People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

At different scales this means unionization and professional organizations, government regulation, and international regulation, to prevent whole countries from defecting - this is in large part what the EU is about, and a significant source of UK ill will towards it; and also generally what makes nationalists upset at globalists.

Collective action problems require collective action solutions. Large actors, however, tend to dislike collective action because it reduces their scale advantage.

Collective action has its own problem: power structures encourage corruption and misuse of the pooled power. Overall, I suspect government and international systems are more likely to be less corrupt because they can afford to build more checks and balances into their institutions, but the distance from the people decreases their perceived legitimacy.

Not an easy circle to square.

    ...
    THALER: Well, first of all, when we use this phrase 
    libertarian paternalism, we’re using libertarian as
    an adjective. And so we’re trying to say we’re going
    to design policies that don’t force anyone to do anything.
    So the claim that we’re trying to tell people what to
    do, or force them to do things, is just completely wrong.
    We are also not trying to tell them to do what we think is
    smart. We’re trying to help people do what they want to do.

    I like to use G.P.S. as an analogy of what we’re trying to
    do. So, I have a terrible sense of direction. And Google
    Maps is a lifesaver for me. Now, if I want to go visit you,
    I can plug in your address, and suppose I’m walking across
    the park, and I see, “Oh, there’s a softball game over
    there. I think I’ll go watch that for a while,” Google Maps
    doesn’t scold me. It will re-compute a new route if I’ve
    gone a bit out of my way. It doesn’t suggest addresses to
    me. It just suggests a route. And if there’s a traffic jam,
    it suggests maybe you should alter your route.

    So, we don’t think people are dumb. We think the world is
    hard. I mean, figuring out how much to save for retirement
    is a really hard cognitive problem that very few economists
    have solved for themselves. And it’s not only cognitively
    hard, it involves delay of gratification, which people find
    hard. It’s just like navigating in a strange city is hard.
    So, why not try to help? When I first was working with the
    U.K. Behavioral Insight Team, the first “Nudge unit,” the
    phrase I kept saying in every meeting with some minister
    was, “If you want to get people to do something, make it
    easy. Remove the barriers.” That’s what we’re about.
    ...

I prefer not to think like that. I'd say we're doing our best to navigate hard problems, and it's not yet clear how to do things more effectively. Worst case scenario we're acting dumb, and I'd argue that is kind of a useless statement. We're acting, and we can do better, so put some time into working on doing better.