Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler (PDF)

Description

Now available: Nudge: The Final EditionThe original edition of the multimillion-copy New York Times bestseller by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Richard H. Thaler, and Cass R. Sunstein: a revelatory look at how we make decisions—for fans of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and SlowNamed a Best Book of the Year by TheEconomist and the Financial TimesEvery day we make choices—about what to buy or eat, about financial investments or our children’s health and education, even about the causes we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. Nudge is about how we make these choices and how we can make better ones. Using dozens of eye-opening examples and drawing on decades of behavioral science research, Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein show that no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way, and that we are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions. But by knowing how people think, we can use sensible “choice architecture” to nudge people toward the best decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society, without restricting our freedom of choice.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review One of The Strategist’ s “13 Best Personal Finance Books, According to Money Experts”“One of the few books . . . that fundamentally changed the way I think about the world.” —Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics“Engaging and insightful . . . The conceptual argument is powerful, and most of the authors’ suggestions are common sense at its best. . . . For that we should all applaud loudly.” —The New York Times Book Review“An essential read . . . The book isn’t only humorous, it’s loaded with good ideas that financial-service executives, policy makers, Wall Street mavens, and all savers can use.” —The Boston Globe “This book is terrific. It will change the way you think, not only about the world around you and some of its bigger problems, but also about yourself.” —Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker “This gem of a book . . . is a must-read for anyone who wants to see both our minds and our society working better. It will improve your decisions and it will make the world a better place.” —Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize–winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow “Utterly brilliant . . . Nudge won’t nudge you—it will knock you off your feet.” —Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness “Nudge is as important a book as any I’ve read in perhaps twenty years. It is a book that people interested in any aspect of public policy should read. It is a book that people interested in politics should read. It is a book that people interested in ideas about human freedom should read. It is a book that people interested in promoting human welfare should read. If you’re not interested in any of these topics, you can read something else.” —Barry Schwartz, The American Prospect “Engaging, informative, and thoroughly delightful.” —Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things and The Design of Future Things “A wonderful book: more fun than any important book has a right to be—and yet it is truly both.” —Roger Lowenstein, author of When Genius Failed “Save the planet, save yourself. Do-gooders, policymakers, this one’s for you.” —Newsweek “Great fun to read . . . Sunstein and Thaler are very persuasive.” —Slate “Nudge helps us understand our weaknesses, and suggests savvy ways to counter them.” —The New York Observer “Always stimulating . . . An entertaining book that also deeply informs.” —Barron’s “Entertaining, engaging, and well written . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “This Poor Richard’s Almanack for the 21st century . . . shares both the sagacity and the witty and accessible style of its 18th-century predecessor.” —Law and Politics Book Review “There are superb insights in Nudge.” —Financial Times About the Author Richard H. Thaler was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where he is the director of the Center for Decision Research. He is also the co-director (with Robert Shiller) of the Behavioral Economics Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research and in 2015 was the president of the American Economic Association. He has been published in several prominent journals and is the author of a number of books, including Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is by far the most cited law professor in the United States. From 2009 to 2012 he served in the Obama administration as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, appeared on national television and radio shows, been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, and written many articles and books, including Simpler: The Future of Government, Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter, The World According to Star Wars, and Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide. He is the recipient of the 2018 Holberg Prize, awarded annually to a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts, humanities, the social sciences, law, or theology. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Common “Nudges”The design of menus gets you to eat (and spend) more. For example, lining up all prices on either side of the menu leads many consumers to simply pick the cheapest item. On the other hand, discretely listing prices at the end of food descriptions lets people read about the appetizing options first…; and then see prices.”Flies” in urinals improve, well, aim. When Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport was faced with the not uncommon issue of dirty urinals, they chose a unique solution: by painting “flies” in the (center of) commodes, men obligingly aimed at the insects, reducing spillage by 80 percent.Credit card minimum payments affect repayment schedules. Among those who only partially pay off credit card balances each month, the repayment level is correlated with the card’s minimum payment — in other words, the lower the minimum payment, the longer it takes a consumer to pay off the card balance.Automatic savings programs increase savings rate. All over the country, companies are adopting the Save More Tomorrow program: firms offer employees who are not saving very much the option of joining a program in which their saving rates are automatically increased whenever they get a raise. This plan has more than tripled saving rates in some firms, and is now offered by thousands of employers.”Defaults” can improve rates of organ donation. In the United States, about one–third of citizens have signed organ donor cards. Compare this to Austria, where 99 percent of people are potential organ donors. One obvious difference? Americans must explicitly consent to become organ donors (by signing forms, for example) while Austrians must opt out if they do not want to be organ donors. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I admit to buying this book after Richard Thaler received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in “understanding the psychology of economics.” And to be fair, this book was published in 2008, so I’m sure Mr. Thaler and Mr. Sunstein both have a large body of work that post-dates it.The book is well written and the authors are methodical in both laying out their case and pointing out its potential flaws. It doesn’t compromise the book in any way, but I did find it a bit odd that they refer to themselves throughout the book in the third person. When I first came across it I had to recheck the cover to make sure they weren’t referring to someone else, but it’s a minor point of style.I was enthused by the idea of mixing sciences; in this case psychology and economics. As the authors note, economists have historically worked with a proxy of the average person that is fully informed, completely rational, and lives in a vacuum. That’s not where the people who actually make, spend, and invest money actually live and that gap between what the authors term Econs and Humans has historically compromised a lot of otherwise sound economic theory.The ideas in the book are built around what the authors call libertarian paternalism. Over-simplified, it’s paternalism with choice, in which the paternalism is achieved by nudging the choices in ways that are effective, but otherwise cheap in cost, modest in sacrifice, and easy to avoid. It’s a kind of win-win solution in which one win is slightly favored by human decency or universal standards of justice.We are constantly nudged without always being conscious of the nudging. When you stand in front of a retail display deciding which shampoo to buy you may have no idea how deliberately that display has been constructed by the retailer and the manufacturers. Tremendous amounts of thought and research are behind it. It’s established fact that positioning drives sales, often more than the variations in products and prices themselves.Most of the nudges that Professors Thaler and Sunstein introduce are less invasive and more transparent than the commercial nudges we are already subject to. How to get people to save more for retirement? How to get more organ donors? How to combat obesity and encourage people to live healthier life styles?In all cases, there is ample evidence that this is what people themselves want. They are impeded in their efforts, however, by the realities of human psychology. Things like the “status quo bias”, “pluralistic ignorance”, and “loss aversion” are all existing nudges common to the human psyche. Fitting in, going along with the crowd, and irrational optimism are as natural as the sunrise.Thaler and Sunstein just want to use these commonplace and natural biases to nudge people toward decisions that they probably want to make but frequently don’t, for reasons having little to do with the value of the intention. The idea makes a lot of sense and I found myself in general agreement most of the way.I admit to having some difficulties with the context at times, however. For example, in their discussion relating to retirement savings, one chapter is titled, “Naïve Investing”, and the authors suggest ways in which savers could be enticed into more astute strategies by way of theoretically painless nudges. There is, however, an inevitable bias underlying the nudge itself. In this case it is the conventional wisdom that equities outperform fixed income investments over a long period of time. This is true in the aggregate and over a long period of time, of course, but not universally true when considering the investment needs and horizon of a single investor.My point is not to argue that bias, however, which they, in fact, acknowledge. My point is merely that the nudge itself introduces its own contextual bias, creating, in effect, a multi-level bias that the “choice architects,” in the vernacular of nudging, must be cognizant of if the nudging is to realize the original objective of positive paternalistic influence.The authors don’t ignore this incremental bias, mind you. On a related note, they cite the example of an Enron employee who lost his entire life savings in company stock, making a sound and appropriate argument in favor of further limiting 401k and defined benefit plan investments in company stock. They’re right, of course, although in this case I think an outright ban is ethically warranted.The “nudge” is, more or less, an aggressive form of default planning that recognizes the weaknesses in human behavior, particularly our seemingly instinctive inability to understand probability theory. (As Peter Hollins points out, in a sample of 23 people the chances of two of them sharing a birthday is 50-50.)In the closing chapters of the book the authors acknowledge the potential criticisms that will be leveled at libertarian paternalism from both the right and left extremes of the political spectrum. Their defense is a strong one but there is an implicit admission that said defense relies on the duality of paternalism and libertarianism. I agree with their assessment that the combined term is not an oxymoron, but one without the other will render the concept less defensible. And that’s where the execution, as they fully acknowledge, could compromise the intent. Or as the old adage goes, the only difference between theory and practice is the practice.When all is said and done I think that what the authors are really advocating is simpler than it reads—moderation, compromise, and common sense. “With respect to government, we hope that the general approach might serve as a viable middle ground in our unnecessarily polarized society.” Nudge on.

