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| Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness | 
 enlarge | Authors: Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $16.25
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Avg. Customer Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 196
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0300122233
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.019
EAN: 9780300122237
ASIN: 0300122233
Publication Date: April 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Nudged to read Nudge April 15, 2008
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
One of my two favorite financial journalists suggested I read this book. So I went in with very high expectations. This book more than delivered.
Like anyone of my age (50), I learned that economics was about supply and demand, and the rational choices we humans make to maximize our utility. I'm not sure why I was ever that dumb to believe it, but at least I can now see that I'm using hindsight bias.
Nudge starts with behavioral economics and one of its authors, Richard Thaler, is essentially its founder. It shows our biases and how we react in ways that do anything but maximize our wealth. I've studied this subject for some time and most books merely repeat our biases. With Nudge, however, I started learning practical things I can use with the first page of chapter one.
Nudge dares to examine things I've taken for granted for all of my life. Is a complete freedom of choice actually likely to hurt me? Should marriage be licensed by the government or other parties? Could I really be buying a lottery ticket when I buy health insurance?
Nudge goes beyond suggesting how we can make better choices to improve our health, wealth, and happiness. It examines the role of public policy in helping us help ourselves.
Not only did Nudge convey important lessons, it did so in a fascinating and entertaining way. I had a hard time putting the book down. Nudge is a brilliant book.
Something new under the sun... May 27, 2008
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
Thaler and Sunstein pulled off something fairly rare and valuable in this book; they offered up a social/political idea that isn't currently being offered up by either the Republicans or the Democrats, but is still politically viable for either party. That's a good thing, because it can be easy to forget that the Democrats and Republicans aren't the only sources of political, social and economic ideas out there.
The authors label themselves as Libertarian Paternalists, two terms that would not normally go together. Libertarians tend to want very small government with a high degree of freedom for citizens, while paternalists tend to think the government should show citizens the right way to do things even at the expense of their freedoms.
Thaler and Sunstein marry the two ideas, saying that governments should not limit peoples' options, but should offer guidance in certain decision-making scenarios. Those decisions would be the ones that are complex for lay-people to make (like prescription drug plan options) or have many options (like choosing a manager for your retirement investments). While the authors do not want to reduce the number of options available or make the decision for anyone (libertarian), they do want to provide well-researched default options and/or forms of encouragement they call nudges to get people headed in a sensible direction (paternalism).
They give a small-stakes example of arranging the food choices in a school cafeteria so that the healthiest options are positioned at eye level at the beginning of the line so they are chosen more frequently (this apparently does really work). They don't want to take away the less healthy options, but neither do they heed the call to stay completely uninvolved. It's a hard philosophy to fault from either side of the political aisle and seems promising for implementation on a number of troubling political fronts we face right now.
Highly recommended for people who like new ideas and are curious to hear about something that isn't being talked up by either of our two major political parties right now.
 False advertising July 5, 2008
9 out of 16 found this review helpful
Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge is best read as a list of examples of and general principles for developing choice architecture in order to improve outcomes. It can provide an understanding of the pros can cons of opt-out, opt-in, forced choices, random selection, and default preferences.
This book was sold to me as something more than that, and the authors continuously repeat their "libertarian paternalism" catch phrase. Simply put, there's very little that could be called libertarian about this book. School choice is a possible exception, but kids always complicate patterns.
To quote the video of the authors on the book's amazon page, "this book is not so much about whether we should have big or small government." The primary failing is that while government programs may be improved through choice architecture, there will always be force involved to the extent that government is making decisions. Reducing the size of the government budget is by default a way to increase liberty, and their refusal to acknowledge that makes their "libertarian paternalism" mantra ring hollow.
The most interesting fact I learned from this book is that the social security website has operating hours.
This book is a great challenge May 6, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
If I can read this book and am not internally conflicted at times, that should scare you (as it may indicate that I think my preferences are always best); however, the book's premise is so valid that the concept must be not only fleshed out in detail, but it must be implemented in some fashion (as the book points out, it cannot not be implemented). The good news is that I was internally conflicted (over which option towards which one should nudge another) and I think most readers will be as well.
The opening story of the school cafeteria sets the stage well and makes the premise clear: people make choices and the way we structure those choices influences the choices they make whether we intend to influence them or not. In light of this, why not choose to influence people to make good choices?
The difficulty is in determining what the good choices are. The book argues that the good choices are those that the people would make for themselves if they had all the best information. However, one still has to ask how one can trust the government to provide all the best information and to even use that with integrity to help people make good choices. It is a difficult dilemma - particularly in modern America where there is such distrust for government.
At the same time, I would certainly rather the school cook place the healthy foods where my child is most likely to choose them than to place the unhealthy foods there. That is a pretty clear decision; however, how does one decide on issues like health insurance and savings. The book suggests that we should make individuals "work" to opt-out of insurance or savings rather than to "work" to opt-in. The point is that people are more likely to have health insurance if the default, with a new job, is that it is taken out of their pay. Additionally, people are more likely to invest in a 401k if the default is that it is taken out of their pay and, unless they make a decision to do otherwise (presumably at the time of hire), it will continue to be.
This seems like a good practice until you realize that the company is defaulting to taking money from the employee and using it for the "employee's good". I can certainly see a time period of struggle where employees may be suing their employers for taking their money without their "explicit permission". That is that since it was a default and not a granting of permission it could be problematic. I supposed time and courts will tell.
This is a tremendous book that brings an important topic to the forefront. Do we need to consciously help people make "better" decisions or can we allow them to make "mistakes" and learn or not learn from those? It does seem to have implications on free will, but at the same time so does doing nothing. This, I'm sure, will become an excellent debate in the coming decades.
 Dangerous elitist rubbish August 11, 2008
7 out of 16 found this review helpful
The fashionable ideas of behaviourial economists like this are elitist rubbish. Who decides what "positive social norms" people need to be nudged toward? Those same would-be decision makers are just as fallible, lazy, stupid, greedy, weak, loss-averse, stubborn, and prone to inertia and conformism (and poor decision-makers) as the people to be nudged.
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