what I've said so far, right? So this was an edited volume but I think this output served three useful purposes, sorry, four useful purposes.

Firstly, the importance of the title. We're starting to get the name out there. And that's important. Even from a... If you think about it, even from a behavioural science perspective itself, isn't it? You want a name of something for marketing or, you know, for labelling. So it's importance in the title. It was important in getting Cambridge University Press involved. And ever since then, they've been extremely strong supporters of the development of this field. I've had very, very good, close working relationship with Cambridge over the years.

It was important for involving policymakers. That's something that I've always tried to do. It's very difficult, actually, I think, in my experience anyway, to engage policymakers and academics together over a protracted period. It's hard to sustain that. I've tried to do it in various iterations over the years, including an ongoing one that I'll mention very briefly in a few slides. But it's important. I think it's an important thing to do. We're supposed to be looking out to the wider world, aren't we, as academics, I think.

And this also was our first link to Gus O'Donnell. Now, Gus O'Donnell, at that time, was the head of the British Civil Service. So he's a tremendously powerful individual. And yet, Gus is, in my experience anyway with him, he's an extremely engaging person.

and he's been a crucial source of support for me personally in all the behavioural initiatives that I've tried. He spoke at all my book launches, everything. He's been great. He's been so good that we've appointed him as a visiting professor in practice at the LSE recently, last month, across the Department of Post-Social Policy, PBS, which is Psychology and Behavioural Science Department, and the School of Public Policy. OK.

So, okay, so we have an edited collection. So where do you... So I'm starting to think now, at this point, we've got something here. I mean, we can develop this further. This can become a field. But what do you need for a dedicated field? You need a dedicated journal, I think, right? And therefore, I went about trying to create one with others.

And this was quite a long process of gestation. By this point in the early... What do you call it? Teenies? What's the decade called between 2011 and 2019? What are they called? Tweenies? Teenies? Teens. Anyway, during that period, at the start of that period, it was very difficult to start up new journals. The publishing houses were very cautious about starting up new journals.

Ten years earlier, it had been easier. So they were being very careful, which means that you had to have a very, very good proposal, really, something that would persuade them. So initially, it took me about three or four years to get this through. Initially, I thought I could do it with sort of local people, but then I realised that wasn't going to sway it for Cambridge University Press. I needed to get the leaders in the world on board with this thing.

So, because I realised that, I wrote to Cass and I wrote to George Akerlof. George is, for those of you who don't know, he's a Nobel Prize winner. Cass is a Holbein Prize winner. These are two leading intellectuals, right? Cass was very enthusiastic. Cass always is, usually enthusiastic about things, which is great. That's one of his big positive attributes.

George was on board, but he was a bit more, he wanted to not start a new journal completely. He wanted to start a new section of an existing journal. And I thought that would be hard to persuade, and that would be harder, if anything, to persuade an editor of an existing journal to give a space, you know, a dedicated space in their journal. And Cass thought so as well, and Cass and I both thought that there was scope for a new journal.

So we browbeat it, we browbeat it into submission and George eventually agreed with us and we went for it. Cambridge University Press sent the proposal out to 14 reviewers I think, 14 reviewers and we got 13 very positive ones and one negative one so that was enough really. So we saw that we had something. This journal now, right, in terms of its impact scores

In general public administration and in applied psychology, it's in the top seven or eight in the world for those two fields, two separate fields, and it's in the top seven or eight actually in terms of its impact scores.

So as a field journal for behavioural public policy, I think I can say that it's definitely number one in the world, right? So this has been a big, big success. I think that this is one of the biggest successes that I've had personally in my career, I think. I would guess. So we've got a journal. Great. What's next? What's next? What else do we need for this to become a field? I was thinking we need two more things and then it's a proper subfield.

We need a regular sort of international gathering dedicated to this new subfield of public policy and we need an international association. Are you listening Charlie? I'm going to test you later on what I've said tonight. It's alright, it's too young to be embarrassed.

Yeah, so the International Behavioural Public Policy Conference. This occurs annually. We wanted to establish the first one in 2020, but the pandemic happened in 2020. So we had to put it back and we had to put it back again. So it was eventually launched in 2022, actually, at the LSE. I thought it should launch. Behavioural Public Policy International Conference should really launch at the LSE.

So we did that and since then we've had one in the University of North Carolina, the lead on that was Luke Bovins who was Alex's boss a long time ago, he's head of the Department of Philosophy here but he's now at the University of North Carolina. This year we had the conference at Cambridge in England, Lucia led the conference in Cambridge. Next year, is Sanchine here yet?

There he is. Sanchayan was going to leave this in Amsterdam next year, but he's moved to King's College, London now. So it's going to be at King's College. And then where is it going to be? Brisbane. It's going to be in Singapore. It's going to be in Copenhagen. And it's going to be back at the LSE again. So I think that this is a very nice gathering. Please come and join if you want to.

The last thing, I think the last cornerstone really for this to be a field, I mean, you know, these are just things I'm involved in, obviously, right? And there's so much more going on about what other people are doing as well. So I'm just giving my own personal sort of contribution here tonight. But we've got an association, the International Behavioral Public Policy Association, that's the website now. And that oversees and links together all of this stuff. So it's trying to create a sort of community of like-minded, an academic policy community of like-minded individuals, really, in this space.

that can, as I said earlier, have very strong disagreements ideologically.

but are all sort of united in an interest, if you like, in behavioural science. So what sort of events does the IBPPA oversee? Well, there's several. We've had an annual LSE behavioural public policy lecture since 2017, so we've had quite a few of those now. So they've been delivered by George Lowenstein and Cass and Julian and Lucia. This year's coming years is going to be by Mario Rizzo from NYU. So I think that's pretty successful.

