I look forward to reading your new blog. If only we had more people in charge who think along these lines. But then, perhaps human nature can also explain why people these days are so skeptical, if not outright distrustful, of experts (i.e. why people who have not studied a subject still assume they know better than those who have).

Dr. Ubel,

There are so many problems with what you are advancing I am not sure where to start.

"Scientocracy", or rule by scientists, is what you really mean, right? Or else you would not use the term. You seem very interested in controlling others. Whether you do it for the most humane reasons, from your point of view, is irrelevant.

To label free-market champions as mere evangelists is quite a dismissal. But you do not even address the the proper idea of "rational" in free market theory. In Austrian economics, humans are hard-wired as logical animals. It is not that humans make the right decisions or most efficient decisions- but that they act purposively toward ends that they want. Your idea of irrationality- whether it is obesity, smoking or otherwise, is just another way of stating your personal preferences. Your brand of "behavioral economics" is just a cloak for your totalitarian mindset.

If I grant you that humans are in need of special intervention to correct their "irrationality" it does not follow that government, what you call "policy", would be the best means for achieving the ends. Government is manned by the very same irrationals, humans, you so want to fix. What is worse, government tends to exploit its power and privilege. Who will watch and check the scientocratic powers? Do you think government is or can be made benign?

Markets make people more accountable for their actions because of the the lack of legal, political privilege. It is policy types like you that have created disastrous "scientific" alternatives to markets: the Federal Reserve System, the Pentagon, and the alphabet soup of government agencies. Destruction of the economy and imperial wars is what we get from policy.

Nevermind just free market thought. Here is JS Mill from his famous classic liberal essay "On Liberty" (thanks Gil Guillory):

"The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State, which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish."