Customer Reviews

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(34)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

I liked the beginning of the book, but it became repetitive and boring after first three chapters. It could be due to the fact that I generally agree with the major premise of the book: people should be "nudged" to make a decision that will make them better off. And yes, the nudge should be transparent and not synonym to manipulating people's minds. And yes, the government has my permission to nudge me in the right direction; if as a result I will make a decision (for example) to exercise more and eat less junk food.
(As a side note, I will be happy to have such a smart government. Or well, this could be an issue. But this is a subject for another book).
I got it, and I don't need three chapters to convince me. Am I alone in this?

I was much more interested in why and how our brain works to react to the "nudges" ("popular psychology" side that was almost non-existent), than in authors' rebukes to the opponents of "libertarian paternalism" - the political implementation of their theory. The other thing that annoyed me was the authors' attempt to be funny and coin terms, names and definitions that were supposed to make the book readable. Instead, it got annoying after the third appearance of the term "libertarian paternalism" and after the fifth time I saw the term "Econ" (used for infamously rational person from economics textbooks).

I had an opportunity to listen to Thaler's presentation on this subject and it was lively and interesting. He is a brilliant speaker with many great ideas; unfortunately, it didn't translate into the brilliant writing.

I would still recommend the book for the ideas of "nudges" in different areas (personal finance, energy conservation, marketing, politics and everyday life). However, it fells short on the inspirational side. You shouldn't be able to put this book down. But you are.

Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein are both professors at the University of Chicago and where the Chicago school was once famous for the Milton Friedman doctrine of free markets (look where they've got us today!) Thaler and now his Law professor friend Cass Sunstein have swung the pendulum the other way.

Here in Nudge, they argue that totally free markets can lead to disasters precisely because human individuals are not actually very good decision-makers. As Behavioural Economists (Kahneman & Tversky Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases- who credited Thaler as being a key inspiration - and Dan Ariely, whose Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions has become a best seller) argue, we are riddled with little psychological tics in our decision-making processes. We buy things, then suffer remorse. We get confused by choices and often make no choice at all.

But where Ariely keeps his discourse in the world of the day to day, Thaler and Sunstein develop an argument that is political - and is bound to cause heated debate. What they argue is that, in the face of our decision-making weaknesses, Governments and Businesses can help "nudge" us in the right direction. The elephant in the room can be benign.

They call their viewpoint `libertarian paternalism' and what they argue is that it would be a good thing for some gentle nudging of the citizenry in the right direction. As Thaler said recently in the New York Times: "In light of human limitations, Cass Sunstein and I argue for policies that we call libertarian paternalism. Although the phrase sounds like an oxymoron, we contend that it is often possible to design policies, in both the public and private sector, that make people better off -- as judged by themselves -- without coercion. We oppose bans; instead, we favor nudges."

How does a Government do this without imposing laws and edicts. A primary argument is that defaults can be set that counter the tendency by humans to procrastinate or make no decision. One example is the Save More Tomorrow Plan which Thaler developed back in 1996 as an employer sponsored retirement plan for employees. Instead of presenting the details and asking employees to consciously sign-up to increase their savings each time they got a pay rise, the plan presented the details and asked employees to basically check the box if they wished in future to automatically increase their savings as their pay went up. To pre-commit. Such schemes have proved very successful, yet they offer the same free choice, though with a different default.

As Thaler argues: "Since it is often impossible for private and public institutions to avoid picking some option as the default, why not pick one that is helpful?"

Another form of nudge might be the act of disclosure. Thaler & Sunstein argue, for example that credit card companies should issue annual statements that tell us how much we've spent this year on late fees and interest. Again: we have the complete freedom to use cards as we want, but the additional information may help us reframe our own spending strategies. Or how about stickers on new cars that show how much gasoline each vehicle would burn over the next 5 years under typical usage. Hold that Hummer.

These are examples of what the authors call helpful "choice architecture." Nice phrase. The architecture puts our options on more clear display.

I must say, I like the thinking here, and it gives credence to agent-based simulation modelling I've carried out whereby small changes can lead to big effects.

But this volume is about more than modelling and mere theory. One cannot help but think that the book has been timed to coincide with the meltdown of the present economy. The free market, the totally free market, the authors implicitly argue, needs quite a nudge itself. Rather than seeking highly regulated solutions, the better response might simply be a series of tweaks to the choice architecture that influences our spending, saving, health care and borrowing patterns.