We have a virtual seminar series running for a few years now that runs a few times every year, every academic year and it lasts for an hour and each one is led by one of the leading figures either in the policy space or in the academic space in this field. We have some nice discussions over, you know, basically it's not a presentation, it's to, they lead on offering a point of discussion. So sort of an unresolved issue. That's supposed to be the sort of emphasis within those seminars.

And we have a series of workshops now as well. So there's a couple that are sort of fixed in the calendar, hopefully going forward. Ching Leong's here, she's organized one of them. Hopefully this is a fixed one going forward, Ching. But this one's at the National University of Singapore. And these are two-day workshops, basically, where we have about 30, 35 people in attendance.

and there's a series of presentations and we have a really good deep discussion about the various papers presented at the conference. So the one in Singapore, that's been taking place every April.

We've got a new one that's going to alternate between LSE and Cambridge. So it's going to be LSE next June and then it's going to be Cambridge the year after and then the LSE. But the same format. Two-day thing, you know, 35 people or something like that. And these are all sort of linked to the International Behavioral Public Policy Association. And then we have floating ones as well. So not ones that run every year, but they sort of float around the world. So there's one in Mexico City next March.

Hopefully, if Georgia calms down and manages to... I won't say anything in case some of you... Hopefully, if Georgia calms down, there'll be one in Tbilisi next December, actually. Anybody who's not been to Tbilisi, please go to Tbilisi. It's got great food, architecture, weather, everything. That's my bit for the Georgian tourist board. They probably desperately need somebody working for them.

And then Tokyo. We're going to have one in Tokyo as well. All right. So I've kind of given you a run through, really, I think. I used to sometimes sort of somewhat sort of grandiosely call it the sort of intellectual architecture of this field. But it's all there now. The field is there. I'm pretty sure of it. But if I look back on my career so far, I suppose, hopefully I've got a little bit of time left as well.

I'd be kind of disappointed. I think I was a failure, I think, if I wasn't at least known a little bit for my scholarship, right? If I was just known as somebody who just organizes events. I remember somebody, I won't mention who, said Adam Oliver is just known for organizing a few little groups, right? And that really sort of cut to my heart, that did really. Because I would like to be known for my scholarship as well, really, right?

Anyway, in the last few years, last 10 years or so, as Alex indicated, I tried to publish a trilogy of books on behavioural public policy. And the idea was to sort of discuss the origins of the field. What I thought was a very prominent motivational force to consider for the field now, reciprocity. This is something that Bob Sugden writes about a lot as well.

And I wanted to produce something, I did produce something on a sort of a liberal framework. So behavioural public policy tends to be dominated by paternalistic frameworks. And that's not me. I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment. But that's not my perspective. I'm a liberal and I want there to be a liberal framework for behavioural public policy. And I think I've developed one.

So the titles, I use my behavioural knowledge to try to make these books really popular, right? So the origins of behavioural public policy, I use the origins of the species for my sort of... And I thought, OK, you know, people associate this with one of the great works in history, then they're bound to think that this is also one of those, right? Reciprocity in the Art of Behavioural Public Policy, I took that from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, right? It sold millions of copies. I thought, OK, well...

You're not buying this, are you? And then the last one I took from Mills, Principles of Political Economy. So that's where I sort of got... Anyway, I won't talk about it, but all these pictures have meanings as well. Darwin drew a load of pictures like that. If you've been to a down house to see Darwin's house, he drew loads of pictures of these little tree diagrams. So that's meant to be that. Okay, so this was my trilogy, really, setting out the origins, the present, the future of behavioural public policy from my perspective, I suppose.

I've got copies of these books here and what we're going to do, the first... I've got all four of them actually because I've got the edited one as well. So the first four people that make a comment or ask a question tonight in this room get a copy of this book, right? It can come up with you. They're even signed. I think I've depreciated the value of these by signing them. But I've signed them as well, right? I've got something even more exciting now. So during the pandemic... You won't see what this is, I'll explain. During the pandemic...

Every morning I used to get up and try to write down a behavioural economic or a behavioural public policy concept on a post-it note. And most of the concepts came from this book actually, the first one.

And what I did is then posted them on social media. And I've even got sort of YouTube explanations for each of the post-its as well, but I did a load of these. And then I thought, "Okay, I could throw these away in the bin," which is probably where most people would like to see them, "or I could put them together as a poster." So if my academic career doesn't work out, I'm hoping some kind of art gallery might pick this up somewhere, right? So this is an actual poster that I produced. There's only a hundred of these. There's about a hundred of these in the world, right?

So if you wait a few hundred years, they might be worth 50 pounds each or something like that, right? Now, I've got a copy of this poster here. As I said, very sort of exclusive. There's only about 100 of these in the world. Some in the World Bank offices, I think. Is Zona here?

Zena Afifir. Okay, Zena is one of my colleagues in the World Bank, and she bought 20 of them to put up in... That's why I sold 100 of them, because the World Bank bought 20 of them, I think. So I've got one of these. Alex is going to be the judge. The best comment or question in the room tonight, Alex is going to judge it, can have a copy of the old behavioral economics on a post-it, Alex, so you'll give that out later. Don't forget, don't keep it for yourself. It's a responsibility. Okay.

Okay, so that's all that. I just wanted to finish, I suppose, in the last five or ten minutes to give some thoughts of my own about the future of what I see as the most useful future of behavioural public policy, I think. Now, originally, when Cass and Richard Thaler, when Cass and Richard published their book, I was kind of on board with all that. I mean, you know, I'd been a behavioural economist. I'd thought about how to use behavioural economics in policy, of course, but I hadn't thought deeply, I don't think,

So when they wrote that book, published that book, everybody became excited. I suppose I became a bit excited as well. And I was on board with it. I thought, okay, this is something to think about. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought about it, the more sceptical I became of their particular approach. Because I'm not somebody I don't think that's a natural paternalist, right? So I don't think personally that a policymaker or a third person should be trying to

manipulate or coerce another person for that person's own good. I think it's okay, manipulation and coercion is okay, I think, most times. When you're trying to prevent harms that the person imposes on other people...

