What does Hillbilly Elegy tell us about J.D. Vance’s daimon?

 

J.D. Vance, Vice President of the United States, identifies himself as a post-liberal conservative. Since he is only a heartbeat away from becoming president, I have been thinking that I should read his latest book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, to see if it sheds any light on how he would be likely to use the powers of the presidency.

However, I decided that I should read Hillbilly Elegy first - and am glad that I eventually managed to read it, a decade after its publication.  I didn’t manage to get past the Introduction when I first attempted to read it a few years ago, but I now think it deserves its status as a best seller.

In this essay I will discuss the problem I saw in the Introduction before outlining what I see as the book’s strongest point. I will conclude that the book shows us Vance’s values and aspirations clearly, but offers only a glimpse of what David L. Norton would call a daimon.

The Introduction

In the Introduction, Vance discusses social problems of people who identify as hillbillies - working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish (Ulster) descent whose ancestors settled in the Appalachian Mountains. At one point he writes:

“When I mention the plight of my community, I am often met with an explanation that goes something like this: “Of course the prospects for working-class whites have worsened, J.D., but you’re putting the chicken before the egg. They’re divorcing more, marrying less, and experiencing less happiness because their economic opportunities have declined. If they only had better access to jobs, other parts of their lives would improve as well.”

Vance goes on to say that he held that opinion himself during his youth. He acknowledges that the opinion makes sense in terms of stresses associated with loss of security of employment in the industrial Midwest. However, he then goes on to claim that experience has taught him that “this story of economic security is, at best, incomplete”.

In support of that claim, Vance only cites one example. He mentions his personal experience of working alongside a young man “with every reason to work – a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way – carelessly tossing aside a good job …”. He suggests that the young man displayed a lack of agency – a feeling that he had little control over his life and a willingness to blame everyone but himself.

Vance seems to be suggesting that such attitudes are a characteristic of hillbillies and “distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America”. Perhaps hillbillies are particularly prone to this kind of learned helplessness, but Vance doesn’t make a strong case in support of that view.  

In Vance’s defence, however, he does acknowledge that his book does not pretend to be an academic study of the problem of declining upward social mobility. He states his primary aim is “to tell a true story of what that problem feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck”.

 That is where the value of the book lies.

The strongest point

The point that comes through strongly in the book is that the messages that individual children receive from influential family members can help them to avoid adopting low aspirations, even when they are born into dysfunctional families and live in communities where most children grow up to perceive that the deck is stacked against them.

The story of Vance’s childhood is largely about the negative influence of his mother, whom he watched repeatedly succumb to addiction, being more than offset by the positive influence of his maternal grandmother and grandfather (Mamaw and Papaw) his elder sister, Lindsay, his natural father, and his Uncle Jimmy. To his credit, Vance doesn’t attempt to present himself as being particularly smart.

The picture that Vance paints of Middletown Ohio, where he grew up, is complex. He contrasts the mores of his grandparents – “old fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking” - with those of his mother, which he describes as “consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful”. He suggests that “increasingly, the entire neighborhood” has been adopting his mother’s mores. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that there were many intact families and peaceful homes in Middletown and that many of his childhood friends have been able to build successful lives there.

This story does not fit easily into either the cultural decline or economic decline explanations in the passage quoted above. Mamaw and Papaw’s mores were presumably reinforced by the stability offered by Papaw’s Armco steel job. And Vance’s mother’s addiction problem is not obviously attributable to either lack of economic opportunity or cultural factors. Towards the end of the book, Vance suggests that his mother’s problems were largely personal: “She tried to find happiness in love and work, but she listened too much to the wrong voice in her head”.

Mamaw nurtured in J.D. an aspiration to better himself, combined with a degree of optimism about his own potential. That is a valuable gift, but it is not the same thing as a daimon. An aspiration to get ahead is generic. Almost anyone can hold it, and it doesn’t say what one is to become. Norton’s daimon, by contrast, is unique and individual. The question for the rest of the book is whether Vance’s aspiration ever acquires that specificity.

Vance achieved well enough at high school to be admitted to Ohio State University but was terrified by the prospect of having to cope with “the unstructured college experience”. He joined the Marine Corps at the suggestion of his cousin Rachael, a Marine Corps veteran.

According to Vance, the Marine Corps taught him to live like an adult. He suggests that by the time he commenced study at Ohio State, the Marine Corps had also “instilled in me an incredible sense of invincibility”. It certainly instilled work habits that enabled him to graduate from college with grades high enough to gain admittance to Yale Law.

Yale Law doesn’t seem to have presented Vance with huge academic challenges. He portrays his experience there as akin to a kind of finishing school where he learned to network and had the good fortune to meet Usha, who became his wife. He credits Amy Chua, one of his professors, with providing sound advice on how to pursue career goals without destroying his relationship with Usha.

The daimon question

As explained by David L. Norton, your daimon is your innate potentiality – a unique “ideal of perfection”. Self-actualization is the process of discovering your daimon and living in harmony with it. Norton describes that as the feeling of  “being where one wants to be, doing what one wants to do”, as well as the feeling of being where one must be, and wholeheartedly doing what one must do. I have previously discussed David L. Norton’s explanation of daimon in an essay entitled, “Do you live in harmony with your daimon?”  The concept of daimon has been further discussed by Ed Younkins in his review essay on Norton’s books.

 Many of the things that are important to J.D. Vance are evident from a reading of Hillbilly Elegy. It is obvious that he considers it important to identify as a hillbilly as well as a Yale graduate. The importance to him of family and close personal relationships comes through strongly. It is clear that he regards personal agency, self-reliance and hard work as important values. He views his development of self-confidence as an important achievement.

However, I don’t think any of those things could be said to constitute a supreme aim or guiding principle. As noted above, Norton describes living in harmony with one’s daimon as a feeling of being where one wants to be and doing what one wants to do, as well as being where one must be and wholeheartedly doing what one must do. Does Vance describe anything like that? The closest he comes in the middle of the book is the Marine Corps, but what he reports there is a new confidence, an “incredible sense of invincibility”, rather than a calling. His account of Yale is dominated by networking, credentials and careerism.

A memoir is only indirect evidence, of course. Norton’s daimon is neither the actual person nor a product of the actual person, so Vance may have a daimon the book doesn’t reveal. I can only report what the book shows.

Perhaps we see a glimpse of Vance’s daimon in the final pages of the book. At that point he introduces us to Brian, a kid from Appalachian Kentucky who reminded J.D. of himself when he was fifteen years old. Brian had experienced many instances of childhood trauma and his hope of a normal life had evaporated. Vance writes:

“We do need to create a space for the J.D.s and Brians of the world to have a chance. I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

If J.D.’s daimon is to give people like Brian a better chance in life, the book can’t tell us whether his political career serves it. Vance writes that “there is no government that can fix these problems for us”, but he also says that public policy can help. The test is therefore what he does with the power he holds, not what he wrote a decade ago.

So what does Hillbilly Elegy tell us about J.D. Vance’s daimon? It tells us a good deal about his values: family, agency, self-reliance and hard work. It shows the aspiration Mamaw nurtured in him. It offers little that could be called a vocation until the final pages, where his concern for children like Brian hints at an aim that may be more than personal ambition.

I’m not sure Hillbilly Elegy sheds much light on how J.D. Vance would use the powers of the presidency. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it. Perhaps Communion will tell me more.

Should media have a duty of care to discourage political polarization?

 

This question passed my mind as I was reading Steven Pinker’s book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows … Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage, 2025.

The question was prompted, in particular, by a statement by the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, as reported in The Australian, at a recent UN function in New York. Mr Albanese tied his government’s proposed new digital duty of care laws to “misinformation, disinformation and increased polarisation”, saying digital services were “having an impact on our entire society and how it functions”. In subsequent media appearances, he appeared to walk away from that statement, returning to the message that the proposed laws are primarily about "giving people control" over algorithms used by social media companies.

Mr Albanese has not allayed my concerns that the proposed laws have potential to enable a future government to impose a form of political censorship. I will briefly consider some of the concerns that others have raised on that score before turning to the question of what light Pinker’s book sheds on the role of social media in political polarization and the motives for political censorship.

Proposed duty of care laws

The exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 indicates that its aim is to ensure a “safe online environment”, a standard that is defined primarily in terms of content. In his submission on the exposure draft, Andrew Bushnell of the Institute of Public Affairs notes that some of the harms listed in the exposure draft require subjective interpretation. More importantly, he notes that the proposed law gives the federal government “almost limitless power to expand the range of harms covered by the safe online environment obligation”.

An indication of the kinds of speech that the federal government might regard as harmful is illustrated by the attempt to remove an X post protesting against the formation of a queer club for children as young as 8 in a Victorian school (discussed here). The author of the post argued that children of that age are too young to be exposed to gender ideology. The eSafety Commissioner sought to have the post removed by sending a complaint alert to X. In this instance, the author of the post was able to conduct a successful legal appeal. I presume that one of the aims of the proposed law is to remove the possibility of future legal appeals of that kind. The proposed law is certainly intended to give the government greater legal power to suppress controversial views.

Pinker on social media’s role in polarization

Pinker begins the relevant discussion by referring to Jonathan Haidt’s 2022 article in The Atlantic entitled, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”. Haidt blamed the “virality generators” – the Like, Share, and Retweet buttons – of the social media platforms for making it easy for anonymous ignoramuses to signal their moral superiority and tribal loyalty at low cost to themselves.

Pinker builds on Haidt’s explanation by suggesting that “virality does not just exponentiate the number of viewers”, it also “creates a sense of common knowledge”. What he means by common knowledge is knowledge that A knows that B knows, and B knows that A knows and so on. That meaning of common knowledge is illustrated in the image shown above, which has been copied from Pinker’s book. It differs from the usage of the term in ordinary English to refer to facts that are widely known, irrespective of any individual’s knowledge of who knows them.

Social media platforms generate common knowledge within online communities of people who have similar interests. The common knowledge generated within those groups can become norms that hold the groups together. When members of groups express doubts about matters that have become common knowledge, they are punished by other group members – just as members of religious sects are punished when they depart from accepted dogma.

Pinker observes:

“Twenty-first-century America has become polarized into political sects, each functioning as a quasi-religious community unified by its own commonly held but not easily verified beliefs.”