The authors present a clear argument and no doubt it will cause heated and lively debate. This book has landed like a rock, right into the centre of the current and somewhat stagnant economic pond. It will definitely cause ripples. Well worth reading.

"Buy on apples, sell on cheese" is an old proverb among wine merchants. Taking a bite of an apple before tasting wine makes it easier to detect flaws in the wine, and the buyer who does so will not as easily make the mistake of paying more than the wine is worth. Cheese, on the other hand, pairs well with wine and enhances its flavor, so a seller who offers cheese may command a higher price for the wine (and may even deserve it, if the wine is intended to be drunk with cheese).

The proverb captures important psychological nuances of choice. The same product - a bottle of wine or a risky medical procedure - may be perceived differently depending on its context, and it is often possible to arrange the context to influence a choice while still maintaining the decision maker's autonomy.

The practice of structuring choices is called "choice architecture" in a brilliant and important new book, Nudge, by University of Chicago Distinguished Professors Richard Thaler (Business) and Cass Sunstein (Law). Nudge lays out the groundwork for the science of choice architecture in investing, insurance, health care delivery, and other areas, and argues for a "libertarian paternalism" in which choices are structured to make it more likely that a decision maker will select what is considered the most beneficial option, without impairing the ability to decision makers to select other options. For example, making enrollment in 401(k) plans automatic for new employees, with a form for opting out, is likely to result in greater retirement savings than an opt-in system, without limiting anyone's freedom to choose.

Thaler and Sunstein apply the principles of choice architecture to a few problems in health care (How could Medicare part D be improved? How can organ donation rates be increased? Why shouldn't patients be allowed to waive their right to sue for medical negligence in return for cheaper health care?) But the concepts in the book go beyond their specific examples and could prove very useful to practicing clinicians, who, they note, are often in the position of being choice architects for their patients.

Their principles of choice architecture (paraphrased by me and focused on physicians helping patients make decisions) are:

* Make sure incentives are aligned with desired outcomes
* Help patients map outcomes of different alternatives into formats they can understand (a major focus of Medical Decision Making as well)
* Arrange default options to favor better health. Pediatricians have done a good job of making vaccination a default option.
* Provide timely and relevant feedback about choices and outcomes. A patient seeking to lose weight needs to experience feedback in the form of measurable progress soon enough that they are not discouraged.
* Expect error and develop systems to prevent, detect, and minimize it. For example, pill cases and inhalers with dosage counters are simple and valuable ways to reduce the frequent errors people make in remembering medication. Psychological research provides direction as to what kinds of errors are to be expected when people are making decisions.
* Structure complex choices to reduce the difficulty of making good decisions. In many ways, that's what medical decision making -- and Medical Decision Making -- is about.

I highly recommend Nudge. It's a great read, and has the potential to change the way you think about clinical practice and medical decisions.

The good part of this book is that it contains a lot of practical and nonpartisan policy advice, such as requiring corporations to sign people up for the 401(k) by default and then letting them opt out. This is an example of what they mean by "nudge". You don't need to coerce people; since something has to be the default option you can at least give them intelligent defaults.

The bad side of the book is its poor understanding of human nature. Libertarian economists such as Gary Becker have been aggressively promoting free markets based on a mathematical vision of rational decision making. Needless to say, this vision could only apply to ultra-logical people like Mr. Spock - the notorious Homo economicus. The breakthroughs of behavioral economics teach us that real people do not act like Mr. Spock. This book does an excellent job explaining the major findings of behavioral economics. But rather than try to understand the richness of real human behavior, most behavioral economists tilt towards the opposite extreme. They pronounce humans as irrational and filled with hidden biases. Homo economicus has been replaced by Homo irrationalus.

That's unfortunate because the real story of human nature is far more interesting. Consider the case of loss aversion (pp 33-34). In a classic experiment which has been replicated hundreds of times, students were randomly given free coffee mugs. The mug-less students were asked how much they would pay to get a mug and the students with mugs were asked how much they would want in order to sell their mugs. It turns out that students with mugs wanted an average of about twice as much as the mug-less students were willing to pay! This goes by the name of loss aversion, the endowment effect, and the status quo bias. It is labeled a bias because a self-respecting member of Homo economicus would think about how often he drinks coffee, how often he does the dishes, and how many mugs he currently has. Based on this analysis he would put a price on a new coffee mug. That price would not influence by whether or not he just got a mug for free. But in fact this behavior is rational. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein conclude that "loss aversion operates as a kind of cognitive nudge, pressing us not to make changes, even when changes are very much in our interests." (p.34)