But I don't think we should be interfering in lifestyle behaviours where there's no harms, no substantive harms on other people. It's only talking about supposed harms for the persons themselves. It's fine to educate people or persuade them openly or those sorts of things. Say, you know, do you know that smoking causes lung cancer if they don't know that already?

But to me that's not paternalism, that's just open education and information. Paternalism comes in when you're trying to manipulate people, you're trying to change their behaviours without them really knowing it, or to coerce them, you know, to actually forcing them to change their behaviours. So I'm concerned that, well, I know, I'm pretty sure, I know, I mean, people dispute this, but from my own perspective I know that nudges...

for the most part, in their proper meaning, are acts of manipulation. You're trying to influence other people's behaviour without those persons really knowing it in the moment. So I'm concerned about that. I don't support that particular approach. And I think that people need to pay more attention to the conceptual foundations of behavioural public policy. I think that's happening now, actually. It's almost like a watershed moment. So for the first few years, people were thinking...

What can I identify that's going to be effective in getting people to save more for their retirement or to stop smoking or to eat more healthily or to engage in exercise? All this kind of supposedly low hanging fruit, right? To discard of their rubbish more responsibly, all this sort of stuff, right? But I think now that people have started to think not just what's effective, but what's appropriate. What's appropriate for a public policymaker to do? And to me personally, so when you think about what is...

What does it mean to be appropriate? To me, it's like, is this creating the conditions for a society that's tolerable for most of us, or all of us, hopefully? And for me, in a society that's tolerable for all of us, there has to be a high premium paid to individual autonomy, to people's freedoms, to people's abilities, to be the authors of their own life. That's important to me. And that's the essence of being a liberal,

at least my conception of being a liberal. If you look at liberal thought, there's all sorts of different perspectives, really, including the extreme ones that people often latch onto, the sort of libertarian end of liberalism. This is when you pay full attention only to negative freedoms or negative liberties, to use a Zyber by Berlin's terms, to let everybody just get on with it, to not interfere in people's behaviours at all. But my conception of liberalism

is not that. If you read most liberal writers, I think the most ones I've read anyway throughout history, not all of them but most of them, they recognise that in order to... They recognise that when you give people a huge sort of carte blanche autonomy, there will be those that exploit that privilege by exploiting other people in some sense, right? By imposing harms on other people. So what, as I have been by then argued, is that you need to balance...

negative freedoms, negative liberties with positive liberties, right? That is to say that in order to protect liberty in general, you need to place some constraints on some particular liberties. You constrain some liberties to protect liberty for all. This is the ethos. This was the ethos that ran through all of Graham Wallace's life. Do you know who Graham Wallace is? I mention him because Graham Wallace was one of the founders of the LSE.

the sort of forgotten founder of the LSE. But also Graham Wallace was known, really, I shouldn't really say this because I thought I was this, but Graham Wallace was the pioneer of behavioural public administration 100 years ago or more. So he's kind of been around for a long time. That was the ethos. So my approach is that liberal tradition, constrain autonomy in some instances to protect the liberties for all.

So, I mean, I've mentioned some ancient, famous, liberal scholars who, you know, I don't agree with everything they say, but they're along those lines, I think. You know, some of them are consequentialists. Probably all of those three are, I think. Maybe Locke wasn't. Anyway, I can talk to Bob about that later.

They're not so much contractarian. You can be a contractarian, you can be bothered about the process, you can be a consequentialist, you can still be a liberal, right? So there's some disagreements there. But all of them, I think, highlighted that in order to protect society, you need to put some constraints on some freedoms. Now, if you went for a more contemporary liberal, Joseph Raz, he'd only died a couple of years ago, he gives us an indication of what autonomy exactly comprises of them.

Now, that's important because a lot of people say, well, you know, you talk about autonomy, what does it mean? Well, Joseph Raz, in The Morality of Freedom, it's probably his famous book, his most famous book, I think, he said that the conditions of autonomy are complex and consist of three distinct components, right? He said that the components are that people have to have appropriate mental abilities, an adequate range of options, and independence. So let me just say what those are, right?

Appropriate mental abilities, people cannot be... It's not that you're dealing with children. You have to be dealing with people that in some sense possess full agency or at least sufficient agency to make decisions for themselves. You can potentially improve that if you look at behavioural public policy. So there are a number of people now, I suppose Malté d'Auld writes about this the most, but Mario Rizzo is going to present next year. He writes about it with Malté as well. Paul Lewis has written about it.

And it could fit within what's called the boosting literature as well. So, for example, you can use behavioural science to potentially give people tools, possibly, to make more fully reasoned decisions for themselves. I'll give you one example, right? So, it's been observed that people find it difficult to process probabilities and they can more easily process natural frequencies.

So people can more easily process, say, one in 100 people than a 1% chance or a 0.01 probability. So if you're presenting statistical risks to people, you know, financial decisions, health decisions, then you may be improving their mental capacities, if you like, mental abilities, by taking those sorts of considerations into account. There's broader things as well. I mean, these are old debates, but you might think that

People need particular goods and services in order to be able to make autonomous decisions for themselves, right? So people might need a decent level of health or a decent level of education or at least a minimum level of income in order to live autonomous lives.

