Siah's Reviews > Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

This is an excellent book if you go into it with a little bit of an open mind. It will challenge many of your fundamental beliefs and principles. And while it might have not changed my core beliefs about supporting quality public education and gay marriage, it still provided a very solid argument to understand the opposing views. I believe everyone will find something on which to be challenged and at times offended. That will apply more so to the liberals than the conservatives. There were a few sections that I found not only disagreeable but quite honestly repulsive and wrong. There is in particular one section. In that, the authors propose an idea for engineering a society that can both allow gay marriage but also allow for a literal interpretation of religious texts. Their solution is to not call the union a marriage anymore. They argue that on every legal document such union should be referred to as a civil union. If you believe in equality for all people, you will on principle disagree with this section. But it shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the rest of the material.

The two authors introduce a few interesting concepts. A “nudge” is a small behavior trigger that encourages humans to make a more correct decision. A nudge can be as simple as placing a fly sticker in a urinal so men aim for that to reduce spill. The authors also talk about humans vs econs. An econ is the perfect human if humans could always make rational choices. A human on the other hand, is irrational, arrogant, forgetful and in most cases uninformed. But the human in their view is manipulable. So they argue that a nudge can guide a human to make the rational choice. To make this idea palatable to the conservatives, they introduce the concept of libertarian paternalism. Which they argue means allowing for freedom of choice and personal rights while nudging the uninformed, the non econ, the human, to the right direction. A nudge can be as simple as placing that fly sticker in the urinal, or selecting a good default plan for people’s retirement accounts. But a nudge can also be as grandiose as not allowing people to enter a marriage without a prenuptial agreement. Depending on where you are on the “Free to Choose” scale your blood might be boiling at this point but again keep an open mind and continue reading the book. You will be challenged but you will learn too.

The book is dense and you need a lot of will power and mental stamina to get through it. Each section has at least one anecdote to surprise you, perhaps we can call them “huh inspiring”. And this book is full of huh inspiring sections. That for me was very enjoyable. As for the format, the book is what you would expect when an economist and a lawyer collaborate. It is long, detailed and at times reads like a rental lease agreement. What I am saying is that this can be like a textbook but stay strong and positive.

The book eases you into the theory of nudging. It starts by providing interesting examples of nudges in everyday life. These chapters might be very applicable for those who design products or architect a service. The middle sections is solely dedicated to personal finance. There is a lot to learn there for every adult. The final section is mostly about applying the nudge theory to a larger society. This part was in fact the most memorable part for me and the most unsettling. That said, I found all of the presented arguments to be very well crafted and thought through. In fact, as a thought exercise I tried to come up with better proposal but at the end I almost always ended up agreeing with what they presented. Richard Thaler is a Noble laureate and a former adviser to Barak Obama but he has also worked in republican think tanks so what you get here reads more like a policy mandate than a book but it should not stop you from enjoying the ocean of ideas in there.