WELL ITS THE FORTH OF JULY AND I'M GOING TO THE LAKE WITH MY FAMILY AND MY MARINE CORP BUDDIES WE ARE GOING TO PARTY !!! I'VE GOT MY TRUNKS AND THE SUN SCREEN FOR THE KIDS AND WE ARE ALL GOING TO WEAR OUR NEW OBAMA SLIPPERS ! (THEY ARE FORMERLY KNOWN AS FLIP FLOPS ) THATS WHAT WE ARE CALLING THEM! NOW OBAMA SLIPPERS ALL MY FREINDS SAY THAT IT FITS PERFECTLY... SO LOOK OUT AMERICA BECAUSE OBAMA SLIPPERS ARE COMMING TO A STORE NEAR YOU !!
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Nudge Against the Fudge
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By a "nudge" Thaler and Sunstein mean a policy intervention into choice architecture that is easy and inexpensive to avoid and that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing an individual's economic incentives. "Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not."
Employers can creatively nudge by designing plans that synchronize employees' automatically increased savings with pay increases: Saving becomes less painful—less noticeable—because take-home pay does not decline.
Perhaps 60 percent of the close to 100,000 people on waiting lists to receive organs for transplants will die before receiving the donated organ they need. The largest obstacle to increased donations is the need to get the consent of members of the families of deceased persons who did not register prior consent. Solution? Better default rules. When people are issued driver's licenses, they could be required to click "yes" or "no" to consent. Or—a stronger default rule—they could be told that consent is presumed unless they click "no." Such framing of choices substantially increases participation in organ donation programs.
Some states enable compulsive gamblers to put themselves on lists of people banned from casinos. Think of Ulysses having himself lashed to the mast so that he cannot succumb to temptation by the Sirens.
Arguably the most cost-effective thing government does is nudge by disseminating information. Granted, some informational nudges are useless: "The Department of Homeland Security has raised the National Threat Advisory to Orange." (So? What if it were Chartreuse?) But governmental nudges about smoking and other health-related behavior have saved millions of lives. Suppose the mandatory stickers on new cars told prospective buyers not just the vehicles' miles per gallon but the cost of 10,000 miles of driving at the prevailing cost of a gallon?
Thaler and Sunstein say the premise of libertarian policy is that people should be generally free to do what they please. Paternalistic policy "tries to influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves." So "libertarian paternalism is a relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism because choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened."
Thaler and Sunstein stress that if "incentives and nudges replace requirements and bans, government will be both smaller and more modest." So nudges have the additional virtue of annoying those busybody, nanny-state liberals who, as the saying goes, do not care what people do as long as it is compulsory.
© 2008
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