And you might argue, as a population, we might decide that the free market, the market doesn't really provide those services sufficiently and equitably across the whole of the population. So that could potentially give a justification for public sector services in some domains as well, right? You need an adequate range of options. I think that this is Bob Sugden's main concern, is that you...

that you sort of extend the range of opportunities that people have so that they can go out and engage in more mutually agreeable exchanges with other people and that can improve their lives, that could increase their autonomy, they've got more to choose from. Feeds in very strongly to the reciprocity motivation. The market mechanism is underpinned

by people's sense of reciprocity, isn't it? Give and take. You know, you pay money, people want that, they give you a good, you want that, right? So if that mechanism works perfectly, which I don't think it always does, Bob might disagree with that, then you just extend the range of options for people. And independence, what Raz meant by independence was freedom from coercion or manipulation. So how does that feed into the behavioural thing? I think that it feeds most strongly into the behavioural literature

when we consider that there are bodies or companies or commercial interests or maybe even sometimes public interests that implicitly or explicitly use knowledge of behavioural science to get people to do what they want them to do, not necessarily what the people want to do themselves. So it's kind of an infringement on that exchange mechanism. It's an infringement on free and fair reciprocity, I think.

An example, right? There's millions of examples that you could give with this, but if you take the online gambling industry, right? They use all sorts of behavioural techniques to get people to gamble more than they perhaps otherwise would. Now, if we as a society think that some of these techniques are inappropriate, we have a behavioural justification for regulating against those particular activities, right? And this might occur in...

the supermarket sector or the financial services sector or whatever sector, you name it, and they are and they do use behavioural tricks to get people to do what they want them to do. Whether you think that that's legitimate or not is sort of open to debate, but it is at least a consideration that they're potentially imposing a harm on the exchange mechanism, I think. So, um...

Some people say, when I say I'm a liberal, they say, well, what role is there then for behavioural public policy if you're just a liberal and they interpret it as a libertarian and let people get on with whatever they want to do? Well, if you interpret liberalism in a slightly different way...

if you're sort of a more interventionist type of liberal, then there's huge scope to use behavioural science in public policy. In fact, I would argue much more profound and ethically defensible ways in which to use behavioural public policy in policy, behavioural science in policy, than nudging. Much bigger and much more profound, I think. Now, just before my last slide, this is my penultimate slide,

I just wanted to throw something out there that a lot of you might ignore this, but over the last year or so, and over the next year, the LSE have funded through the Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fund, they've funded a behavioural exchange group, behavioural knowledge exchange group at the LSE. And what this is, it gets, every six months it gets

Some academics, but behavioural leads at government departments and the international agencies and some of the private consortia sits together to discuss behavioural public policy basically. And what really struck me when I started running these again is how much real really misunderstanding or... I mean I'm not criticising anybody, it's just a lack of knowledge about what the different forms of behavioural public policy are because there are different forms of behavioural public policy. There is the paternalistic approaches

There's the mental capacity increasing approaches that are autonomy preserving. There's the regulation against externality behavioral, but there's a lack of understanding of what those are. They've all got their own names. These are some of the names here, Nudge, Budge, Boost, Nudge Plus, etc. But I think that these labels, my view is that these labels have been applied now so loosely and are so poorly understood that the use of them just creates confusion.

And over the... I've known this for years, that this is happening. And I try... I've written many things where I've tried to provide what I think is a bit more intellectual clarification of what these different approaches do.

But I'm not getting anywhere at all with that. I learned that in these meetings. You know, people don't really know what these definitions are. So I think that these labels just confuse. And I think we should just drop them. And I've developed this one. So I'm arguing, you know, dropping against the framework that I personally proposed as well. All right?

I think rather than consider these very sort of opaque labels, when we're thinking about a behavioural public policy intervention, when it comes online, just think about what it involves. Who's it targeting? Is it manipulative? Does it preserve autonomy? Is it regulatory? You know, consider those things. And then think about, all of us together, think about does this fit our own conception of what it means

to have a society that's tolerable for all of us. Just think deeply. So, you can come down on any side. You can be a paternalist. I've got no problem with that. Gus O'Donnell has mentioned earlier, when he presented at one of my book launches, he said that in public policy, everybody is a paternalist. An unashamed, unapologetic paternalist. That's what they do, they're self-selected. It's fine to come, but I just want people to think a little more about what these things entail, and then reach their conclusions.

So finally then, and this goes to the heart really of my last comment in the sense that people can be anything and legitimately be anything I think and in my mind legitimately be anything so long as they've really thought about it, right? But I think we're just products of our own histories. I mean maybe this is an obvious point to you. When I think about it, you know, my beliefs have not really changed I think in terms of autonomy, in terms of the belief that autonomy is important.

and yet that we need to regulate those that would otherwise exploit others. I don't think my beliefs have changed over time. And I think there's reasons for that, but I won't go into those. But if you think about Adam Smith, you know, Adam Smith's beliefs is coming through his major works, but he was writing at the time of the rise of commercial society on a global scale, you know, the Industrial Revolution. He must have been shaped by the circumstances that were happening around him. Merely, right?

Mill was indoctrinated to the point of reaching, you know, of experiencing a nervous breakdown by his father and by Jeremy Bentham. You know, he learnt fluent Greek by the time he was three or four or something ridiculous, right? So he must have been shaped. He could never let go of utilitarianism completely, even though I think that had he not been so indoctrinated early on, he might have done, actually. Hayek. Hayek, his country of origin...

was overtaken by authoritarianism, wasn't it? Austria in the 1930s must have profoundly influenced him, right? And you could go on and on and on. So I think what I'm trying to make a point here is that we are shaped by our circumstances, our views are,

And therefore it's good, I think, to try to engage in mutually respectful debate with those that you disagree with. I've observed that people really fall out with each other, to the point in academia where literally some of them want to kill each other. I'm not even exaggerating about that. So I just think that we should take a step back and realise we come from different places here and we should engage in mutually respectful debate.

Now, as I've run through this today, you might think, okay, this was easy, setting up this new discipline, this new subfield. It's not a discipline, it's a multidisciplinary subfield. But I face much resistance developing behavioural public policy, various initiatives. I'm not going to go on about that today. There's some initiatives that didn't happen that should have done, I think, and would have been great. And I face resistance from people mostly that don't know anything about this stuff. So...

