Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Behavioural economics has rapidly become popularised and a couple of titles have made the best seller list, but if you read only one or two this should be on your list. What makes this different is that the authors come up with policy options which could significantly improve public policy choices and save our taxes.

With the widely recognized academic reputation of Thaler, I would have expected a far more creative book that covers new territory. I only made it half way through and put it down because it wasn't telling me anything new. This book largely reframes what has been written by several other authors.

so yeah i did what they said on pg 17-18 and measured the dimensions of the tabletop diagrams. the two tabletops on pg 17 measure 5.25mm by 2.5mm and 5.5mm by 2.2mm respectively. A smaller difference that the naked eye suggests, but a difference nonetheless. Then on pg 18 we're presented with a different diagram of two identical tabletops, 2.4mm by 5.4mm (or thereabouts, the sides aren't all even in any of the diagrams) and told these tabletops have the same dimensions as those on pg 17, thus proving they were identical all along. wtf?

I agree with other reviewers that the topic, though interesting, does not warrant book-length treatment.

I also think the authors fudge the definition of "nudge." For instance, in the last section of "12 nudges," they mention Automatic Tax Returns for those who don't itemize deductions. Purportedly, such automatic filing will save tax filers millions of hours of time a year. Probably a good idea, but how is making something automatic, in effect reducing choice, a libertarian nudge? And really, how is it different now from the current choice architecture, in which filing is mandated anyway? Similarly, while I enjoyed the idea of separating "marriage" and "civil union" and I think it might make good public policy, I don't really see how it fits into the idea of "nudging." This complaint goes hand in hand with my first one, which is that, in order to come up with enough material to make a book, they had to really stretch on some of the nudges.

Finally, and maybe I'm being nit-picky, but I was driven crazy by the amount of parenthetical phrases. It seems, especially in the first half, that every other sentence had something or other in parentheses, most of which in my opinion either could be removed or didn't belong in parentheses in the first place. It really made parts hard to read.

The book is very well written, has some excellent points and is in generel very informative. The one thing dragging this book down is the distribution of subjects it covers.

More than 60% of the book, concerns itself with current political topics in the US, and how they could be handled better by using "nudges" and decision architecture. This has 2 major side-effects, 1. It's mostly irrelevant for non-US citizens, 2. In 5 years time, it will also be irrelevant for US citizens, since they problems mentioned are very specific and will most likely no longer be relevant.

The remains of the book is split something like this:
10% What is a nudge (as well as the Econs Vs. Humans)
5% What is liberal paternalism
20% Defense of liberal paternalism against critics
>5% How do you nudge people.

I highly recommend reading the first 100 pages or so, sadly the remaining 200 pages are mostly filler.