The examples of polarized thinking that Pinker provides are well known. Rather than spell them out here, I ask readers to imagine a political party led by Chicken Little. Mr Little has a vast number of dedicated followers on social media who share his belief that the sky is falling. Every raindrop that falls is interpreted as confirmation that the sky is falling. Attempts to persuade party members to consider evidence that the sky is not falling are largely unsuccessful because members and their leader are bound together by their common knowledge that the sky is falling.

Mr Little could be on either the conservative or the progressive side of politics. Opponents of his views consider that the growth in number of Mr Little’s followers is a threat to social cohesion. Some argue that his views should be suppressed.

Pinker on the motives for censorship

Pinker writes:

“Freedom of speech is protected in all democracies. Yet the repression of controversial ideas is no longer a hallmark of theocracies and dictatorships but increasingly a fixture of universities, the very institutions most committed to exploring ideas.”

The veracity of the first sentence of that paragraph is dubious. For example, Australia’s constitution has no free speech guarantee - only implied freedom of political communication.

Pinker has good reasons to focus on universities because protection of freedom of speech is central to their role in the search for truth. However, much of what he writes in Chapter 8, “The Cancelling Instinct” is also relevant to the exercise of free speech in social media.

The chapter opens with a list of 17 questions raised by serious scholars, scientists and writers that have caused them to be censored, punished, fired, threatened, harassed, demonized, libelled, and in some cases physically assaulted. That list begins with the question: “Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?”

Pinker suggests the threat to freedom of speech emerges from two features of human psychology:

• People hold many factual beliefs not because they have been shown to be true, but because they are felt to uphold a moral order.
• The upholding of a moral order takes place in the arena of common knowledge.

In respect of the first point, laudable moral principles lurk behind the 17 questions mentioned above. The censors fail to acknowledge that the questions seek empirical information that is compatible with the moral values they wish to protect. Even if it is true, for example that groups of people differ in their average traits, it would still be unfair to discriminate against individuals for that reason.

Why are censors so prone to blur the distinction between fact and value? One of the reasons given is that people tend to engineer their bundle of beliefs towards “winning arguments” rather than “laying out logical entailments”. For example, it is easier to persuade people to oppose capital punishment by bundling the belief that it is inherently immoral with the belief that it is not an effective deterrent to murder.

Pinker suggests that despite their training in making conceptual distinctions, academics are not immune to the tendency to defend factual claims that make their moral positions more compelling. Added to this, there is the complication that the postmodern current in the humanities denies that there is any such thing as objective truth.

The threat to freedom of speech also arises because the upholding of a moral order takes place in the arena of common knowledge. Pinker writes:

“What terrifies the censors and cancelers, it appears, is not that a dangerous idea might be thought, or even expressed, but that it might become common knowledge.”

For example, a member of the speech police might not be particularly upset if they thought that they were the sole recipient of an email containing a “dangerous” idea, but be outraged if it was apparent that the idea had been communicated simultaneously to a large number of people.  Pinker notes that the metaphor, “deplatforming”, is telling “because being on a platform, visible to all, is what allows a speaker to generate common knowledge”.

Misinformation and disinformation

The cancellation and deplatforming that takes place within universities interacts with social media in interesting ways. Scientists and other scholars are often able to publicize their views on social media even though university colleagues and politicians have alleged those views to be misinformed. In some instances, the censorious actions of their university colleagues seems to have attracted additional attention to the views of controversial scholars, e.g. Bjorn Lomborg, perhaps assisting their views to become more influential.

There is, of course, a substantial amount of misinformation and disinformation published in electronic form in pursuit of objectives that are Antisemitic, Islamophobic, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or designed to denigrate other community groups. It is easy to agree that promotion of such views should be condemned but it is not clear what role government should play in seeking to combat misinformation and disinformation beyond prohibition of incitement to violence and protection of children.

Media proprietors may have a moral responsibility to prevent their platforms being used to inflame polarization, but that does not justify government attempts to impose content standards. By suppressing discussion of controversial social and political issues, Australia’s proposed new duty of care laws may well impose harms on the community that far exceed the harms that these laws will prevent.

Behavioral Economics and Human Flourishing: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective

 This is a guest essay by Dr Edward W. Younkins, Professor of Accountancy and Business at Wheeling University, and Executive Director of its Institute for the Study of Capitalism and Morality. Ed is author of a trilogy of important books on freedom and flourishing: “Capitalism and Commerce”, “Champions of a Free Society”, and “Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society”. He also has numerous other publications, including several published on this site. (Please see the list after the end of this essay.) 

 

Behavioral Economics has emerged over the past seven decades as a significant development in economic thought challenging the idealized assumptions of perfect rationality that have long dominated neoclassical economics. Yet, for all its insights into human cognition and decision-making, the field has generated controversy regarding its normative implications. Should behavioral economists address their findings to public policy makers who could nudge citizens toward supposedly better choices? Or should they address their recommendations to individuals, empowering them to make better decisions for themselves?

The concepts of nudging and choice architecture initially played a role in gaining the attention of public policy makers to interventions informed by the behavioral sciences. The more recent approach holds that individuals require the knowledge that traditionally has been in the domain of researchers and government officials.