⭐First some quick comments, then some longer ones:1) Anyone interested in the Social Sciences should get this. Parts of it are written as if the book were a guide to finance, but that was probably just a marketing ploy of some sort. The main thesis is really interesting and very refreshing for those interested in the somewhat stale and oversimplified “big vs. small government” debate.2) I read this right after Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow.” Both are extremely similar, but Nudge is more to the point and more organized. “Thinking Fast and Slow” was still brilliant though.3) All those reviewers who call this “manipulation” or some other “Big Government!!!” charge, I must say, probably didn’t read the book. The authors address libertarian concerns multiple times, and with great consideration, throughout the entire book. Understanding what makes “libertarian paternalism” libertarian is an extremely important step in getting the authors’ main point. Honestly, if anything, it made my political views MORE libertarian rather than less, so it’s difficult for me to think of Nudge as a “defense of Big Brother” or some other right-wing nonsense.4) The only inconsistency I came across (and I mention this below) is that when they talk about being “anti-mandate,” they really mean being against public or consumer mandates. However, many of their proposals do implicitly involve mandates on businesses though, such as requiring that air conditioner manufacturers install a light that would tell the user when the filter needs replacement (which would save a good amount of energy). I am not opposed to this whatsoever, but it’s important to acknowledge that it’s still a government mandate, so it’s not as libertarian as it first seems. However, it’s still more libertarian than other conceivable alternative mandates that could be placed on the public to use less energy.5) My take-away from the book: The authors spend a good amount of time describing ECONS and HUMANS, but not so much time describing why ECONS are so important for right-wing economists. This is also partly because authors’ main objective, it seemed, was political. They describe their philosophy as “libertarian paternalism.” They are libertarian in the sense that they (ostensibly) don’t generally like the idea of the government “banning,” “mandating,” and “outlawing” economic choices, or making some economic choices extremely difficult for the consumer (for example if the government made all vehicles which get less than 20 MPG twice as expensive via taxes, and mandated that a consumer must wait 90 days before being able to register a low-MPG vehicle, whereas high-MPG vehicles could be registered immediately). However, the other part of their philosophy involves “paternalism”–a very dirty word to libertarians. The basic normative argument for paternalism is that the government has some role to play in guiding people toward better choices. In talking about “libertarian paternalism,” they are saying that whatever the government does, it is going to have some effects upon the population, even if it is not explicitly trying to manipulate or persuade the public. So, instead, adopt smart policies (with predictable results) that guide the public toward a “good” direction, but allow individuals to opt-out if they wish. An interesting example they brought up involved organ donors. Turns out that there are some massive inter-country differences when it comes to the desire to donate organs. But is this because the people in each country have such massively different attitudes about it? No–the main variable is a simple one: Is the default option to donate, or not to donate? In the U.S., on our licenses, we have to check a box that confirms we want to be organ donors and, therefore, our default is that we are not donors. In other countries, the default option is that citizens are donors–but of course they are free to opt-out at any time.Bringing it back to the ECONS vs. HUMANS debate is what makes a simple example like this so mind-blowing (for me, at least). The crucial key to understand is that, to the ECON, it makes no difference what the default is. The ECON always knows what s/he wants–if s/he wants to be a donor, and the default is “No,” the ECON would instantly change it to “Yes,” and vice versa. Simple as that. But HUMANS, on the other hand, don’t do this. HUMANS have a massive, statistically proven bias toward the default option and, as a result, which route the government decides to go ends up making a massive difference. If the government decides that it’s probably a “good” thing if most citizens are willing to donate vital organs, the authors argue, then it should keep the default at “Yes” and allow people to opt-out. (Notice that if the government simply mandated that everyone donate their organs, it would be paternalism outright, not libertarian paternalism.) The book is essentially a collection of examples like this, where the authors wish to enact policies that result in a better society/economy while staying true to the libertarian paternalist ethic. (One place where I think they slip a bit, though, is that they are more inclined to support “regulations” on businesses–but these regulations are of course mandates, however much they don’t want to call them mandates. When they say they are against mandates, they seem to be more against regulating average citizens and consumers than regulating businesses.)As I see it, the die-hard libertarian still has a valid argument to make. Basically, they can object to the nudge argument on purely political grounds, which would sound like this, “I don’t give a crap if libertarian paternalism would result in a better economy or better society. The government has no right to–i.e., shouldn’t–participate in manipulative policymaking.” It’s a fair political argument, but it doesn’t cohere with the free-market argument, which states that free-market policies will actually result in a better economy. Nudge shows how free-market policies actually won’t result in a better economy, in large part because the actors receiving, evaluating, and acting upon economic signals are HUMANS, not ECONS.For those interested, I wrote an article about this type of stuff (and long before reading Nudge or much else in the way of behavioral economics) called “Unmasking the GOP’s Faith-Based Economics” available @Truthout.org