The method behind our seemingly irrational madness is found in a classic problem in game theory - the game of hawks and doves. Hawk and dove are different strategies people can use when they are in a conflict over a prize. The prize could be anything. For butterflies it could be a sunlit leaf because male butterflies have more mating success when they occupy such a position. For feral horses it could be a pool of water (Herb Gintis reviews the literature in _The Bounds of Reason_). Doves are sharers. When two doves see a prize they will share it. When two hawks see a prize they will fight over it. When a hawk meets a dove the dove will yield the prize to the hawk. A world of all doves is basically a communist utopia where everyone shares everything. It is also efficient because people maximize the use of available resources (prizes). The problem is that it is not what biologists and game theorists call an evolutionary stable strategy. It can easily be invaded by hawks. The first person to switch to the hawk strategy will get the entire prize without cost wherever he goes. Over time more and more and people will play hawk. That's inefficient because the cost of fighting must be subtracted from the value of the prize.

We have a problem. A world with doves is efficient but unstable. A world with hawks is inefficient but stable. The evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith found the answer - the bourgeois strategy. That means "play hawk when you own the prize and dove when someone else does." A world of bourgeoisie is efficient because it eliminates fighting as effectively as the dove strategy. It is also an evolutionary stable strategy that cannot be invaded by hawks. That's because hawks are basically parasites on doves - they need the free prizes to offset the cost of fighting. A necessary consequence of adopting the bourgeois strategy is that people will value prizes that they own more than prizes that other people own. That's the real reason for loss aversion. It is not a "bias" but an efficient and stable strategy that provides the strategic foundation for the rule of law. The cost of enforcing the law goes up with the number of people who are trying to break it. If people did not have a sense of loss aversion then there would be more useful trades - but there would also be conflict and fighting over prizes.

That is just one example and this is already a long review but these kinds of lessons underlie nearly all of the so-called "biases" that Thaler and Sunstein identify. If you want to learn about Homo economicus then pick up _The Economics of Life_ by Gary Becker. If you want to about Homo irrationalus then buy this book. But if you want to learn about Homo sapiens then you will need to look elsewhere. I recommend starting with Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious_ by Gerd Gigerenzer. It is the book that _Blink_ by Malcolm Gladwell should have been. Books that talk discuss the hawk-dove game and other fascinating results out of evolutionary game theory are pretty scholarly. Games in Economic Development only requires high school algebra and you can easily skip over the math. I also think that most people interested in this book would enjoy Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism. It is an accessible but sophisticated look at modern economics, including some behavioral economics.

This book covers a lot of ground, and none of it is covered with any rigour or depth.

There are occasional interesting pieces of insight - for example, if you want people to reduce their energy usage, it may be enough to tell above-average users that they are in that category - below-average users, not so much, they may then use more energy - but you can counter this by a nice smiley emoticon next to where that fact is displayed (implying they're doing a great thing by using less energy) and their usage will stay low.

The problem is, to gain these nice pieces of insight, I had to dig through much much more content that was not covered well.