This essay argues for the latter approach. Drawing on the neo-Aristotelian tradition of human flourishing as an essentially self-directed activity, and on the work of Robert Sugden, Winton Bates, Douglas J. Den Uyl, and Douglas B. Rasmussen. Behavioral Economics can make a valuable contribution to human flourishing, but only when its insights are placed in the hands of individuals rather than autocrats. The most useful ideas from Behavioral Economics are those that help self-directed human beings understand their own cognitive tendencies and design choice architectures that serve their own conception of the good life. People need to be empowered to contribute toward designing their own decision environments and therefore choose if and how they want to nudge themselves.

The Development of Behavioral Economics

The intellectual roots of Behavioral Economics run deep. Adam Smith, often celebrated as the father of economics for his Wealth of Nations, also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explored the psychological and moral dimensions of human action. Smith understood that human beings are not mere calculating machines but creatures of sentiment, sympathy, and social connection.

The modern Behavioral Economics movement, however, is typically traced to the 1950s and the work of Herbert Simon. Simon introduced the concept of bounded rationality, arguing that human beings, in all but the simplest decision contexts, are simply unable to make fully optimal decisions. Rather than maximizing, Simon suggested that people satisfice. They seek outcomes that are good enough given their cognitive limitations and the information available to them.

The field gained substantial momentum in the 1970s with the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their prospect theory offered a descriptive model of decision-making under risk that departed radically from expected utility theory. Prospect theory demonstrated that people are loss-averse (they feel losses more acutely than equivalent gains) and that they weigh probabilities non-linearly, overweighing small probabilities and underweighing large ones. Kahneman later popularized the distinction between System 1 (fast, automatic, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, deliberative, analytical) thinking, a framework that has become central to understanding how cognitive biases and heuristics (mental shortcuts) operate.

Richard Thaler, building on these foundations, developed nudge theory in collaboration with Cass Sunstein. Their 2008 book, Nudge, argued that choice architecture (the way options are presented) can be designed to steer people toward better decisions without eliminating any options or significantly changing economic incentives. Thaler and Sunstein termed this approach libertarian paternalism suggesting that nudges preserve freedom of choice while gently guiding people toward choices that improve their welfare.

Other significant contributions include the  endowment effect (the finding that people value what they already possess more highly than identical items they do not own), regret aversion theory (the tendency to avoid decisions that might later be regretted), mental accounting (people divide financial resources into psychologically meaningful distinct categories rather than treating all resources as fungible), framing (the way alternatives are presented can influence decisions) anchoring and adjustment  (a person tends to start with an initial reference point and adjust away from that anchor), and halo theory (the tendency for one positive characteristic to influence judgments about other characteristics).

 Libertarian Paternalism and the Threat to Autonomy

The normative turn in Behavioral Economics—exemplified by Thaler and Sunstein's libertarian paternalism—has drawn criticism. The core problem is epistemological: how can policy makers know what truly serves individuals' welfare? As critics have noted, behavioral economists often treat perfect rationality as an ideal against which real decisions are judged, and any deviation from this ideal is taken as grounds for intervention.

 Mark D. White has made an argument that the findings from behavioral economists are partial, the policies prescribed by libertarian paternalists are misconceived, and that both strengthen cognitive biases and inspire nudges. White argues against the use of paternalistic nudges by government and makes a positive case for individual choice and autonomy.

 The fundamental objection is that proponents of libertarian paternalism nudges fail to take seriously their targets' true preferences. Without a defensible notion of true preferences, the justification for nudging people toward choices they would not have made of their own accord is lacking. 

Robert Sugden and the Community of Advantage

 Robert Sugden offers a compelling alternative vision for how Behavioral Economics should engage with normative questions. In The Community of Advantage, Sugden reconstructs and defends the liberal tradition in normative economics in light of the findings of Behavioral Economics. He argues that behavioral economists should address their recommendations and findings to individuals showing them how they can coordinate their behavior to attain mutual benefit.

 Sugden's key insight is that the market is a community of advantage—a network of mutually beneficial transactions in which participants come to see one another as cooperative partners rather than rivals. When people participate in market exchanges, they can act with the intention of achieving mutual benefit, rather than merely pursuing personal benefits. Joint action in voluntary transactions permits mutually beneficial cooperative schemes.

 Sugden rejects libertarian paternalism on several grounds. First, he argues that the concept of latent preferences—the idea that individuals have underlying preferences that can be revealed through proper choice architecture—is psychologically ungrounded. People do not have consistent, context-independent underlying preferences. Second, Sugden contends that behavioral economists should not make recommendations about public policy. Rather, recommendations should be addressed to individuals as the directors of their own lives, advising them how to pursue their own interests.

 Sugden abandons core elements of traditional normative economics—notably “the view from nowhere” associated with the idea that an economist or policy maker can objectively determine what would make people better off and advances a contractarian alternative. He advocates addressing individuals as agents responsible for their own decisions.  His approach successfully reconciles the liberal tradition with the findings of Behavioral Economics.

Neo-Aristotelian Flourishing and Self-Direction 

The neo-Aristotelian tradition offers a philosophical framework that complements Sugden's liberal approach to Behavioral Economics. For Aristotle, eudaimonia (human flourishing) is the ultimate end of human action. Flourishing is not merely a subjective feeling of well-being but an objective state of living well and doing well, achieved through the exercise of virtue over a complete life.