⭐Common sense is not so common, but the science of it is in this book.

⭐Não gostei do livro. Além de considerar que o autor não fez uma boa pesquisa sobre os temas do ponto de vista jurídico, entendo que não está ciente e, portanto, não fala, no livro, as implicações de muitos “nudges” que trata no livro. O autor vê o estágio 1 de suas interferências – nudges – mas não vai além disso. O livro poderia, também, sofrer edição para retirar muito besteirol. Afirmo que os primeiros capítulos são interessantes, porém parece que o gás acaba e tenta-se preencher as páginas de qualquer forma, mesmo em detrimento do prazer proporcionado ao leitor.

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⭐Apesar de relativamente novo (2008), “Nudge” já pode ser considerado um clássico da economia comportamental (behavioral economics), da teoria dos incentivos e da ciência das escolhas. De fato, a simples “presença” de Cass Sunstein (ganhador do Holberg Prize) e Richard Thaler (ganhador do Nobel Prize) como autores já diferencia o livro e, por si, torna a leitura recomendável.Partindo da ideia de um “paternalismo libertário”, Sunstein e Thaler desvendam uma verdadeira arquitetura das escolhas públicas e privadas, de forma a demonstrar como seria possível, a um só tempo, preservar a liberdade de escolha dos indivíduos (caractere libertário) e influenciar a direção das atitudes individuais em um sentido economicamente ótimo (caractere paternalista).A fim de demonstrar que a suposta incongruência entre libertarianismo e paternalismo pode ser muito menor na prática cotidiana do que na teoria, os autores dissecam exemplos de arquitetura de escolhas nas mais diversas áreas de atuação humana: do incentivo à poupança e aos investimentos a questões saúde pública; do casamento a questões de sustentabilidade ambiental; de previdência à educação pública e privada.Recheado de exemplos de como pequenos incentivos podem alterar substancialmente as escolhas individuais em direção a níveis ótimos, “Nudge” foge de estereótipos ideológicos pra mostrar uma realidade passível de mudança a partir de critérios racionais facilmente realizáveis. Enfim, um livro muito bom.

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⭐Es una obra básica para entender la implementación de políticas aplicando la economía del comportamiento. Junto con “Misbehaving” y Thinking fast and slow” ofrecen un panorama comprensivo sobre esta rama de la economía.

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⭐Comprato per un corso universitario in Public Management. Scritto in modo assolutamente scorrevole ed a tratti anche divertente (i due autori, di cui l’ultimo premio Nobel per l’ economia, si alternano, richiamano e prendono a volte in giro tra un aneddoto e l’altro).Per chi non ha mai sentito parlare dell’argomento “nudge”, questo libro ne è una sorta di pietra miliare (anche all’università, corso in Public Policies, ci è stato suggerito da 3 professori diversi per 3 corsi diversi).Per chi invece già sa di cosa stiamo parlando, potrebbe risultare un po’ ridondante e carente di una conclusione particolarmente illuminante rispetto alla letteratura già in circolazione.Ad ogni modo il mio consiglio per chi sente l’argomento Nudge per la prima volta, per gli entusiasti di approcci innovativi e creativi (lateral thinking) e per i curiosi in generale è “Compratelo!”. Assolutamente consigliato in quanto un ottimo investimento per il vostro tempo libero (o meno, nel mio caso).E’ quel tipo di lettura piacevole, su un argomento veramente interessante (ultimamente quasi di moda) capace di lasciarti un valore aggiunto.N.B. Per chi parla la lingua, consigliata la versione originale rispetto alla traduzione. Per chi non se la sente o non parla inglese, quella in Italiano è comunque un ottimo acquisto!Se siete al primo approccio e volete saperne di più, o toccare con mano. Vi consiglio di andare a curiosare su YouTube! Troverete una VALANGA di esempi di nudging in tutto il mondo.[ARGOMENTO, per chi fosse curioso di avere qualche impressione in più rispetto alla trama ufficiale: Il libro introduce al tema della “spinta gentile” (come è stata tradotta in Italia) – sarebbe quella spintarella per farti coraggio o l’incentivo per prendere una decisione.Il senso è trovare il modo tramite cui indurre le persone ad adottare comportamenti “raccomandabili” in maniera del tutto spontanea, scorrevole (che portino quindi ad un valore aggiunto per loro stessi e per la società in generale). E’ ovviamente un approccio “democratico” in quanto lascia sempre libero arbitrio a chiunque ma, cambiando il modo in cui tutte le alternative sono proposte e presentate, aumenta la probabilità che la scelta propenda verso l’alternativa desiderata da “l’ideatore” o dal “public manager” (il concetto sarebbe, come già anticipato, non farlo per fini personali) .Parte da esempi quotidiani ripresi da tutto il modo (a partire dai risultati ottenuti mettendo una mosca finta dentro molti bagni pubblici maschili) per poi approcciare gradualmente a tematiche più manageriali, quali incentivi nel sistema assicurativo, per i sistemi pensionistici e così via.]Buona lettura!Giulia

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