NUDGE:
Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth,
and Happiness Everyone knows that many Americans are struggling with obesity, failing to save for retirement, investing their money foolishly, receiving inadequate educations, contributing to climate change, and choosing health insurance plans that poorly meet their needs. Why do so many of us make bad choices on such important issues? Do we really want to choose badly? In a nation founded on liberty, can we guide people to better choices without hampering their freedom? Is it possible for people to be wealthier, healthier, and also more free? In Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, pioneering economist Richard Thaler and leading legal thinker Cass Sunstein answer with a resounding “Yes.” In this fascinating, enlightening, and often funny book, they offer easy-to-implement ideas that can greatly improve people’s lives, without anyone being forced to do anything. Instead, people are offered gentle but helpful nudges. The authors begin by examining how human beings make decisions. Recent scientific research shows that people are susceptible to cognitive biases and blunders. Because we are human, we are fallible, and because we are fallible, we can use all the help we can get. Nudge uses cutting-edge research about human fallibility, much of it first produced by the authors themselves, and outlines a new world that recognizes human nature for what it is, while also making wise choices easier and more likely. Full of practical solutions that could make the world run better at no additional cost, and reconciling the liberal impulse to improve society with the conservative impulse to maximize liberty, Nudge could be the start of a non-partisan policy revolution. Perhaps even more exciting, it makes available to the broadest audience a deep knowledge of how human beings actually choose, opening for leaders and individuals a world of opportunities for beneficial changes in our lives. |
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