Contemporary neo-Aristotelians such as Den Uyl, Rasmussen, and Bates emphasize that human flourishing is essentially a self-directed activity. The agent chooses autonomously to the extent that he selects his actions from a set of alternatives that has not been decreased by the coercive actions of others. As Bates has observed, it is good to be aware of how you are being nudged so that you can make a conscious choice to accept or reject the suggestion involved.

 Rasmussen and Den Uyl characterize human flourishing in terms of objective human goods while emphasizing agent-relativity, individuality, self-directedness, sociality, and practical wisdom. Flourishing is not a passive condition that someone else can simply deliver to an individual. It is an activity involving the exercise of one’s practical wisdom. 

 If flourishing is essentially self-directed, then the discovery that individuals sometimes make predictable errors does not automatically establish a warrant for external direction. Instead, it creates a reason for improving people’s capacity for self-direction.

 

Behavioral Economics can function much like a mirror. It can show individuals things about themselves that they might otherwise fail to notice. The appropriate question becomes not: “How can behavioral experts make people choose better? but “How can knowledge of human behavioral tendencies help people become better directors of their own lives?”

 

Bates argues that human flourishing is ultimately self-directed and involves the exercise of practical wisdom and responsibility. Bates observes that people should be aware of how they are being nudged because awareness provides an opportunity consciously to accept or reject the suggestion. He therefore sees Behavioral Economics as potentially useful for human flourishing when its insights are directed toward individuals rather than primarily toward paternalistic policy makers. 

 

Den Uyl and Rasmussen's template of responsibility, developed in The Perfectionist Turn, provides a framework for understanding how individuals can take responsibility for their own flourishing. The template emphasizes that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that external interventions—however well-intentioned—cannot substitute for self-direction.

From this perspective, the proper role of Behavioral Economics is not to provide policy makers with tools for manipulating choice but to provide individuals with information they can use to make better decisions for themselves. As Bates has argued, Behavioral Economics can make a useful contribution in helping to make us aware of how nudges may affect the choices we make. If one wants to help individuals to make better decisions, it is better to address the information to individuals responsible rather than to autocrats.

 Situations Where Behavioral Economics Serves Self-Directed Flourishing

1. Retirement Saving: Overcoming Present Bias Through Self-Nudging

 One of the most well-documented findings in Behavioral Economics is present bias—the tendency to prioritize immediate gratification over future well-being. This leads many people to undersave for retirement. Rather than waiting for governments to mandate automatic enrollment in retirement plans, self-directed individuals can design their own choice architectures. They can arrange for automatic transfers from their checking accounts to retirement accounts, set up calendar reminders to review their savings progress, or commit to increasing their contribution rate each year. The key is that the individual, not the policy maker, chooses the nudge and the goal.

 2. Health, Exercise, and Nutrition: Designing Personal Choice Architectures

 People frequently intend to exercise, eat well, sleep adequately, or maintain other healthy practices but find their immediate preferences competing with long-term goals. Behavioral Economics can identify mechanisms such as present bias, default effects, commitment problems, and environmental cues. A self-directed individual can deliberately rearrange his or her environment: placing exercise equipment where it is visible, scheduling workouts, preparing healthy food in advance, using reminders, or making unwanted behaviors less convenient.

 The modern food environment is saturated with cues that trigger System 1 responses—impulse purchases of unhealthy snacks, oversized portions, and marketing that exploits our cognitive biases. Self-directed individuals can design personal choice architectures that serve their health goals. They might rearrange their kitchen so that healthy foods are more visible and accessible, use smaller plates to manage portion sizes, or implement a rule that they will only eat what they have prepared themselves. These are nudges, but they are self-imposed nudges, chosen by the individual in service of their own conception of flourishing.

 3. Investment Decisions: Managing Loss Aversion and the Endowment Effect

 Behavioral Economics has enormous practical value in personal finance. People commonly exhibit present bias, loss aversion, overconfidence, status-quo bias, mental accounting, and difficulties with self-control. Awareness of these tendencies can help an individual to construct voluntary mechanisms that support personally selected financial goals.

 Investors are prone to loss aversion, holding onto losing investments too long in the hope of recovering losses, and the endowment effect, overvaluing assets they already own. Self-directed investors can use behavioral insights to improve their decision-making. They might set pre-established rules for selling investments (e.g., sell if an asset declines by 20 percent), or regularly review their portfolio with a focus on opportunity costs rather than sunk costs. Awareness of these biases is the first step toward overcoming them.

 4. Career and Life Planning: Countering Status Quo Bias

 Status quo bias—the tendency to stick with current arrangements even when change would be beneficial—can prevent people from making important life transitions. Self-directed individuals can use behavioral insights to overcome this inertia. They might set a specific date for reviewing career options, seek out information about alternatives systematically, or imagine that a decision has turned out badly and work backward to identify what could have gone wrong. These techniques engage System 2 thinking and help counteract the automatic preference for the familiar.

 The sunk cost fallacy may cause someone to continue pursuing an unsuitable career simply because substantial time has already been invested. The endowment effect can cause an individual to overvalue a current position. Status quo bias can make change seem costlier than it actually is. The halo effect can cause someone to overvalue an institution because of its reputation.

