Malcolm's Reviews > Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness

This comes with a whole bunch of big name endorsements – the physicist Brian Appleyard, Stephen Leavitt (of Freakanomics fame) and we’re told by the end of Introduction that it is making an impact with Obama and Cameron and so having a policy impact in both the UK and USA. What is more, it is now marketed as a ‘new international edition’. As I ploughed my way through this I kept thinking of a comment by the great photographer Eve Arnold to the effect (and with a few more expletives) that she was not the genius many proclaimed, it was just that everyone else was so mediocre: the praise singers do themselves no favour by shouting about the marvel that this book is.

It has one central idea, grounded in social psychology, that with careful thought and planning people can be encouraged to ‘freely chose’ things that are good for them, with the corollary that too much choice or unclear choices will lead to many/most people making bad choices. So far, so good – and the first part (about ⅓) of the book does a pretty good job of explaining some interesting (but not that complex) social psychology. Alas, then the ‘new international edition’ goes off track in that, aside from a brief postscript considering some issues about the circumstances of the 2008 financial crisis, the vast majority of the examples under discussion rely on a some pretty detailed explorations of US-based material – which is a perverse understanding of ‘international’ – made all the more frustrating by Thaler & Sunstein’s jokey, blokey little self-referential asides.

Leaving aside the difficulties of behavioural economics – the first major problem with the book, though, is what is not in it and as a consequence what it is able to be used for. There is little doubt that ‘nudging’ is a good thing – we know that we are more likely to continue with decisions when we feel like we have chosen freely (the psychologists call this compliance, and it is a big thing in theories of behaviour change). The big issue for me is not how to ‘nudge well’ – but the direction in which we nudge, and so far it looks to me that the policy applications of this idea have in many cases been little more than a cover for increased privatisation, for a removal of services and social support networks and to generally undermine the social world that many of us rely on to survive.

There is a further and key deficiency related to this bigger picture of what the ‘nudges’ are used for, and that is its failure to explore the broader socio-political question of who gets to nudge us – or in their jargon, who gets to be a ‘choice architect’. For a book that has as one of its areas of application politics they seem remarkably unaware of or, more likely, are extremely good at obfuscating a key dynamic of politics – power – while at the same time having constructed a text that is all about making sure that those of us who are subject to various forms of political power (be it about health care plans, buying gas, donating organs or managing our pension funds) do what the wielders of power want us to do. Their notion of ‘libertarian paternalism’ (in many ways an oxymoron but I’ll cut them some slack because they are, after all, economists applying psychology to broader social contexts so have to grapple with two discipline areas that claim to be ‘sciences’ in an effort to assert their credibility) seems to be a synonym for ‘soft power’, so beloved of contemporary liberal imperialists. They set up two ideal type figures – Econs and Humans – and then build a text around a series of methods that enhance the likelihood that (irrational) Humans will make better decisions, where better is defined by what the (rational) Econs would do. In short, hidden within all the popularising language, this is text that is designed to promote ways to make us more like the Rational Economic Man so beloved of neo-classical economics. It is not that they want us to become more powerful people or to gain a greater degree of autonomy and control over our own lives, it is that they want to make us more compliant by making the decisions others want us to make.

So, my problem is two-fold. First, this is a book that is dangerous because it focuses only on the means and not the ends, in that the ends that seem to be taken-for-granted are those that are defined by a model and theory of economics that lies at the heart of the current crisis. Second, even if I accept that model and its theories (which I don’t) it is not that this book is wrong, just that it is disappointing. Now I admit that this may be a characteristic of these popular ‘academic’ titles and if I read more of them I’d be less disappointed – but as I continued through this I felt more and more like Eve Arnold; wearied by the mediocrity of others. I get enough of that in my own writing.