Take a photo of a barcode or cover
seanmckenna 's review for:
Nudge
by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein
Nudge falls into the (large) category of non-fiction books where the key points are made in the first 50-100 pages and the remainder of the book is made up of examples of varying quality intended to drive home the point.
In this case, the key point concerns the notion of "choice architecture" or the impact of defaults, information disclosure, and alignment of incentives to improve our ability to make complex decisions despite rarely performing a full rational analysis on them. The authors argue in favor of the idea of "libertarian paternalism", the notion that people should be guided towards the choice that is objectively best for them while maintaining their option to make a different decision. They suggest this approach as a reasonable middle ground between strict government mandates and throwing people into the deep end of complex decisions like investments and health care plans. I'm sympathetic to this line of reasoning since it maintains individual freedom while acknowledging the fact that most people don't bother exercising that freedom. Since there's always going to be a choice of some kind (including doing nothing), we might as well default people into an option that will be better than what they might otherwise get.
While some of the examples provide hit the nail on the head, including the classic example of making 401k plans opt-in vs. opt-out, two challenges emerge as the book progresses:
1) Choice architecture is only feasible when policy makers can agree on what the goals of the architecture should be. Usually, differences in policy aren't simply a matter of whether a particular behavior should be mandated or just "encouraged" but whether the behavior is desirable or not. The chapter on the environment suffered from this problem. So long as there isn't a political consensus about whether global warming is actually an issue, it seems premature to talk about how you might nudge people in one way or the other.
2) Some of the examples seemed only tangentially related to the premise of the book. The discussion of marriage, for instance, seemed to be first and foremost a libertarian argument, with a little bit of choice architecture thrown in towards the end to tie it back to the central point. It was hard not to feel like this chapter was a combination of filler and the authors taking advantage of their soapbox to make an argument that is only somewhat related to their book.
My recommendation would be to read the early chapters to get the core point and the research that backs it up, and then skip to the examples that you're particularly interested in.
In this case, the key point concerns the notion of "choice architecture" or the impact of defaults, information disclosure, and alignment of incentives to improve our ability to make complex decisions despite rarely performing a full rational analysis on them. The authors argue in favor of the idea of "libertarian paternalism", the notion that people should be guided towards the choice that is objectively best for them while maintaining their option to make a different decision. They suggest this approach as a reasonable middle ground between strict government mandates and throwing people into the deep end of complex decisions like investments and health care plans. I'm sympathetic to this line of reasoning since it maintains individual freedom while acknowledging the fact that most people don't bother exercising that freedom. Since there's always going to be a choice of some kind (including doing nothing), we might as well default people into an option that will be better than what they might otherwise get.
While some of the examples provide hit the nail on the head, including the classic example of making 401k plans opt-in vs. opt-out, two challenges emerge as the book progresses:
1) Choice architecture is only feasible when policy makers can agree on what the goals of the architecture should be. Usually, differences in policy aren't simply a matter of whether a particular behavior should be mandated or just "encouraged" but whether the behavior is desirable or not. The chapter on the environment suffered from this problem. So long as there isn't a political consensus about whether global warming is actually an issue, it seems premature to talk about how you might nudge people in one way or the other.
2) Some of the examples seemed only tangentially related to the premise of the book. The discussion of marriage, for instance, seemed to be first and foremost a libertarian argument, with a little bit of choice architecture thrown in towards the end to tie it back to the central point. It was hard not to feel like this chapter was a combination of filler and the authors taking advantage of their soapbox to make an argument that is only somewhat related to their book.
My recommendation would be to read the early chapters to get the core point and the research that backs it up, and then skip to the examples that you're particularly interested in.