Reddit reviews Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

You should read Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. It's all about non-judicial mechanisms of influencing behavior that don't restrict anyone's rights: opt-out retirement plans, putting the fruit closer than the junk food, etc. They also have a blog.

It seems like some of these decision architectures could be employed to reduce the birthrate without infringing on people's rights.

Oooh goodie. OK. So. This is a pretty good list. From the Mankiw Blog:

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers

Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity

Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist

P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich

Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics

John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar

William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates

If you have specific interests in economics, like global poverty or behavioral economics, then I can give more recommendations.

Edit: I found out about another good one today, called The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why it Matters. I haven't read it yet, but the reviews make it sound like exactly the kind of book on modern economics I've been looking for.

This is an intriguing idea, and is a great example of the main thesis of Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge. Of course, that book takes a wide societal look at what designers have known about for a long time - the concepts of affordances and cultural constraints.

Essentially, the possibilities we perceive a situation to offer, and our perception of the degree of effort required to achieve each possibility can impact our decisions. Therefore, situations (such as removing a cigarette from its packaging or choosing lunch from a display) can be designed so that the socially desirable possibility is that which is perceived to require the least amount of effort to achieve.

Recommended Reading:

• Nudge (by Richard Thaler)
  
• Predictably Irrational (by Dan Ariely, he's great)
  
• Drunk Tank Pink (by Adam Alter)
  
• The Design of Everyday Things (by Don Norman, the godfather of cognitive psych)
  
• Brain Rules (by John Medina)
  
• The Tipping Point and What the Dog Saw (by Malcolm Gladwell)
  
• edit: Thinking Fast and Slow (by Daniel Kahneman)
  
• edit: The Emotional Life of Your Brain (by Richard Davidson & Sharon Begley)
  
  (Those are just the ones I have sitting on my bookshelf... I have a dozen more on my Kindle that I can add to the list if you're interested.)
  
  ---------
  
  Authors & Speakers (lots of TED Talks):
  
  
• Dan Ariely
  
• Malcolm Gladwell
  
• Rory Sutherland
  
• Daniel Pink
  
• Simon Sinek
  
• Robert Sapolsky (evolutionary biology professor at Stanford and hidden gem)
  
  ---------
  
  Let's start a book club! :)

Absolutely. Choice architecture plays a huge role. Nudge is a good read on the topic.

Time for a Bruce Bartlett style question. Let's assume the marginal return from this whole exercise was $30,000. Given this fellow Libertarians:

Would you rather see a one time, one day, one percent increase in the state sales tax (Chosen at random in the calender year so that it can't be prepared for), or one more of these ticket events.

I ask because I'm wondering if you'd prefer a more effective but less invasive government, or a more invasive but less efficient one. There's a growing trend amongst libertarians in favor of things like libertarian paternalism and If We Can Put a Man on the Moon and I wonder where reddit libertines stand on it.

I believe Ariely mentions this in his TED talk (and his books, which I'd recommend), though I'm not sure how much of his own research pertains to this. I would also recommend the book Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, which deals with this topic in depth. Specifically, how we can use to defaults to improve retirement savings, etc.

Oh, I very much approve of gift economies. But I doubt they can realistically be extended to physical goods. We could have here a case of "the exception that proves the rule" - we see gift economies turn up only in the digital realm, because only here we can put 100 hours of effort into something, and touch the lives of thousands or millions. In the physical realm one hour worked makes a gift of one hour for somebody else. It's much more exchange-like.

The book I mentioned a few comments up, "Debt, the first 5000 years" talks about different ways people interact. The pure communist ideal is pretty much how people used to behave in small communities - there literally wasn't a concept of property per se. But it also makes it obvious why it's so unsuited for our much larger, urban communities.

> why should a group of people elect someone to control the group when the same group can control itself directly and democratically?

Can the group control itself directly and democratically? What would a group of southern folks would do if they found a gay nigger living with them? What would people in a village in Uganda do if they found out the photographer that arrived yesterday is a militant atheist?

But you're right, we are much farther from this end of the spectrum. Right now we need a lot more direct democracy, not less.

Lately I found myself very much attracted by Libertarianism, especially the paternalist kind. Nudge makes very well the case that you can influence how people behave without having to touch their freedoms with what they call "choice architecture". Stuff like making organ donations default, and still allowing a simple opt-out switches the donor percentage from below 10% to about 90%.

By training, they know the wonders and limitations of markets. It's a very pragmatic, data driven approach (see Thaler and Sunstein), which is why people like Krugman become pariahs to academics.

Lol who said anything about czars being new? Of course they are important, I don't know where you get the idea that they are not. I'm well aware the first ones were appointed by Roosevelt during the New Deal, the same year he signed executive order 6102

And, I actually finished just last week a very thought provoking book by a sitting czar, so I may know a thing or two more than you do about the ideas of a would-be government regulator.

I don't know why you would say I am brand new to politics. It is a false assumption but even if were true, one doesn't have to be a veteran authority (such as yourself...?) to recognize that gratuitous insults are sign of intellectual weakness and dishonesty. Nice try deflecting the issue, but you are still wrong about earmarking.

Nope...its from Nudge http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/0300122233