“Why Nudge” has a shaky foundation that, like some Hollywood movie, requires suspension of disbelief to proceed. Once you get over that hump, the book makes great sense. The hump is John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle. This says that if something doesn’t harm anyone else, you should be left alone to deal with it as you please. If no harm occurs, government should not be regulating or managing it. But it is easy to show, particularly in this litigious, liability-obsessed society, that virtually any action in a highly varied population has repercussions that harm others, if only through the expenditure of taxpayer dollars. Every traffic jam costs money in lost productivity (travel time), maintenance and pollution. Any sort of law requires enforcement (detectives, prosecutors, offices, jails …). If you water your lawn, there’s less water available to drink. It is easy to rationalize pretty much any action as harming someone else. Far from a zero-sum game, harm spreads geometrically, like the proverbial butterfly batting its wings in Brazil, causing a typhoon in Japan. But since this entire lecture series is built on the premise that paternalistic nudging of behavior can direct actions away from harm, you kinda hafta go with it. Sunstein finally dismisses this concern half way through the book, because he must. Ironically, it is Sunstein’s stated purpose to “cast doubt” on Mill’s Harm Principle.

His main concern is whether nudges are paternalistic, but it is easy to have great difficulty putting them in that box. Consider the French Bonus-Malus, a real life program Sunstein does not examine. If you bought a small car with good fuel economy, you got a bonus of hundreds of euros towards the purchase. If you bought a poor mileage vehicle, you paid an extra fee, up to 3000 euros. The theory was it would be zero-sum, ie. self financing. “Unfortunately” it was so successful at promoting smaller cleaner cars, it bankrupted itself. It was clearly nudged behavior. The question is, was it paternalistic? In a cohesive society, the question is meaningless.

Sunstein categorizes paternalism in four neat boxes; it is either soft or hard, means or ends. They are self explanatory (well named) and really easy to visualize. The least objectionable road to success is soft and means, in which gentle nudges like ratings, warnings and data help people decide for themselves. The biggest problem is that people make the wrong decisions, often choosing against their own best interests. Giving them data makes a big difference. Even just the existence of surveys colors consumers’ choices. Knowing that, a skillful nudge could improve a life.

At some point, American society changed. From the time of hunter-gatherer societies, paternalism had been sought after. People willingly agreed to it in exchange for some sort of protection, some sort of advantage. But these days, Americans view government as the problem, not the solution. This makes nudging unnecessarily controversial. If the pendulum swings back, this whole argument goes away.

That this one thin volume can elicit such thoughts is a good indication of its import. Nudges, while inherent and unavoidable in many cases, need to be recognized and better employed. Sunstein has furthered the discussion with intelligent analysis. In other words, he is nudging us to appreciate nudges.

David Wineberg ( )