Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

According to the authors, man is not the hard, cold rationalist, or economic man, who is often described in free market postulations, but is instead quite fallible, even the highly-educated. The thinking and perceptions of man are constantly being waylaid by subtle influences which result in bad choices. The authors propose "libertarian paternalism," a catchall term for the subtle persuasion of people to make decisions that are helpful to them. However, if one examines our economic system, the authors' fears that their paternalism is freedom stifling pale next to the realities of consumer manipulation by large economic entities.

The first section of the book describing the various influences on erroneous thinking are fairly basic, much of it demonstrated in psychological experimentation. Unfortunately, life is a good bit more complicated than merely making so-called correct decisions about trivial or contrived matters. There are many areas in our lives where powerful institutions have created a situation where there are no good choices for most of us.

Take retirement savings, 401k plans, and investment decisions. Workers did not choose for corporations to abandon defined benefit plans and put the onus on workers to save for retirement. Many workers don't contribute to 401k plans because they have insufficient income - not that they cannot make a decision, a fundamental fact not mentioned by the authors. It is simply disingenuous to criticize workers for the performance of mutual funds in today's stock markets, for their investment "choices." Stock markets have been captured by financial elites who use others' investments as money to play with. The ordinary 401k contributor absolutely does not have the tools or the means to manage their investments on a minute-by-minute basis aided by sophisticated computer software.

The idea that parents don't correctly choose a good school for their children is absurd. Let's say in a school district of 100,000 students that there are five good schools with total enrollment of 10,000. Of course, all parents want their children to go to those five schools, or could easily be so persuaded - an obvious impossibility. This is a problem of poor schools, not a failure of parents to choose. Or take the new Part D of Medicare, the Prescription Drug Plan - this plan was designed by insurance companies to be completely incomprehensible with all kinds of loopholes where benefits do not have to be paid. Do the authors really want to use this as an example of choice failure? This is a scam that has been perpetrated on the American public.

On the surface, there can hardly be anything wrong with the idea of improving choices; who advocates making poor choices. However, let's consider our environment. We live in a capitalistic economy - profits are virtually all that matter. Giving good information to people is not a priority; in fact, it could be argued that giving disinformation is, especially if it positively affects the bottom line. What is advertising? It is disingenuous to write a book about poor choices without situating those choices. There are many powerful players who are successful because they count on poor choices and ensure that those choices continue. That is the book that needs to be written.

If and when we ever empower the citizens of this nation to control the nature of our institutions, then criticize the result and the choices. Now the choices we have are not really choices.

while the ideas behind this book are interesting, they do not warrant a book-length examination. good for the authors for being libertarian--it is mentioned relentlessly throughout the manuscript--and good for them for figuring out the whole choice architecture thing and coining such a pop term. but everyone participates in choice architecture when they make decisions, whether they realize it or not. does it matter if people know that they are doing it and that it has a name? i doubt it.

i did like the idea of separating "marriage" and "civil union"--all 6-8 pages of it-- and that was interesting. overall this would have made for a great nation or new criterion article, but not a book. skip it the book, read the reviews here (some of which are more enlightening than the book itself) and re-read freakonomics instead.

The subject matter is good but like so many books of this type, it would have been a much better read at 1/3 its length.

This book provides insights to those who need to move people to make good decisions and if they cannot, then the default would do them the least harm. Many of the examples that they have provided are not new, e.g. Singapore has adopted the opt-out model for organ donation years ago. The idea on privatising marriage by the authors is an interesting one.

A book as progressively forward thinking as this appears to be, ought to be priced in line with the Kindle standard pricing "theory". Perhaps the $15.44 marker is merely one giant "paternalistic libertarian" choice-architecture experiment? I wonder. . . .