Self-Promotion

I'm quoted in the latest issue of The Economist, in an article on "the new paternalism."

But Glen Whitman, of California State University, has doubts. In an engaging tract for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, he wonders why governments should always favour the long-sighted self over its near-sighted alter ego. The immediate pleasures of gambling, drinking and idleness are real; so too are the costs of suppressing them. “In contrast to the obese and the profligate, whose short-run selves constantly trump their long-run selves, we might point to the misers [and] workaholics for whom the reverse appears to be true,” he writes.

If you want to know what anyone else said, I guess you'll have to read the article!