Here are some of the the things you'll find in this book

- A superficial review of psychology research concerning a few factors on how people make choices (For example, too many choices lead to overwhelm and bad decisions. Another example - people can be influenced to make a bad decision if others around them are making bad decisions).
- A explanation of how people can be helped to make good choices, for example with food, by where food is placed on store shelves (e.g. at eye level vs not).
- Many many pages of excruciating detail on why choices of medical insurance plans can be a complex and painful process. Ditto for how the complexity of investing can lead to bad investment choices. None of this is original.
- A fairly basic solution proposed to complexity of choices - regulations to require providers to provide information on the implications of their choices - for example, lenders should provide documentation of the implications of a given choice of loan - what you'd end up paying over time (not just at the time of initial "special deals") and what the worst case scenario would imply in terms of costs for you. This information, the authors advise, should not be buried in the fine print. Very very obvious stuff.
- A chapter on making organ donation to be opt-out instead of opt-in. One of the better chapters, with some evidence given of it having worked in some countries. But could have been dealt with in a few paragraphs, did not need to be stretched to a chapter (admittedly a short chapter).
- Some attempts at philosophical argument for why governments should be allowed to "nudge" people to better choices, but not done to any depth or rigour.
- Several side comments that did not provide any new insights - for example, that the principle of what actions are being taken by those in authority should be transparent might have prevented the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. Again, nothing original here.
- Several trite pieces of advice about how publicising a commitment you've made (e.g. to lose weight) and setting up disincentives for failure (e.g. a certain amount of money to be donated to a cause you disapprove of) can help you achieve the goal. Again, nothing new here.
- A more reasonable chapter on privatizing marriage - the goal being to allow religious groups to endorse marriages based on their convictions, but for all partnerships to be granted equal legal status. Not really related to the concept of nudging though, and drawn out and padded with sociological thoughts on what function marriage has historically served, which does not seem to be the authors' field of expertise.
- Random pieces of advice such as permitting motorcycle riders to not wear helmets if they take extra training and show evidence of medical insurance. If I could be sure that they are also paying higher insurance premiums I might not be too annoyed at that one, but the authors don't venture into this area of discussion so again I felt their treatment of this topic was incomplete.
- A recommendation that the Social Security Administration assist those claiming benefits by making more clear at what age you should start collecting the benefits if you want to obtain the maximum amount of money by it (allowing for things like, maybe I'm ok with less money if I want it sooner). Having a payer assist a payee in taking maximum advantage is nice and altruistic, good luck with getting that happening.

Overall it felt like the authors had a collection of unrelated instances of advice that they were trying to force to fit the concept of a "nudge".

If you are interested in this kind of content from a psychology viewpoint, read Freakonomics (Dubner and Levitt), Predictably Irrational (Ariely), Influence (Cialdini), Tipping Point (Gladwell). For the investment advice and bits of self-help associated with that, David Bach does a better job in his various books.

Nudge's purpose is to use our understanding of Man As He Is to build better policies. Rather than assume a perfectly rational human who can parse long, complicated documents with his mighty, limitless brain, Man As He Is sometimes skims and can be deceived by cleverly worded contracts. Man As He Is is often aware of his own limitations: he'll flush his cigarettes down the toilet to prevent his future self from doing what his present self knows to be harmful; he'll promise to start exercising tomorrow; and he'll curse himself for procrastinating. Perfectly Rational Man -- whom Thaler and Sunstein call an "Econ," to be contrasted with a "Human" -- would never have these problems. Econs sit down with (notional) pencil and paper and calmly work out the costs and benefits of all available actions, then take the action that maximizes their present and future happiness subject to a discount rate (future happiness is worth less than the same quantity of present happiness). They don't have an internal procrastinator at war with a rational planner, nor do they ever regret on Sunday morning what they did on Saturday night.

Nudge is for Humans, not Econs. Nudge realizes, for instance, that making 401(k)s opt-out rather than opt-in, and setting a reasonable default investment plan, will lead lots more people to save money for retirement. And now that they've been enrolled, very few people will opt out. This is what Thaler and Sunstein call "libertarian paternalism": giving people a gentle push in the direction of their own best interests (the "paternalism" part), but never taking away choices (the "libertarian" part). People can quit at any time; it's only the default that has changed.

Your 401(k)'s default investment plan is part of what Thaler and Sunstein call "choice architecture." As a 401(k) administrator, I can guide your choices in any number of ways. I can choose opt-in or opt-out; if I choose opt-out, I have to choose a default plan, whereas if I choose opt-in, I have to decide how much prodding to give you. The point is that choice is inevitable. There's no way to avoid structuring the options available to people, so the right thing to do is to pick the best default. Given this realization, most of Nudge will be entirely uncontroversial.

Thaler and Sunstein digest a mountain of psychological research and reassemble it into a convincing story about how to build policies that correct for human failings. Humans can be expected to make the right decision when faced with a routine, concrete problem -- buying food at the grocery store, say -- but all bets are off when we're asked to evaluate a complicated, large-scale problem like the impact of our air-conditioner usage on global climate change. Thaler and Sunstein want to give the market itself a nudge here. They wouldn't insist that we buy only low-power appliances. Instead, they want our appliances to give us simple, immediate feedback on our energy usage: thermometers that reveal moment-to-moment energy costs, say, and EPA fuel-economy infographics that use easy-to-understand metrics like "dollars per year."

Econs may be able to consume any information thrown at them and correctly render a judgment from what they read; Humans have finite attention spans and would rather spend time with their families than pore over fuel-economy tables. If we want Humans to make the best choices, we have to structure their choice environment to make this possible. Nudge is Thaler and Sunstein's brilliant contribution toward this goal.

