Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

[quantropy]

Why I looked at this book

I've heard a lot about the concept of a 'nudge' to influence behaviour, and this seems to be the book which introduces this concept. However, the authors of some popular works that I've read seemed to me to use the term behavioural economics to refer to whatever they happen to want to write about at the time. I'm hoping that this book will be more grounded in research, but still accessible to the non-specialist.

[quantropy]

The introduction (available in the Kindle sample in the UK) introduces the idea of a nudge, and then discusses whether influencing people in this way is excessively paternalistic. I did wonder whether this worry was really necessary as I would have thought that most governments inevitably have a lot of control over their population, and a few nudges wouldn't make any noticable difference.

I then read the start of chapter 1 in Amazon's 'look inside' sample,and this did tend to confirm my worries about writers including all sorts of nonsense under the 'behavioural economics' title. They start with a ridiculous example of a picture of two tables, one of which is long and thin and the other just about square. Anyone who understands perspective can see that. But apparently we're supposed to ignore perspective and treat the picture as a plan view. Well in that case they're not tables, as the 'legs' are sticking out sideways. Later on they get to the equally ridiculous lily-pad lake question that I first saw in Thinking Fast and Slow, but maybe I'll leave discussing that to a later date.I just hope the rest of the book is able to recover from this disastrous start.