 However, to reach the conclusion that the government should provide public goods, one requires a number of additional assumptions, all of which are controversial. Standard welfare economics identifies well-being with preference satisfaction, a view that has received much criticism (see entry on  well being;  Nussbaum 2001; Hausman et al. 2017: Ch. 8; Reiss 2013: Ch. 12). It is implausible to assume that people always choose what is best for them. People may have inconsistent or unstable preferences such as the smoker who flushes his cigarettes down the toilet in an attempt to quit smoking, just in order to buy a new pack the next day. If people have inconsistent or unstable preferences, it is unclear which consistent set to choose for policy. Uninformed preferences also appear to be a bad basis for policy. If people erroneously believe, say, that there is no external threat, they might prefer less investment in national defence than if they were fully informed. It has been argued that in the political realm, insufficient knowledge is the norm rather than the exception (Somin 1998, Caplan 2007, Somin 2013). It might be extraordinarily difficult to assess the value of a public good to an individual, especially if the public good is a national or global one such as defence, climate change mitigation or basic research.