Can government do a better job? One answer is that it can nudge people in a preferred direction, and that such nudges can have an even stronger (beneficial) effect than the nudgers expect. Testing that proposition has been a Nudge Unit embedded in the British government by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, whose head David Halpern has written a book called Inside the Nudge Unit, reviewed here in the Times Literary Supplement.
Auto-enrollment of employees into pension plans supposedly got an additional 5 million people to save for their pensions. Reduced carbon monoxide content in the natural gas used to heat ovens has resulted in a 30 percent drop in suicides (at least by inserting you head in an oven).
Other, less exotic examples are mentioned by the TLS reviewer Alex Burghart. “They have used the power of social norms to persuade tardy taxpayers to cough up simply by telling them (truthfully) that most people have already done so, reaping millions upon millions of pounds of extra revenue. They have used ‘implementation intention’; to nudge tens of thousands of people into work by asking them what they are planning to do in the next fortnight, rather than what they have done in the previous one. And they have shown that you can boost pupils’ performance in tests simply by texting their parents two days in advance.”
These sound like great results, and perhaps replicable here and in other countries beyond Britain. But I think prudent readers will ask whether the alleged results of these policies have been accurately and fairly measured and ethical readers will wonder whether policymakers have crossed the boundary between maintaining freedom of choice and overpowering it.