 5. Consumption and Spending: Overcoming Framing Effects

 Consumers encounter choice architectures constantly. Retailers, websites, advertisers, subscription services, and salespeople routinely frame choices, establish defaults, use scarcity messages, exploit social proof, and influence attention.

 How options are framed dramatically affects choices. A product described as "90% fat-free" is more appealing than one described as "10% fat," even though they are identical. Self-directed consumers can protect themselves from framing effects by developing habits of deliberate evaluation. They might translate percentage discounts into actual dollar amounts, compare products on objective attributes rather than marketing claims, or implement a "cooling-off" period for major purchases. By understanding how framing works, individuals can make choices that reflect their genuine preferences rather than the influence of presentation.

 Behavioral knowledge therefore strengthens consumer autonomy. Rather than requiring government to protect people from every persuasive influence, education can help individuals become more capable evaluators of their own choices.

 6. Social and Cooperative Ventures: Mutual Benefit Through Voluntary Coordination

 Sugden's insight that market participants can act with the intention of achieving mutual benefit has practical implications. Self-directed individuals can use behavioral insights to design cooperative arrangements that serve shared goals. For example, a group of neighbors might agree to a system of reminders for recycling, or a team at work might implement a "no-meeting Wednesday" to protect focused work time. These are nudges, but they are chosen jointly and voluntarily, reflecting the participants' own values and goals. They represent the kind of community of advantage that Sugden describes—voluntary cooperation that benefits all participants.

Conclusion: Behavioral Economics for Human Flourishing

 Behavioral Economics has given us powerful tools for understanding human decision-making. Its insights into bounded rationality, cognitive biases, and the influence of choice architecture are valuable contributions to our self-knowledge. But these insights can be used in different ways.

 The libertarian paternalist approach—exemplified by Thaler and Sunstein—treats cognitive biases as problems to be solved by wise policy makers who nudge citizens toward better choices. This approach is problematic. It assumes that policy makers can know what is truly good for individuals, it fails to take seriously the plurality and subjectivity of people's values, and it risks undermining autonomy and self-direction.

 The alternative approach, advanced by Sugden, Bates, Den Uyl, and Rasmussen, treats behavioral insights as resources for self-directed individuals. On this view, Behavioral Economics should inform ordinary people about the evidence and let them decide for themselves. The goal is not to replace individual judgment with expert judgment but to equip individuals with better tools for making their own decisions.

Designing and empirically testing self-nudges should be on behavioral economists’ research agendas. Self-nudging respects individual autonomy and helps to alleviate concerns about paternalism and manipulation. People can learn to use nudges to regulate their own behavior.

This approach aligns with the neo-Aristotelian tradition, which understands human flourishing as essentially a self-directed activity. Flourishing is not something that can be imposed from outside; it must be chosen and pursued by each individual. The role of Behavioral Economics, then, is not to provide a substitute for individual judgment but to enhance it—to help individuals understand their own cognitive tendencies, recognize when they are being influenced, and design choice architectures that serve their own conception of the good life. 

The six situations discussed above illustrate how this might work in practice. In each case, the individual, not the policy maker, is the agent of change. The individual chooses the goal, selects the nudge, and takes responsibility for the outcome. This is Behavioral Economics in service of autonomy, freedom, and human flourishing.

Perhaps the deepest application is metacognition—thinking about one’s own thinking. Behavioral Economics gives individuals a vocabulary for examining their own judgments. A person can recognize confirmation bias, anchoring, loss aversion, present bias, overconfidence, framing effects, availability effects, status-quo bias, and other tendencies. The goal should not be to eliminate bias completely. That would be unrealistic. Rather, individuals can learn to recognize when particular biases may be influencing an important decision.

As Sugden reminds us, the market is a community of advantage—a network of voluntary exchanges in which participants can pursue mutual benefit. The same spirit should guide the application of Behavioral Economics. Let us share our insights with one another, learn from the evidence, and design our own choice architectures. Let us be the directors of our own lives, using the tools that Behavioral Economics provides to pursue our own flourishing, in our own way, on our own terms. 

Recommended Reading

Bates, Winton. 2016. “Is Economics Becoming a Branch of Psychology?” Freedom and Flourishing. May 22.

Bates, Winton. 2020. “How is Behavioral Economics Related to Human Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. May 19.

Bates, Winton. 2021. Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books.

Den Uyl, Douglas J and Rasmussen, Douglas B. 2016. The Perfectionist Turn; From Metanorms to Metaethics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Hertwig, Ralph and Reijulas,Samuli . 2020. “Creating Citizen Choice Architects” Behavioral Scientist (Sept.28).

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. 

Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Den Uyl, Douglas J. 2005. Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics. Penn State University Press.

Simon, Herbert A. 1957. Models of Man: Social and Rational. New York: Wiley. 

Simon, Herbert A. 1982. Models of Bounded Rationality: Behavioral Economics and Business Organization." MIT Press.

Smith, Adam. 1759. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Various editions.

Sugden, Robert A.  2018. The Community of Advantage; A Behavioral Economist’s Defense of the Market. Oxford University Press.

Thaler, Richard H. and Sunstein, Cass R. 2008. Nudge Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press. 

Thaler, Richard H. 2015. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. New York: W.W. Norton.

White, Mark D. 2013. The Manipulation of Choice: Ethics and Libertarian Paternalism. Palgrave Macmillan.

