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. Thaler, who is currently in London teaching a summer school and having his brain picked by Conservative high command, gladly admitted to me that nudging was as old as time, quipping that ‘religion at its best is all about nudging’.
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