Nudge and liberty

The behavioural economist Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize this week. I was on the Moral Maze with Thaler back in 2010 and it was obvious that we were the only two people out of the eight on the show who had read his book. This wouldn't have mattered except that the show was all about nudging and Thaler had to listen to his ideas being totally misrepresented. I remember him saying to one panellist, 'you could not be wronger'.

People have been getting nudge wrong ever since and Thaler occasionally corrects them...

No!  We prefer the current model of "prompted choice" which was adopted by the Cameron government. https://t.co/n1P94za2mV

— Richard H Thaler (@R_Thaler) October 4, 2017

To state the obvious: a BAN is not a NUDGE.  The opposite in fact. So don't blame Bloomberg's ban on large soda cups on us.

— Richard H Thaler (@R_Thaler) May 31, 2012

Some libertarians find nudging a bit sinister but most of them have never read the book either. Personally, I have always thought that libertarian paternalism was much more libertarian than paternalistic. The main criticism of nudging is not that it is authoritarianism but that it is quite trivial. In practice, there are not many problems that can be solved by nudging, particularly by government.

I've written about this in my forthcoming book, Killjoys, which will be published on November 10th and I've given CapX an excerpt which you can read here.

I'll say more about the book in a future post but here's the cover.