But Tim Besley, who's one of the leading economists at the LSE,

I'll say this, I don't want to embarrass Bob, but I think that the Nobel Prize next year should go jointly to Tim Besley and Bob Silverman. So if anybody from the Nobel Prize committee is listening to this online, that's the combination that most of us would be happy with, I think. We'd accept that as a legitimate Nobel Prize. But Tim has been very, very supportive of the development of behavioural public policy within the LSE, both as a very respected...

and profound intellectual, but also in terms of practicalities, in terms of giving financial support as well. He's been great. And Manoush Shafiq, who was the director of the LSE until recently, she started supporting it as well. And when she started to support behavioural public policy, there was a real change, a sea change within the LSE around supporting this stuff.

Larry Kramer has taken over. Larry couldn't be here tonight, but Larry Kramer has taken over. And I get the sense that Larry is an equally strong supporter. So I'm hopeful. And because of their support, I think, mostly, the LSE, eventually, they kicked their heels for many years, but eventually they decided to give me a professorship in 2023.

which meant that I've had every possible academic position at the LSE since I've been here, apart from assistant professor. And the only reason I haven't had an assistant professor's year is because they didn't exist when I would have been eligible for one. So they gave the first professorship in the world in behavioural public policy. Behavioural public policy, not social policy, Alex, as you said earlier. He's a professor of behavioural public policy in 2023. And I hope there will be many more going forward. So thank you very much. I'll take questions.

Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, back to the event. Thank you, Adam. I see that Adam's prizes have worked a treat. There are lots of hands up. I also want to say thank you, especially to our online audience for joining. Apologies for not welcoming you before. And in fact, we will start by taking a few questions from our online audience and then I will turn to the audience here. But please keep your hands up and I'll make sure to get you.

Hi, we have a question from LSE alum Anthony who says, have you come across a behavior change approach called community-based social marketing championed by Doug McKenzie-Mois and how does it fit with BPP?

No, I haven't come across that one, so I can't really comment very meaningfully on that. Community-based? Community-based social marketing. Community-based social marketing. Does anybody know anything about that? Do you know anything about community-based social marketing, Alex? I'll have to come back with him on that, but if you take his name, I'll look into it and come back. Good. We'll start here. The gentleman with his hand up in the green sweater over here, please.

Okay, thank you so much for this great talk. It's really been a pleasure. I found it quite interesting, the debate on the agency-enhancing policies. There's been quite a debate going on with Sarah Connolly on the one hand, with against autonomy, but also new agency-enhancing policies emerging on the other hand via boosts and also the work of Enrico von Reckl and everything of that nature.

What I wanted to ask is there are some concerns in the literature regarding the operation ability. You mentioned on one of your slides that we should kind of move away from the specific buckets and kind of move towards a more individualized approach to think about the specific needs. But wouldn't this also incorporate some

operational downsides on the one hand and how can we maintain agency on the one hand while keeping an operational public policy? I'm not sure I fully understand your question. What's your name? Philip. Philip. We can perhaps talk about it later.

Where I think, I mean, I'll try to make this clear, where I think that I, I don't know whether this, where autonomy is very important is on personal lifestyle behaviours, right? So I don't think it's important, the preservation of autonomy for me is not important if you're harming some other people, right? So there's huge scope for, you know, operationalising regulation on some kind of externality-based justification, right?

Let me rephrase it. Probably with regards to agency could be more... Yeah, I could phrase it a bit better. So when we look at, for example, agency-enhancing policies on the one hand, this would, for example, with regards to boost, also involve some...

It could be financial literacy education or something on the one hand, and when we look at this from a public policy perspective, this also involves a bit more effort in designing the policies. I mean, a nudge, for example, is sometimes being applied as a one-fits-all solution. So therefore, I'm asking if we in COISO, when we incorporate more agency into behavioural public policy, which I am highly supportive of, how can we kind of make sure that we also have...

have a good operationability in public policy, so turn it into actionable public policy results? Yeah, I mean, again, I'd have to think about that. I think that the agency enhancing interventions, though, I mean, you've mentioned boosts there, they are, and there are other ones. For me, they're not paternalistic interventions because they're retaining people's ability to go their own ways. In essence, for me, they're forms of education.

They're forms of open education. So long as people are not being manipulated, so long as they're just being given information that they can take it or leave it, it's explicit, and they can use it as they see fit, then for me, that preserves autonomy. People can still go their own ways, and then that kind of respects the fact that we all have different desires for our own lives.

The problem with the nudges for me, one of the problems, is that they don't respect that because, as you said, it's kind of like a one-size-fit-all thing. So if we sort of try to get people to save more for retirement, we'll have an intervention that's applied across a whole population. People are then potentially changing their behaviours without really knowing why, without really thinking about it, without really sort of...

engaging in the new behaviour that they're undertaking to see, you know, to discern whether that's something that they really want to do. For some people, that might work for them. You know, maybe they did want to save more for their retirement. They were being inert or something like that. But we can't assume that that's...

net benefit across the board you know it may be that a lot of individuals then are saving more for their retirements than they would really want to potentially and you could apply that to any particular image because it's always you're saying it doesn't really respect the differences in individual behaviors I'm not sure if I fully answered your question there so maybe we can just you're gonna have to leave it there Adam because we have lots of people in the audience the lady in the black scarf there at the back with her hand up yep

Hi, thank you for your lecture. You have to tell us what your name is, though. My name is Valentine. Valentine, okay. I wanted to ask what is to you the role of behavioral public policy in the context of climate change? The context of climate change? Well, I mean, I think that's, I mean, for me, that's one of the areas where, okay, that's one of the areas where

I think that trying to change individual behaviours from the demand side, the citizens' behaviours, is going to have a very limited effect. To me, for those profound problems in society, you've got to tackle the supply side. That's what I think you've got to do. That's not just an issue for behavioural public policy, that's an issue for public policy generally. It's a big public policy issue, obviously.

