Richard Thaler's "Misbehaving" Volume 2 // Part 4

This will, as far as I know, be my final blog post for Richard Thaler's book Misbehaving which sought to explain behavioral economics in a modern-day setting. With this final post, I will be tackling a moral idea that truly impacted me, eugenics. Eugenics and their financial factors will be scrutinized within the scope of behavioral economics. This theory of economics is a combination of business and psychology that seeks to understand and explain why people buy. With this as my lens, I will be explaining why eugenics connects to the business industry and how behavioral economics plays a role. 

First off is incentives. While this may seem out of the blue, I believe it is one aspect of eugenics that truly hits the low end of the ethical spectrum. Before we get to that though, the economics of incentives. Behavioral economics tells us that incentives offer a way to "nudge" or otherwise influence consumer rationale. Nudge is actually the name of Richard Thaler's book previous to Misbehaving, and I'd highly recommend it. The book is an extended dialogue into the small adjustments that can be made to influence consumers. 

So we see now that incentives are an effective tool for essentially getting someone to buy or buy into whatever it is you want. It is not hard to see why incentives can have a malicious possibility within the scope of eugenics. When you have the ability to promote and entice consumers to buy into a grey area, it can negatively affect the consumer. These incentives oftentimes take the form of direct financial payouts, which to many could be seen as a life-changer. The exact ethics behind these incentives isn't clear due to their unfortunate connection to the idea of eugenics itself. Based on your personal feelings about the practice of DNA editing, you will likely sway to one side or the other on these incentives. 

Speaking of financial rewards, behavioral economics often seeks to explore how individual consumers weigh options in decision-making. When one option isn't necessarily their favorite, but the cost of the other or the benefit of choosing the first is so drastic it can make a situation feel a whole lot less like a choice.  This idea, called cost-benefit analysis, can make a difference in eugenics decisions. Taking part in eugenics can seem like a necessary evil to certain people, especially when a heavy financial burden or benefit hangs in the balance. If you are interested in further diving into cost-benefit analysis, I have linked an article about it from the Harvard Business School. ARTICLE

While we are still talking about these incentives, I have one more note about them. Inside behavioral economics, there is an idea known as temporal discounting, which sounds far worse than it really is. Temporal discounting is simply the tendency of consumers to put a larger value in immediate rewards rather than long-term waiting. Everyone likes having things now instead of later, and this is the behavioral reasoning behind it. There is an unfortunate connection between temporal discounting and the not-so-ethical parts of eugenics. When an individual consumer is presented with a large and more importantly immediate incentive, their ability to withstand this for the sake of personal moral or societal norms becomes far weaker. This giving up of potential personal feelings could lead to pretty poor implications and is not something that should have even happened in the first place. 

Let me pivot away from incentives now and speak on something else; responsibility. When major financial institutions or entities support something so gray-area like eugenics, it must be taken into account their social responsibility when it comes to transparency. When a practice like eugenics, which at its core fundamentally seeks to alter the population of the world, there is certainly some sort of responsibility that must be taken by the very people bankrolling them. When in class we spoke about consumerism, we talked a small amount about how large corporations need to start taking responsibility and be accountable for the environmental and societal impacts their actions have, and this is no different. Eugenics continues to have a large amount of grey area in both its ethical implications and how the public views it, which should tell the companies supporting it that they may need to think twice about what they are backing.

Furthermore, on this idea of responsibility, there is the coercive nature of many eugenics policies. As we have previously spoken about, behavioral economics highlights that there are subtle strategies that allow marketers to influence and coerce consumers into making one decision or another. Is this unethical? Is it even legal? Unfortunately, there is no direct answer due to lenient oversight from federal regulation. Within eugenics, this subtle coercion can have huge impacts due to the dynamic changes that come out of eugenic practices. If someone chooses to take part in a permanent and life-changing eugenics procedure based off of a decision that was influenced by a third party, then not only should the individual know this, but maybe it should have never happened in the first place. For an individual consumer to be able to make a proper, autonomous decision, then they ought not be coerced or influenced by the very thing that they are deciding on. I know all the marketing ideas can be a bit confusing, so if needed please refer to this GRAPHIC that greatly helps to explain further. 

Speaking of autonomy, I think an economic idea that is oftentimes lost or not spoken about is dignity. Dignity, especially human dignity, is essentially the economic belief that an individual deserves to be treated based on their entire worth (including inherent traits and individual talent) as opposed to their raw financial production value. This is, in my opinion, one of the greatest and most important behavioral economics beliefs because it helps humanize people when dealing with economics. If individuals were allowed to be treated as simply their ability to buy, produce, or otherwise financially contribute to X thing, then how they are treated morally, ethically, and physically would be greatly different. Within the idea of eugenics, if an individual is given no value towards their intrinsic abilities and only treated as a way of providing income to a company, then no thought will be given to their well-being as they commit to such an intrusive and permanent practice.