Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

The premise of this book is that we all make decisions, but, being human, we often make decisions poorly and end up doing things that are not in our own best interests. This ranges from poor eating habits to poor (and sometimes disastrous) financial decisions. In an ideal world, everyone makes decisions that maximize their own self-interests, but we don’t live in an ideal world and can’t expect to.

The authors’ solution is a sort of “choice architecture,” in which the policies and circumstances around important decisions that people make are carefully designed to help people make the decisions that will lead to the outcomes that they really want. They apply this idea to an incredibly wide variety of economic and social issues, from retirement plans to health care, education, energy consumption, and marriage. Their ideas (to me) seemed really intuitive by the time I finished the book, and they cite many examples of how the ideas have actually worked in real-life contexts. But it is not how things are generally done, and what makes this book so interesting is that by the time you finish, you wonder why not.

I can't quite do justice to the idea in a limited space, but I think it might be easier to see with an example. One of the examples they give that really struck me is organ donation. Although it’s hard to argue that having more viable organs available for patients who need them is anything but a good thing, you would never want to enforce organ donation. Many people have valid and well-thought-out reasons for not becoming organ donors, and forcing people to be organ donors, or even making it very difficult for them not to be organ donors, would seem to violate ethical and democratic principals.

But there are also lots of statistics showing that a lot more people are willing to be organ donors than are actually registered as donors, and one of the reasons for this is that we have to go out of our way to make that choice. This hits me really close to home. There was a time in my life when I was hesitant about being an organ donor, but since that time I have thought quite carefully about it, and have decided that I am comfortable with the idea - I hope it never comes to that, but if it does I want my organs to go to someone who needs them if at all possible.

But I am not an organ donor. And the reason I am not an organ donor is only because I keep forgetting to sign the part of my drivers’ license that says I wish to be an organ donor. That’s all.*

Thaler and Sunstein’s choice architecture would take into account people like me by making it so that we wouldn’t have to consciously go out of our way to make the decision we already know we want to make. As it is, to be an organ donor you have to opt in, and the default is to opt out. But it would be incredibly simple for the DMV to require that you choose to either opt in or opt out at the time you get your license. That would have taken care of my problem immediately because I could have made the decision right then and there and never had to think about finding the right kind of pen to sign the back of my drivers' license.

Or another option is to make organ donation the default, which makes more sense than making non-organ donation default, if you think about it. If people have to make a conscious effort, whether it's to opt in or opt out, the people who feel most strongly are going to go ahead and make that decision—it is the people who don’t really care much either way who will end up with the default option. And if people who go with the default are okay with either one, then you’d probably want to make the default option the one that will most benefit other people—in this case, organ donation.

There are an awful lot of other interesting ideas floating around in this book, and I’d be really interested to hear other peoples’ take on it. I sometimes don’t have a lot of faith in either government or the free market to make a genuinely positive (and intentional) impact on people’s lives, but this book gave me some optimism, as well as plenty to think about. Whether or not I agree with everything the authors suggest, the ideas are really compelling, and the writing is quite readable. I highly recommend this book.


*For the record, in the course of writing this post I realized that I finally needed to just do it, and signed the back of my license.