So that's one of the directions that I come from with that. The persons that have made that point stronger than I would, actually, I think, are Nick Chater and George Lowenstein. And they wrote a paper called S-Frame versus I-Frame that created a lot of controversy within the behavioural public policy literature because I think that a lot of people in behavioural public policy felt that they were being attacked by George and Nick. And what George and Nick were saying were that...

The demand side, the individual side, the demand side, interventions that have been fixated upon, according to them, over the last 15 years, are not going to address these big problems. You've got to focus upon what they call the S-frame, the supply side. And I kind of agree with them with that. So, I don't know. I mean, I would go beyond behavioural public policy for those massive issues and really think about, you know, what we can do to regulate...

you know, activities that as societies we think are imposing illegitimate harms on all of us. So that's, I think that's all. Does that? Thank you. I feel as though my answers are really wishy-washy. Just diagonally in front, yes, with the hand up, also in the black jacket. Yes.

Thank you. Thank you for the lecture. I'm taking the course next semester, so I'm still literally lost in the field. Join the club.

So I wanted to ask, it's kind of related to the last question, but there are some critiques on behavioral public policy as too soft-handed and incapable of addressing future public policy and problems that we're going to face, such as climate change or let's think, for example, the pandemic.

There also could be criticisms regarding what harms to others may be considered. For example, in the case of smoking, there's harm that could be materialized as increasing taxes to finance the NHS or, I don't know, for example, disabilities. Someone else has to care for you and some people might argue we're trying to make people to stop smoking, that's paternalistic. My question is,

in this context, how do you envision behavioral public policy to take place? And also, what's the relationship of the current behavioral public policy academia and current public policy in the UK? Is there...

Has it lost momentum? Is it still very strong bond? How would you describe it? I think your question is similar. What's your name again? Macarena. Manaria. Macarena, like the dance. I think your question is similar to Valentin, wasn't it? It's a similar sort of question. I think where do we most effectively employ behavioural public policy? To me, it is the supply side, personally. But what I would say, though, is...

You've got to be careful here because a lot of the people that work in behavioural public policy, they're not claiming that they're offering a panacea for all society's problems. They're often saying that we're proposing something that might be marginal, it might work very incremental at the margins, but it's still something that's worth thinking about. It could have some incremental positive effects according to their own analyses.

And often, if it doesn't cost a lot of money, then that may not be something that you would just... Not to be sniffed at, so to speak. No, not something that you would dismiss entirely. So, for the big profound problems in social policy and environmental policy, etc.,

Often you need probably to go beyond behavioural public policy. I'm just reiterating what I said a moment ago. If you're staying within behavioural public policy, you're probably going to have the largest and most ethically defensible interventions from my point of view if you focus upon the supply side. But to reiterate, that's not to say that I would entirely dismiss what may be relatively marginal interventions on the...

on the demand side. For me, there would have to be externality focus still rather than internality focus, but other people have different views on that. Aren't you being too modest here, Adam, about the potential for the field? People always say that about me. Not about you in particular. I don't think you've been particularly modest this evening. But about the field. So think of health. In most of the rich countries, but also many middle-income countries,

Non-communicable diseases are the primary source of lost health. And so much of those are partly behavior-related. Isn't that...

One of the biggest social problems that you would expect behavioural public policy moving beyond nudge in the non-paternalistic direction you've been sketching to be able to make a major contribution. Maybe. So that would be sort of developing world context, I suppose, is what you're mostly... No, also, I mean, like I said, most middle- to high-income countries, non-communicable diseases are a leading cause, the leading cause of lost health.

So you mean sort of tackling people in terms of weight and exercise? For example? Yeah, maybe, but for me, even then, I mean, I suppose the externality justification usually there is cost to the NHS and those sorts of arguments, in this country at least. Maybe, but I think for me personally... So for me personally, right, if you decide to eat eight doughnuts a day, ten doughnuts a day, let's say,

and you're not really harming anybody else. Why do I care? I mean, just eat. I mean, I can tell you that it's not good for your health. You know, you're adults. You can decide to eat less of them. You could say, OK, but this person's not listening and they're imposing costs on the NHS. Are they? You know, they might die quite young. Might not impose that much long-term costs on the NHS than somebody that doesn't eat any doughnuts at all.

So you've got to look at the evidence very, very carefully about making externality arguments in those instances. So even in those instances, I wouldn't manipulate or coerce somebody to stop eating donuts, I don't think. However, I might sort of say, let's tackle the food industry. The food industry are engaging in all sorts of manipulative tactics, possibly, to...

motivate people to, or incentivise people in some sense to eat more donuts than they otherwise would choose to eat. And if they're using behavioural tactics, I think we have a behavioural justification for regulating them. And I think therefore, for me, that's more ethically defensible. But I also think that that would be more effective.

If you're regulating the supply side, how people can buy things, that's probably going to have more of an impact, I think, than trying to change individual behaviours, which is notoriously very, very difficult. To get people to lose weight, to get people to stop smoking, to get people to go to the gym, whatever, it's very hard to do. So, yeah, I think I'm still focused upon the supply side there. But I think there's a role for behaviour in that.

Good. Gentleman here in the purple box. It seems as though in your argument... Bob, can you speak into the microphone? You put a lot of emphasis on this concept of manipulation, and manipulation being defined by using behavioural tactics. But surely, given that we are psychologics and we're all psychological beings,

In 1991, what proportion of our decisions are actually ever based on conscious reasoning? They're all based on psychological cues. You say, "Oh, the business firms think of these evil firms working around persuading people to buy their products."

