Nudge
Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
How the design of a choice shapes the choice, and the case for arranging defaults to help people.
Thaler and Sunstein argue that there is no neutral way to present a choice, so whoever designs the presentation is already influencing the outcome and might as well do it helpfully. Their term for it is libertarian paternalism: change the default, keep the options. The book gave governments the vocabulary of the nudge unit, and its authors a Nobel Prize between them.
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Robert J. Shiller
Cass Sunstein, one of the two authors, was in a high position in the Obama administration, and some of their proposals made it into legislation. I’m not a political scientist; government is imperfect, and it reflects special interests, but sometimes it triumphs. Sometimes it does work. You bring in experts and they point out that we need to put chlorine in the water supply, and we do it. It does work.
Interview · January 2018
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