Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Nutshell review - The book covers Libertarian Paternalism, how to help people be free in their choices and, at the same time, help them make better and more informed ones. An informative book about human nature, human behaviour and into ways in which we can improve our decision making processes. Thought provoking.

The book initially starts out very interesting in its theory. Once it starts moving on into its sections on how their theory could improve the different parts of our lives, to include money, health, and education, it just becomes very dull. For example, they go in depth into how to improve social security using in depth examples, when they could have gotten to the point. I beleive most of the book was written to fill enough pages to publish. The attempts at humor in this book are all directed at "econs", and is not quite as entertaining to the rest of us as it is to the authors. The stars are given only because of the first part of the book,which explains choice architecture. The rest of the book is given a one star, it was not worth reading beyond part 1.

Well, humans are not as intelligent as we think. The first segment of this charming book is about experiments that make it clear we just don't think lots of the time. Of course, there are times when we can't have all the information necessary to make a good choice. So the point of the book is how "choice architects" can "nudge" people to make choices that are in their best interest. The book is very readable, it has a casual style that makes economics much less intimidating than it usually is. But it certainly provides a dose of self-awareness most of us probably will be embarrassed about - a smiley face can affect adult behavior!

The fashionable ideas of behaviourial economists like this are elitist rubbish. Who decides what "positive social norms" people need to be nudged toward? Those same would-be decision makers are just as fallible, lazy, stupid, greedy, weak, loss-averse, stubborn, and prone to inertia and conformism (and poor decision-makers) as the people to be nudged.

In this lovely, useful book, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein examine choices, biases and the limits of human reasoning from a variety of perspectives. They often amuse by disclosing how they have fallen victim to the limitations of thought that they are describing. The fact that these educated, articulate professionals can fool themselves so often demonstrates how tough it is to think clearly, a point the authors emphasize and even repeat. Humans fall prey to systematic errors of judgment, but you can harness this problematic tendency productively, including by helping others make better decisions. Some of the authors' suggestions may not be practical, but many are and all are interesting. getAbstract recommends this book to anyone who wants to know how to shape responsible decisions.