I must admit that I tend to flit a bit from book to book about these kinds of subjects; as interesting as I find them, I read parts of many more than I actually finish (case in point: Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is fascinating but which I've been stalled halfway through for months - despite the additional nudge of it being selected as a work book club text partway through!).
I raced through this one, though, probably in equal parts because its ideas are: (1) intuitively appealing; (2) familiar to me; and (3) at least potentially applicable in my work. There's also some interesting colour at the margins in relation to the tortuous process of Sunstein's appointment by Barack Obama as the administrator of OIRA and the massively controversial nature of some of the regulation that he and his office considered - most notably associated with the Affordable Care Act and a suite of environmental regulation - but for me, much of the appeal of these nudge-informed approaches to government action and regulation is their potential to bridge the partisan 'big government'/'small government' debate. More substantially, of course, the foundational assumptions about how people actually make decisions (informed by behavioural economics), the implications for how governments should engage with citizens in shaping 'choice architectures', and the possibilities for huge positive impacts all strike me as very plausible (and normatively defensible, in terms of the concerns about paternalism and lack of transparency).
Not everyone's fully on board, though - pieces like this are a useful additional perspective, and there are plenty of far more strident outright rejections to be found (some knee-jerk and ill-informed, some much more thoughtful).
I raced through this one, though, probably in equal parts because its ideas are: (1) intuitively appealing; (2) familiar to me; and (3) at least potentially applicable in my work. There's also some interesting colour at the margins in relation to the tortuous process of Sunstein's appointment by Barack Obama as the administrator of OIRA and the massively controversial nature of some of the regulation that he and his office considered - most notably associated with the Affordable Care Act and a suite of environmental regulation - but for me, much of the appeal of these nudge-informed approaches to government action and regulation is their potential to bridge the partisan 'big government'/'small government' debate. More substantially, of course, the foundational assumptions about how people actually make decisions (informed by behavioural economics), the implications for how governments should engage with citizens in shaping 'choice architectures', and the possibilities for huge positive impacts all strike me as very plausible (and normatively defensible, in terms of the concerns about paternalism and lack of transparency).
Not everyone's fully on board, though - pieces like this are a useful additional perspective, and there are plenty of far more strident outright rejections to be found (some knee-jerk and ill-informed, some much more thoughtful).
