Introduction: a symposium on the behavioural limits of the state

Behavioural public policy is a relatively new, but now substantive, subfield of public policy. It encompasses the theoretical and conceptual development, and associated application, of how behavioural science can inform the design of public policies, interventions and institutions. To date, this subfield has been dominated by hard and, particularly, soft paternalistic policy frameworks, at least in terms of the rhetoric. Much criticism has been waged against those frameworks for a number of reasons: for example, in relation to how effective their associated interventions are likely to be in addressing the challenges that modern societies face; on whether their associated interventions are indeed informed by novel behavioural science findings (and even where they are, the robustness of those findings is often questioned); and that paternalistic approaches are overly statist, and that there thus ought to be more consideration of how behavioural science might be used to inform policy from a liberal perspective. The counterargument to this last concern is that by allowing people to ‘go their own way’ if they so wish, soft paternalism protects the individual autonomy that is so prized by liberals, but one might contend that the hidden intentions that underpin many soft paternalistic interventions render them even more statist than more open, easily challengeable, hard forms of paternalism. With these thoughts and questions in mind – i.e., on the normative consideration of how behavioural science should, and should not, inform public policy – I hosted a number of symposia on the appropriate ‘behavioural limits of the state’ through the offices of the London School of Economics and Political Science in the Spring of 2022. Mario Rizzo, Nick Chater, Cass Sunstein, Peter Boettke & Christopher Coyne and I presented papers