Other essays by Ed Younkins on this site:

Younkins, Edward W. “What Contribution did David L. Norton Make to our Understanding of Ethical Individualism?” Freedom and Flourishing. January 18, 2025.

----------------------------“How can dialectics help us to defend liberty?” Freedom and Flourishing. July 8, 2025.

---------------------------“How can Austrian Economics be reconciled with the Neo-Aristotelian philosophy of Freedom and Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. October 2, 2025.

----------------------------- “Can Polarized Moral Politics be Bridged by a Neo-Aristotelian Philosophy of Freedom and Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. December 13, 2025.

----------------------------- “Does Humanomics Need a Moral Anchor?” Freedom and Flourishing. January 22, 2026.

----------------------------- “Is Character Education Compatible With Individualistic Perfectionism?” Freedom and Flourishing. February 27, 2026.

 ----------------------------- “Are Spontaneous Order and neo-Aristotelian Arguments for a Free Society Compatible?” Freedom and Flourishing. March 19, 2026.

----------------------------- “Are Spinoza’s Philosophy and Neo-Aristotelian Philosophies of Freedom and Flourishing Compatible?” Freedom and Flourishing. June 4, 2026. 

----------------------------- “The Architecture of Freedom: Randy Barnett’s Natural Law Case for a Free Society” Freedom and Flourishing. June 26, 2026.

----------------------------- “Robust Political Economy and Neo-Aristotelianism: Complementary Visions of Freedom and Flourishing” Freedom and Flourishing. July 10, 2026.

------------------------------ “Is Ayn Rand’s Philosophy Consistent with Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics?” Freedom and Flourishing. July 26, 2026.

-------------------------------"Henry B. Veatch’s Neo-Aristotelian Defense of Reality, Reason, and Rights” Freedom and Flourishing. August 30, 2026.

What kind of Politics is Consistent with Consent of the Governed?

 

I have been thinking about the kind of politics that is consistent with consent of the governed since reading Max Borders’ book Underthrow: How Jefferson’s Dangerous Idea Will Spark a New Revolution. The book was published in 2023, but I have only recently read it.

The second chapter of the book is entitled “Politics is the Pathology” but Borders' target is contemporary politics. He argues that contemporary politics “brings out the worst in all of us”. He then goes on to argue for social action – a different kind of political activity - which will promote consent of the governed.

A question which the book raises for me is whether underthrow initiatives can be successful in bringing about substantial movement toward consent of the governed without some support from within contemporary political systems.

What does consent mean?

Consent of the governed figures prominently in Borders’ book. He quotes from the United States Declaration of Independence, which asserts that governments “derive their just powers from consent of the governed” and that when government becomes destructive of individual rights, which include “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”, “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government”.

I understand that the American revolutionaries saw election of representatives as the primary vehicle for consent. That view of consent appears to have much in common with the concept of ‘government legitimacy’ as described by modern political scientists who focus on procedural rules such as the existence of free and fair elections. It also appears to have a lot in common with the concept of ‘tacit consent’ as described by John Locke:

John Locke wrote:  

“The difficulty is, what ought to be looked upon as a tacit consent, and how far it binds, i.e. how far any one shall be looked on to have consented, and thereby submitted to any government, where he has made no expressions of it at all. And to this I say, that every man, that hath any possessions, or enjoyment, of any part of the dominions of any government, doth thereby give his tacit consent, and is as far forth obliged to obedience to the laws of that government, during such enjoyment, as any one under it; whether this his possession be of land, to him and his heirs for ever, or a lodging only for a week; or whether it be barely travelling freely on the highway; and in effect, it reaches as far as the very being of any one within the territories of that government” (Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Hollis, London: A. Millar et al., 1764, Second Treatise, Chapter VIII para 119).

However, Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration, held that no generation has a right to bind following generations. On that basis, he argued that every constitution and law naturally expires at the end of 19 years. He added: “If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.”

Would endorsement of a constitution by a majority of voters every 19 years constitute consent of the governed? It might come closer to that ideal than any constitution for any country on earth at present, but a substantial minority of citizens could still claim that they have not given consent to some, or all, of the constitutional provisions agreed to by the majority.

Borders argues that consent of the governed means “a real, contractual civil association that a sovereign person selects in a governance market”. I will outline his ideal model of consent after considering the case he makes that we should be concerned about consent.

What is so important about consent?

Borders makes a powerful moral point by asking questions:

• “if you could choose nonviolent means of achieving social goals such as poverty relief, wouldn’t you?”
• “if it is possible to help the poor (and for the poor to help each other) without resorting to violence, isn’t this something we ought to do?”

He also suggests that it is immoral to impose monolithic systems upon people who prefer to live in a different political, cultural, or economic niche.

The implication is that if any of the current activities of government can be undertaken without resort to the coercive powers of the state (violence) then it is immoral for those activities to performed in a manner that requires citizens to submit to those coercive powers.

Throughout the book, Borders links lack of consent of the governed to a set of interconnected problems in liberal democracies.  These include expansion of authoritarian control; partisan tribalism and civil conflict; an unhealthy focus on national sensationalism; and weakening of community and civil society.

Borders advocates that monolithic systems should be peacefully underthrown rather than violently overthrown.

So, what does underthrow entail?

