A REALITY SHOW FOR SURVEILLANCE

Red-light cameras show us the flaw in the theory that government will ‘nudge’ us into doing the right thing

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

The Wall Street Journal
February 5, 2016

“Any terrorist who doesn’t watch this for tips is, frankly, a mug.”

So went a headline in the Times of London about a popular new British reality show for the surveillance age, called “Hunted.”

Participants, drawn from ordinary folk, are given the equivalent of $650 and an hour’s head-start. They “win” if they can elude capture for 28 days by a team of British security experts using tools similar to those available to British police. Not many succeed. Early lessons include: stay away from ATMs, stay off public transportation, resist the urge to pick up the phone and let a loved one know how you’re doing.

Automatic license-plate readers, with which Britain is festooned, have proved especially deadly. If you’re using a car that can be traced to you, steer clear of main roads. Don’t pass through town centers.

“It is possible to stay off the grid, but getting increasingly harder every year,” explains the reality show’s hunter-in-chief, a former counterterrorism czar for the City of London.

The show has been a hit with British viewers, riding a wave of perverse pride and outrage over the country’s notorious “surveillance culture.” CBS recently bought the rights and probably won’t be too upset by an article in the latest Atlantic magazine about a U.S. company, Vigilant Solutions, amassing a database of billions of license-plate photos of Americans going about their business. License-plate tracking, says the magazine, is an “unprecedented threat to privacy.”

Quite possibly, but missing from such privacy freakouts usually is a clear sense of exactly why privacy (or perhaps more accurately, anonymity) should be valuable to us.

Fortunately the city of Chicago has provided a first cut at an answer to this question with last week’s conviction of former official charged with accepting $2 million in bribes from a company that ran the city’s red-light cameras. As the Chicago Tribune noted: “Testimony in the trial indicated that greed—not safety—was the driving force behind the city’s expansion of the camera network into the largest in the nation.”

This purely mercenary motive might at first seem reassuring: At least the cameras aren’t being used to gather details on citizens’ private lives. But the Trib continues, “Nearly half the red light cameras have resulted in no reduction in dangerous T-bone crashes and likely are making intersections more dangerous because of an increase in rear-end crashes as people stop short to avoid a ticket.”

All this will seem old hat to some readers. We’ve been pointing out for a decade the habit in many jurisdictions of setting yellow lights at or below the three-second minimum in order to ring up more tickets even at the cost of creating more accidents. But demonstrated here is a flaw in the theory of “Nudge,” the Obama-touted book by University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein on how government can use gentle rewards and punishments to improve us. Such theories fail to reckon with the incentives of the politicians and officials who design the programs.

Take ObamaCare, partly a giant exercise in nudge. Because Americans supposedly don’t worry enough about their health, ObamaCare encourages them by making “preventive” care exempt from copays and deductibles. But because lots of medical specialties and trade groups have the administration’s ear, their services have been labeled “preventive.” Because it helps to validate the Democrats’ “war on women” theme, many services for women have also been labeled “preventive.”

As a result, copays and deductibles for other services have become so towering that customers with minor injuries or illness might as well be uninsured. They face the same financial incentive to skip care that an uninsured person does.

Not to belabor the obvious, but insurers in a natural market would never design their policies this way, because nobody would buy them. But politics is in charge. The design is irresistibly shaped by interest groups lined up at the Washington trough.

Britain once claimed its camera network would “deny criminals the use of the roads.” A decade later, though the cameras have helped solve a few high-profile crimes, Britain’s overall crime rate has remained unaffected. The financial motive is easier to observe. As one camera promoter told an undercover reporter for the Mail on Sunday: “The money will come in buckets.”

Alas, these dangers are partly self-inflicted, as the Chicago case demonstrates. Fearful older citizens support the cameras even when recognizing (as they tell pollsters) that the city’s motive is financial.
Citizens aren’t likely to become better citizens under close monitoring, with punishments meted out electronically. They are likely to become children, fearful and compliant. Worse, they become children of a parent (government) that is always putting its own needs and interests first.