The economist Richard Thaler — a favourite of the Cameron and Obama camps — talks to James Forsyth about the power of ‘nudging’: small transformative acts of persuasion
No one likes to be pushed, prodded or shoved. But no one objects to a nudge in the right direction. The idea that people can be nudged into making better choices is the brainchild of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, two whip-smart University of Chicago academics. The two professors see nudging as the ‘real third way’, an alternative to both government regulation and laissez-faire liberalism. The idea is the new big thing; the two politicians of the moment — Barack Obama and David Cameron — are both keen on it.
Thaler and Sunstein, though, have no more discovered nudging than Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity.
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