Word: thaler
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...Cass R. Sunstein ’75 is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and the author, with Richard Thaler, of “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” He will be joining the Harvard Law School faculty in the fall...
...What are you working on right now? CRS: I am most excited about a book called “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” which I co-authored with Richard Thaler. The basic idea of the book is that humans are amazing in many ways but cutting edge social science shows that we blunder and that our blunders make us poorer, less happy, and less healthy. The good news is that we are nudgeable through acts by private companies and governments. We can be nudged in directions that make us less poor, happier...
...Thaler and Sunstein, longtime colleagues and friends, dub this "libertarian paternalism." The deliberate oxymoron is meant to exalt individual freedom (the authors use their system to explain how one might structure school vouchers or privatize Social Security) while protecting people from cognitive and social forces that lead them to decisions that even they would describe as poor. We are all like houseguests who eat from a bowl of cashews, then thank our host for removing the nuts so that we don't spoil our dinner...
...Yale University Press; 293 pages), the two University of Chicago professors sketch a new approach to public policy that takes into account the odd realities of human behavior, like the deep and unthinking tendency to conform, even in areas--like energy consumption--where conformity is irrelevant. For 30 years, Thaler has documented the ways people act illogically: we eat more from larger plates, care twice as much about losing money as about gaining it, fret over rare events like plane crashes instead of common ones like car accidents. That research underpins Nudge's argument that as policymakers go about their...
...Thaler has been putting these ideas to work for years in corporate retirement-savings plans. Some 30% of people eligible for such plans fail to sign up, even though companies often match contributions--free money, as it were. As a result of Thaler's work, many firms have switched to automatic enrollment. In the language of Nudge, the plans have moved from "opt in" to "opt out." That turns people's inertia-like tendency to stick with the default option--whether or not it's a good one--into an advantage...