Nobody forced my neighbor to buy that expensive plasma TV. After reading Nudge now he knows why he spent so much more money than he intended. It seemed like such a bargain, standing right next to a much more expensive set in the store display. In Thaler and Sunstein's terms, the store nudged him to buy that TV. They organized the choice set in a way that gently moved him towards what they want him to do. They got him to buy a pricey TV by taking advantage of the principle of contrast. Such psychological biases have been exploited since the beginning of human commerce to sell us things we don't need. This book makes a compelling argument that the same psychological biases can be used to get us what we really want.

After reading Nudge it is easy to understand how small things can make a big difference. For instance, most people I know would like to save more money; most of them don't. Nudge convincingly argues that people can, and should be helped to do that. Very few of us can commit to saving more money today, but most of us can commit today to save more money tomorrow. This human tendency can be used to help people save, and Nudge describes how several companies have already implemented such programs successfully by nudging employees to committing in advance to save part of a future salary increase.

By relying on a large body of work in Psychology and Behavioral Economics, Thaler and Sunstein elegantly argue that people have predictable, systematic biases and that this knowledge can be put to work to help all of us.

Their basic thesis is simple and brilliant: First, how options are presented matters. There is no neutral way to present options. If you present the salads first in a buffet, people will eat more healthy food than if you put salads at the end. Second, don't reduce choice, but organize the options so that people will be more likely to end up with what they themselves would prefer. This is as true for the salad bar as it is for health care.

This amazing book is useful for individuals and policy makers. Policy makers should be interested because such "choice architecture" is strictly non-partisan. Individuals should be interested because this book will nudge them to improve their life their way.

The sub title of the book "Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness" should have been a hint at what the book was really about which is "choice architecture" a way to further "libertarian paternalism" meaning that if choices are presented to you in a certain way, you'll make better choices and it'll seem like you're making the choice of your own free will instead of being "nudged" into making the "right" choice.

I'm a big fan of learning why we make the types of choices we make and possibly how to influence those choices. I'm also a big fan of learning how to make better choices for myself.

This book, however, leans heavily to the public policy side of things like how to get people to choose more wisely for retirement savings and the like. It really isn't about Health, Wealth and Happiness. It's about creating systems to "nudge" people into making choices they might not otherwise make.

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.

My dictionary tells me that "nudge," which rhymes with "judge" and means a gentle push, is probably of Norwegian origin. The authors are careful to distinguish this from the Yiddishism "noodge," meaning pest or bore (@4). So maybe a bakkel, which is what they call doughnuts in Norway, would be a more appropriate analogy for this book than a bagel. But either way, the book is missing something at its core. And it is not as much of a departure from the Chicago School worldview as some reviews would have you believe.

1. Richard Thaler (RT) and Cass Sunstein (CS) base their recommendations on the experimental studies of A. Tversky, D. Kahneman and, among others, RT himself. As developed during the past three decades or so, these have led to the field of "behavioral economics" (and a Nobel Prize for Kahneman). The gist is that people have certain "irrational" ways of looking at the world that lead them to act differently from the way most economists assume for their convenience of their theories. By "nudge" they mean a design element in a thing or in a process that anticipates these psychological tendencies, and steers people toward behavior that, ideally, helps them without limiting their freedom.

Many of the principles and techniques they describe (which other reviewers on this page summarize) have been known and exploited for far longer than there were fancy names for them. Retailers have set at prices $9.98 rather than $10.00 since time immemorial, relying on "availability". The wisdom of writing contracts and designing business processes with "idiot-proof" procedures (the term I was taught decades ago, in lieu of "nudge") is similarly ancient, at least within better law firms and companies. So RTCS's notion that nudges could be used more often when designing social policy shouldn't be very controversial. And on their face, many of their analyses make sense.

2. RTCS do skate on thin ice near the end, when they make it explicit that they're relying on "the invisible hand" of markets to make their proposals work (e.g., @239-240) - a hand whose existence, or at least invisibility, is controversial. They're also on shaky ground when they suggest that John Rawls's "publicity principle" should be a constraint on nudges "in both the public and private sectors" (@244-245). This principle states that governments shouldn't select policies that they wouldn't be willing or able to defend publicly to their own citizens. RTCS don't spell out, though, the scope of this principle in the private sector. Should the analogue of "citizen" be shareholder, or indeed all citizens? If the latter, what's the source of this duty? If to shareholders only, where does that leave the rest of us?

