I read the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness way back in 2009 and-- like much of rational liberal America, I decided I was a "libertarian paternalist" and bought in-- this was a kinder gentler time in politics, the years of hope and economic recovery from the subprime economic crisis-- which seemed to be a technical crisis more than anything, based on technocratic choices and rules gone wrong-- and now it seemed if we got those technocratic rules right, then solutions and progress could be made by smart little tweaks to choice architecture-- technocratic solutions instead of partisan political chaos and conflict-- but after listening to Mike Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri revisit this book and all the "nudge-like" ideas on their fantastic podcast If Books Could Kill, I realize-- like Mike Hobbes-- I bought into something very silly-- and so I have changed my mind-- especially since the main anecdote supposed to hammer home their thesis is not true-- changing organ donation box default from opting in to opting out does NOT greatly affect the organ transplant system of a nation-- Spain has best organ donation program because of the structural system they put into place-- and when Mike and peter break down, debunk, run the numbers, and point out the illogic and in the rest of the nudge-like examples-- then none of them work or seem to even fit the description of a gentle choice architecture nudge-- aside from the one very simple example-- putting the desserts below eye level in a cafeteria line and promoting fruits and vegetables to a better placement promotes slightly healthier eating-- more telling examples are things like "we know how to fix gay marriage . . . just make ALL marriages a private legal affair-- so essentially burn down the institution of marriage instead of letting gay people take part in it" and "we know the problem with healthcare-- let people opt out of litigation if care goes wrong and then it will be cheaper because all these lawsuits are what's wrong with the US healthcare system" . . . so just downright stupid stuff that I was probably too sleepy to parse back then (because I had two very young children) and in part two of the episode, they really dive deep and point out that co-author Cass Sunstein ended up riding this "nudge" wave to a government position on the creepy Reagan-created Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an office designed to sit on regulations and block regulations and essentially murder people in a slow methodical deliberate bureaucratic manner-- a real detriment to Obama's legacy and technocratic slow walking of anything against big business-- check out what happened to silica regulations under Sunstein's reign; co-author Richard Thaler kind of rescinded his ideas about the ubiquitous wonder of nudging, realizing that many nudges were scams-- and we are surrounded by scams in America-- and when it comes down to it, the nudges just never seemed to be neutral-- anyway, listen to both parts of the podcast, wonderful and funny and logical and eye-opening-- but the only scary thing is this kind of breakdown makes me not want to read these fun non-fiction books anymore because they play so fast and loose with facts and numbers, and these books have to fill pages with stuff that won't hold up to academic scrutiny-- and I'm not doing academic research in the fifteen minutes before I drift into REM sleep at night so I can succumb to these ideas quite easily (as can entire administrations of the US government . . . and many other governments, who formed "nudge units").
