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The point is very clear. We all have preconditioned manners of making decisions and instead of having to choose from thousands of options it makes more sense to nudge us to a more common ground than to leave us confused and frustrated. This of course is on condition that there is pure transparency of all the options. If you have ever read any books about psychology or studied the subject or have read Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, than this book will not provide you a lot of new insight. It looks at a lot of old and some recent researches about how people who think they’re making rational decisions are in reality not and have pretty predictable decision patterns. The book then goes on to recommend how society could be better if we followed some type of Paternal Libertarianism where the ones providing choses like Insurance companies or government services nudge persons to make smarter decisions while being transparent of all the options and not hiding any of them. I agree with them almost 100%. Most of their suggestions and examples make sense as long as the ones nudging are 100% transparent. If you’re anything like me, you will say the book is just okay and you will not be blown away by any Wow moments. So you can either read the book or save time and just speak to someone who read the book and have a nice long discussion with them.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein has a simple premise. Unlike classical economic theory, where people are fully rational and always do things in their best interest, we are really lazy, uninformed, and unmotivated. We make bad decision because we lack information, or space out, or are too stupid to investigate what descisions will make our lives better.
Intuitively, this view appeals to me. One example: create online retirement forms with a default setting which generally benefit employees, rather than no setting at all. Most people don't really understand their retirement plans, if they even have one. So make their laziness work for them.
Of course, the “Libertarian Paternalism” proposed in this work is problematic. Who makes the choices that we get to choose from? Can’t "they" rig the system for their benefit and not ours?
Despite this, I think the author’s view of human nature is sound, and can lead to more intelligent discussions about what we, as a species and individuals in that species, can hope to accomplish.
No wonder Richard Thaler's work won him the Nöbel Prize in Economics! Built on the earlier work founding Behavioral Economics by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tvarsky which de-throned the "Rational Actor" model of humans in Classical Economics, Kahneman and Tvarsky, joined by Paul Slovic, showed human thinking is hard-wired in evolution, beset by Heuristics and Biases which are provably non-rational. They answer the question often provoked by observations of others clearly acting against their self-interest. There has been 35 years of continuing research in this area, a Nöbel for Kahneman, even showing that Capuchin monkeys are hard-wired native economic thinkers and choosers. We act, as evolution indicates, for action in the short term, primarily in the lower level, fast thinking brain and with heuristics/algorithms sufficient to meet the test of "Probably Approximately Correct", with book of this name by Leslie Valiant. Humans are not randomly irrational, but predictably irrational, which is what makes The Nudge work effectively.
Thaler gives us an alternative to formal control systems for humans based on rules, laws, behavioral/operant conditioning, "shoulds, oughts, musts". Humans ignore or rebel against the rules, and deny consequences for short term gains.
Thaler's "Nudge" is the alternative, assuming people will act in their self-interest without depending or using rationality or reason. Thaler shows in his reserach and presents in his book how to shape choice using the newly discovered laws of predictable irrationality, or choice shaping.
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This item: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
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