3. But those are details. The deeper problem is what's missing from the big picture of this book. Namely: society.

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." So said Margaret Thatcher, and though RTCS don't quote her, they seem to share this view. Everything in this book is focused on decisions made by individuals (called "Humans" by RTCS) for their own good or ill, and based on their own preferences. The only other entity is a "Planner", such as a legislature, bureaucracy, judiciary or corporate management. Its relationship to individuals is top-down. Moreover, the Planner's own psychological quirks are rarely discussed. In effect, the "homo economicus"-type of rationality that behavioral economics denies to Humans is shifted up one level to the Planner.

The idea that people might act together to influence the Planner, select the Planner, communicate their will to the Planner, or rebel against the Planner is totally missing from this book (aside from a passing reference in a footnote (@238). This is very much in line with Robert Reich's observation in "Supercapitalism" (2007) that collective action and debate in American democracy has been replaced by an atomistic consumerism affecting all aspects of life, including politics.

The worldview expressed in "Nudge" is a far cry from the idea of "active liberty" described by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in his book of that name (2005). Democratic participation in lawmaking is central to Breyer's view, and policy decisions should be based on facilitating that participation. OTOH, in their footnote, RTCS make the conjunction of good laws and popular will sound like an occasional happy accident: "Social practices, and the laws that reflect them, often persist not because they are wise but because Humans, often suffering from self-control problems, are simply following other Humans. ... We do not mean here to question the view that laws that really do embody the judgments of many people often deserve support for that reason" (@238n). Of course one can think of examples where what RTCS say here is right; slavery, for example. But many other cases are less clear-cut (not that RTCS even express any opinion on the slavery issue or the "wisdom" of any other human rights). This footnote embodies the entire discussion of democracy you'll find in this book. RTCS don't even specify who those "many people" might be -- "Planners" perhaps?

4. A corollary of RTCS's ignoring society is that they have no sensitivity to culture (notwithstanding numerous references to TV shows). This is most obvious in their chapters on organ donations (Ch. 11) and marriage (Ch. 15). The idea of a market for the purchase and sale of human organs "has obvious merit, [but] it is also spectacularly unpopular for reasons that are not well understood" (@175). Maybe the reason is that peoples' cultural beliefs lead them to find the idea of such a market repugnant?

Or how about RTCS's proposal that the institution of marriage be left to private religious groups, with government providing only the institution of civil union - for everyone. They don't consider the idea that a nation's laws should express the cultural values of its people. Nor do they consider whether civil unions would be accepted without stigma in society - or even within families. Since many inter-faith marriages wouldn't be recognized under the laws of any specific religion, do RTCS expect people to shop around for a more convenient religion, or give up religion altogether? Maybe someday people will come around to RTCS's ultra-rational view (which may also be tinted by the apparently divorced status of at least one of them), but we're a long way from it. They need to deal with that.

One more thing about culture: RTCS assert that Tversy & Kahneman-type psychological tendencies arise from brain function (@19), and throughout the book they use the word "Human" to describe people who display those tendencies. I'm not an expert in this area of research, but it isn't clear how much of it has relied on subjects from non-Western cultures. Previous multi-cultural studies in behavioral economics, such as "Foundations of Human Sociality" edited by J. Heinrich & al. (2004), show considerable variation across cultures. So the details of "choice architecture" may be far more culturally-specific, and less scientifically grounded, than RTCS acknowledge. Certainly the book's point of departure, how to engineer behavior on the basis of individual preferences to behaviors, is very American. It would be quite alien to many books on social policy from France, Germany or Japan, for example. BTW playing this scientistic rhetorical trump card in matters of policy is a hallmark of the Chicago School. See, e.g., James Hackney Jr.'s "Under Cover of Science" (2007), which, despite not being enitrely convincing about the historical reasons for this rhetorical trope, is entirely correct in identifying it.

5. CS was close with the Clinton Administration, and an early supporter of Obama. He's probably on the short list for a Federal judgeship - even to fill a Supreme Court vacancy - next time the Democrats take the White House. Before reading this book, I'd have welcomed such an appointment. Now, I'd be much more cautious to do so. America is a society in addition to being a group of individuals. And that society is the source of any "Planner's" authority. I hesitate to give such authority to anyone who forgets where it comes from, and forgets the values that underlie it. Unfortunately, that is exactly what the authors of "Nudge" appear to have forgotten.