10 - Summing Up

Summary

This chapter concludes the book. In it, I summarise the principal arguments I made in all of the other chapters, before offering some final words as food for thought. Ultimately, I conclude that there are two arms to my political economy of behavioural public policy. The first arm is for policy makers to allow people a great deal of individual autonomy, while at the same time shaping the general institutional environment so as to nurture people’s almost intrinsic desire to cooperate and reciprocate with others. The second arm recognises that some people will act on their selfish, egoistic inclinitations when afforded a great deal of freedom, and thus in those circumstances where people implicitly or explicitly use the behavioural influences to serve themselves and to harm others, the policy maker has an intellectual justification to intervene in their actions and behaviours.