 Borders has borrowed the concept of “underthrow” from Michael P Gibson, who suggests: “We can underthrow the state one contract at a time.”

The approach to underthrow that Borders develops in this book is based on the framework for utopia that Robert Nozick developed in Part II of Anarchy, State and Utopia. Borders suggests that Nozick’s framework – a scaffolding hospitable to pluralism – can serve as a strategic construct for subversive innovation:

“In reordering Nozick’s premises into a strategic framework of niche creation I call subversive innovation, I look around at the authoritarian powers in our midst. Then, I seek out weak joints or legal gray areas to exploit, in which one might apply a liberatory strategy or recruit new constituencies through entrepreneurial means. Carving niches means experimenting with new governance systems, however modest, hoping that these systems prevail in competition. Such is the delicate dance of dissidence.”

Subversive innovations that Borders mentions in this book include Uber, Airbnb and Bitcoin. The discussion of subversive innovation overlaps considerably with that in The Social Singularity (which I discussed here) and The Decentralist (discussed here). In Underthrow , however, the author also discusses Balaji Srinivasan’s proposals for start-up societies and proposes a program to create a “network state”.

Borders ends this book by urging people to join him in creating a society that will work toward establishing consent of the governed. He views the Freemasons as providing a model for the values-based association of like-minded people that he has proposed.

The political context

I wish Max Borders every success in his ongoing Underthrow activities. I admire his enthusiasm as a political entrepreneur who is seeking “to help people of conscience become a countervailing force”.

Before going further, I should clarify why I have referred to Max as a political entrepreneur. The main reason is that I propose to refer below to a series of essays about political entrepreneurship that I wrote last year. However, I think the description is apt because Max’s innovative endeavours encompass aspects of both economic and political entrepreneurship.

In the epigraph to my essays on political entrepreneurship, I quoted Don Lavoie’s understanding of the links between economic entrepreneurship and culture:

“Entrepreneurship necessarily takes place within culture, it is utterly shaped by culture, and it fundamentally consists in interpreting and influencing culture.”

From Lavoie’s perspective, “entrepreneurial acts are the readings of, and contributions to, different conversations”. In the third essay, I suggested that political entrepreneurs respond to public discourse, using it as a basis for policy innovation.

While developing the line of reasoning leading to his proposals for establishing a society of like-minded individuals Borders is highly critical of the contemporary politics in liberal democracies. I share his concerns about interest group politics (see this essay about the incentives that political entrepreneurs are faced with, this essay about the information constraints facing political entrepreneurs, and this essay about the erosion of norms of political behaviour).

However, as noted at the outset, I find it difficult to see how it will be possible to bring about substantial movement toward consent of the governed without some support from within contemporary political systems. As Borders recognises, subversive innovators face huge difficulties in competing with social insurance programs that are funded by compulsory tax payments.

Perhaps substantial public support for economic freedom (policies that are more consistent with consent of the governed) will return if the current trajectory of many liberal democracies lead to deepening economic crises. Deepening economic crises do seem likely but policy change leading to greater economic freedom will depend on election to government of political entrepreneurs who support greater economic freedom. In the absence of enlightened political leadership, economic crises may well result in deepening authoritarianism.

I concluded my consideration of what kind of political entrepreneurship is required to promote greater liberty by noting that, unfortunately, important reforms in the rules of the game made in some countries during the 1980s and 90s did not become deeply entrenched. Political leaders obtained sufficient electoral support to implement market-friendly policies, but there does not seem to be much evidence that members of the public improved their understanding of the benefits of free markets in any of the countries in which reforms were undertaken.

That led me to consider how the anti-market bias of public opinion could be reduced and to note the historical role of political entrepreneurship in social movements in promoting liberty. I ended by endorsing the view of Ed Younkins that it is through the “numerous interactions with individuals” during their everyday lives that advocates of liberty can “transmit the freedom philosophy to the general public”.

Max Borders’ political entrepreneurship seems to me to be a positive step toward establishing a broadly-based social movement that will enable substantial steps to be taken toward making consent of the governed a reality. Hopefully, one day that movement will become sufficiently influential to enlist the support of political entrepreneurs within government that will be necessary to enable citizens to opt out of coercive collectivism.

Conclusion

Max Borders makes a compelling moral case that we should prefer peaceful, voluntary paths to social goals over means that require citizens to submit to the coercive powers of the state, and underthrow offers a model for how such paths might be built one contract, one niche, at a time. But the question I raised at the outset remains: can underthrow deliver substantial movement toward consent of the governed without support from within contemporary political systems?

The experience of market-friendly reforms in the 1980s and 90s suggests that action within contemporary political systems can be helpful. The reforms occurred because political entrepreneurs won sufficient electoral support to legislate change, but those changes did not become deeply entrenched, in part because the public's underlying understanding of why free markets serve human flourishing was never substantially improved. Subversive innovation of the kind Borders proposes may be one of the more promising ways of closing that gap: niches that actually work can teach by demonstration in a way that political argument alone cannot.

Rather than viewing underthrow and electoral political entrepreneurship as rival strategies, I see them as potentially complementary: subversive innovation can demonstrate what consent-based alternatives look like in practice, while political entrepreneurs working within existing systems can widen the legal and political space in which those alternatives are permitted to grow.