What's politics about? What's religion about? What's science about? When you write a paper, don't you try to persuade your audience? Not very good at all. What are you calling manipulation? No, I don't think... I mean, Bob and I have had these arguments a lot. I don't think... I see what he's saying, and I think that there are many instances where... We have a discussion. So, I'll give you an example, right? And Bob's heard this example before. But if you go into a supermarket to buy breakfast cereal...

There'll be all sorts of tactics that the marketers use to get you to buy their particular brand, won't they? They'll put very colourful anthropomorphic figures on the boxes just to entice you in, right? They're using behavioural science in some sense, right? Okay, so do we regulate against that?

And I think that's not a decision for me. That's a decision, that's like a societal decision. I don't know how you reach it, but some kind of deliberation, democratically based deliberation, I suppose, in liberal democracies. For me personally, I wouldn't regulate against that. I think they're just trying to gain, you know, a place in a crowded, gain some customers in a crowded marketplace. I think that's fair game, probably, that manipulation.

So manipulation is trying to get people to change their behaviours without them really knowing why they're doing it for your own benefit. Or it could even be for the supposedly misdirected benefit of the other people. Let's leave that to one side. However, say you've got the online gambling. Say you've got the online gambling industry and they do have a drop-down menu that says...

A safe amount for you to bet each day is, and then there's a drop-down menu and you can choose your safe amount from the drop-down menu. It's your choice. And this happens, I think, and the first figure on the drop-down menu could be something like £100,000 a day. That's anchoring. That's using anchoring. That's the first thing that people see there, right?

And to me, that goes beyond the grounds of what's legitimate. You know, it's another form of manipulation. And I think there's a strong case there to regulate against those particular activities. Not because people are gambling. People can enjoy gambling. I've not got no problem with that. But they're potentially being manipulated into gambling more than they otherwise would. There's an infraction on the exchange mechanism, the process. So I think it's case by case, Bob.

and i don't think there's any hard and fast rule and people will have different views but we reach some kind of democrat democratic deliberative decision about what is acceptable in our conception of a tolerable society and what's not acceptable uh sorry good we're going to because we have so many enthusiastic questioners we're going to take uh three in a row uh ask you to state questions uh briefly and i'll take people close together to help it can you check that that mic is on

Good. And then we'll take you and the lady in the brown scarf and then the gentleman over here. I think all the books are probably gone. I think we've had more than four questions in the room, haven't we? We have. So if you want to put and you ask one of the first four questions, I'll leave them here, right? But the best one is still up for grabs. And you can choose. If you run up, you can choose which one. Get back there and answer the questions for me. Yeah, yeah.

Go ahead. Thank you, Alex. Hi, Adam. You've mentioned a couple of times on how you have an idea on the autonomy that people should have on their personal lifestyle. You also mentioned in the...

if I'm correct, the freedom, right? On the slide, it was mentioned. I use those terms loosely, actually. Yes, mental abilities have to be developed to a point for a person to have autonomy. We live in a world where there are a lot of pros that social media has brought on us. A lot of pros that social media has brought on us, including you use it yourself to promote your own ideas.

but it is also directly a variable for decreasing mental health in young youth, in children, as well as creating echo chambers for adults, which is a direct variable for not creating a tolerable society. So I would like to understand your views on what maybe the PPP interventions can be, maybe on the supply side of social media, and is it even relevant or possible?

and maybe what can be possible if it's needed at the demand side. Good. Just before you answer that, we're going to take the question next to you. All right. I've got to remember all this. I know you said earlier that BPP is not social policy, but how... No, no. I didn't say that. I said I'm a professor of behavioral populism. How would it connect to social policy? Okay. Good. And the third question over here. One moment. One moment. Yep.

Thank you, thank you Adam. My question follows a bit on from that one. I remember being at LSE at the time when there were discussions about whether there should be a school of public policy at all in the university or whether the LSE wasn't one by definition.

It's interesting that you come from a department of social administration. There are many different departments in here, and I could have placed you here or there or there in economics, behavioral science, government, a whole lot of them.

Is there a particular place where BPP should be in LSE or is it everywhere and do you feed people from across many departments and not only the department that you are in? And can I just ask you a question because this kind of got me. In your second book, which was the reciprocal one, you had a picture of some cogwheels and I wonder if you just flashed that

slide up, I could just make a comment about it. Look at those cogwheels. Those cogwheels will actually not move. They are locked. Is that the intention? Is something supposed to be... Because actually, if one cogwheel moves in one direction, the other won't move in another direction. Well, they're not moving because I want you to fixate on the cover. I don't want it to go anywhere. OK, shall I answer these questions then?

Social media. Social media, yeah. Yeah, start with that. Social media, okay. Yeah, I think there is a... I mean, I've not really thought about this to any great degree, you know, than the average person, so I suppose we've all thought about it a bit. When it comes to children, though...

My arguments don't apply to children because I don't think that children have full agency. We have to be paternalistic towards children, often coercively, don't we, Charlie? So, you know, in order to hold society together, of course, of course we have to be paternalistic there. But, you know, when it comes to adults and social media, it's a tricky one, isn't it? I mean, there's a lot of manipulation going on, but again, I think it's a regulation around the supply side. So I think that's there for us to figure out...

if it's just behavioural public policy, what behaviourally are they using that as a society we don't find legitimate? And I think that there are things there, but that's a big discussion, I think. The next question was on social policy and behavioural public policy. Oh, yeah, it's behavioural. Well, I guess many of my colleagues probably don't think I'm in social policy. No, I'm kidding. They do, really. They do these days. Yeah.

I don't know. It depends how you define social policy. I mean, we've had these discussions over the years as well in our department. You know, what is the definition of social policy? What's the definition of public policy? Are there two distinct things? Different people within my own department have different views about what public policy is compared to social policy. I suppose when I think about social policy, it's the traditional sort of social policy issues, really, like, you know, pensions and education and health, those sorts of... And they were heavily... The study of those...

The origins of the studio, as far as my understanding goes, was very heavily influenced and impacted by sociologists. Economists came in a little bit later, I think. But public policy, to me, is a field that's more dominated by the intersection of political scientists and economists. So for me, it's kind of got almost like a disciplinary difference to them.

Other people would disagree with that, and that's fine. And I think that the thing's become amorphous anyway. But every aspect of social... However you define it, every aspect of social policy and every aspect of public policy is...

ripe for considering how do we use behavioral science to meaningfully contribute to you know policy development in these spaces so it's behavioral public policy is not an aerial it's a set of tools really that you can apply across all different areas and then your point about social is where are the behaviorists at the LSE well it's true to say now these days that I'm the only behavioral what would classify I think a behavioral person

in social policy, although I'm trying to tell them all this, they're really all working on behavioural public policy without knowing it. Most of them are doing behavioural public policy relevant things, I think. You're learning that, aren't you? Johan, you know that you're doing behavioural public policy. Yeah, they know they're doing behavioural

But in terms of people that are trained in some sense, I suppose, in behavioral economics or behavioral science, I think I'm the only one in social policy. And ever since I've been here, and this goes back to why Alex was such an important collaborator of mine over the years, there's people that are very interested and have particular expertises across all the different departments at the LSE, across philosophy, anthropology, government, economics, everywhere. Right?

Marketing, of course, is an important, very important one. And over the years, I've often tried to get them together and work on initiatives cross-departmentally at the LSE. It's hard to do that because, as you know, the LSE works in silos, right? But I think we've had some success over the years in doing that

I tried to get that cross-departmental MSE in behavioural public policy running. And everybody was on board with it, but it was kind of, you know, people through the spanners in the work, so that didn't fly. But we've had very, you know, very sort of, what do you say, prolonged, protracted seminar series and things like that, including the ongoing one in the behavioural exchange group that I talked about. So...

I suppose in short, where would behavioural public... I think it would be best probably, I might be speaking out of turn here, but if we could get an institute or even eventually a department within the LSE that is behavioural public policy, I think that that would be a very successful...

branch, new branch of the LSE and I think it's something that the LSE should have because behavioural public policy was born at the LSE. So I'm hoping our new President Larry Kramer and his colleagues in the senior management team will take that note on board and maybe we'll move in that direction in the future.

Good. Some more questions first. At the very back, please. I think the two of you both raised your hands. One in the blue blazer and pink shirt, and then next to you in black coat.

I almost feel I am jumping the queue. I raised my hand at one point because I wondered about your argument that it's ethically legitimate to change the supply side.

And with reference to your donut man, I did wonder what that would look like because if you change the supply side, then with reference to Russ and his autonomy argument, you could be thought as depriving the individual of a meaningful range of options to actually be in a position to exercise autonomy. How do you square that one?

Just before you answer the neighbor, please, your slide, Johan. Thank you. Yeah, I think my question is actually a follow-up of the question Timo asked. You didn't arrange this. No, not at all. Thanks. So what would be the source of morality here? What's that? Source of morality? Social morality. Yeah, so freedom of morality you mentioned, like, you know.

So if supply side is restricted, what should be the source of morality there? And then I had another question related to the evolving nature of the discipline. So in development economics, there is constant intervention. So it's more going towards positivism? Do you see-- Say again. Positivism?

So in development economics there is growing emphasis on positivism in research, intervention and changing behavior. So is it the sort of like, you know, involvement we would see in the future in this field? You mean in terms of measuring stuff? Yeah, I mean methodological development. So first the question on freedom.

This is typical Timo asking a very difficult question with three minutes left. I'd have to think about that, Timo. But I think when you're extending the range of options... I mean, Bob would probably disagree with this. I think he would say just offer as many opportunities as you can. But I don't think personally that it's a legitimate option.

to offer opportunities that are harmful in some sense. I mean, my definition of harm, and this is too late to explain this, and I'm not probably made it clear, but my definition of harm is process harm, really. It's when there's an infringement on the exchange relationship so that exchange is no longer quite fair, I think, rather than it being a harmful outcome. So that's where my main emphasis lies, in the process. So I think that if people are being restricted from offering opportunities

options that harm that free and fair exchange between individuals, then it's not really an extra option in the sense of being a free and fair choice anyway. So, yeah, that's all I will say about that. Positivism, I'd have to think about this more, Mubarak, but I think it's, isn't it mostly been positivist anyway, behavioural public policy, in terms of

I mean, the emphasis has been on trying to measure effect quantitatively over time. I would think that... I mean, my argument is to try to balance away from that a little bit and think more about, you know, the deontological arguments, for instance, sort of rights-based arguments and... What do you call it? Sean's here somewhere, where we're concerned about the laws and...

Not the contractarian, what do you call it? The constitutional, yeah, constitutional approaches. So that's kind of... I mean, Sean Hoggreeves-Eve was another one of my undergraduate teachers, actually, with Bob, and I found in recent years, only in recent years, Sean and I have sort of gravitated together because he is focusing upon the constitutional arguments around behavioural public policy and the use of behavioural economics in policy. And that's where I am now with him, really, constitutional concerns.

I know there are many more questions out there. I do apologize for those I didn't reach at the bottom of the list. However, there's good news because firstly, there are drinks outside and you can cajole and nudge your way past other supplicants to ask a question. I'll just add. I'll add them at the drinks.

I have to announce the winner now of the best question. And I think the question that was on many people's lips was asked close to the end, whereas limiting supply doesn't also, in a sense, limit the people to whom the offer would be made. So, in my view, the question... Timo. The winner goes to Timo there at the end. Many congratulations. APPLAUSE

Can I just say that Timo's office is opposite mine, and I want to see this poster on the wall. Very good. Now that you've warmed up your hands, please join me in thanking Adam for a very stimulating lecture. Thank you all for your questions, and join you at the drinks outside.

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