nudge unit

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Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, Atul Gawande, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microcredit, Netflix Prize, nudge unit, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, price mechanism, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, statistical model, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty

See Laura and John Arnold Foundation, ‘Laura and John Arnold Foundation announces expanded funding for low-cost randomized controlled trials to drive effective social spending’, press release, 7 December 2015. 9David Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference, London: WH Allen, 2015, p. 274. 10Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, p. 274. 11Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, pp. 91–2. 12Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, p. 89. 13Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, pp. 113–15; Michael Hallsworth, John List, Robert Metcalfe & Ivo Vlaev, ‘The behavioralist as tax collector: Using natural field experiments to enhance tax compliance’, Journal of Public Economics, vol. 148, issue C, 2017, pp. 14–31.

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The Australian Taxation Office reports that it increased compliance from tax debtors by 5 per cent simply by removing from its letters the opening words: ‘Please disregard this letter if you have paid this debt in full in the last seven days’: Peter Martin, ‘Mind games could pay handsomely’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November 2013. 14Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, p. 90. 15Tim Harford, ‘Nudge, nudge. Think, think. Say no more …’, Financial Times, 11 February 2012 16Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, p. 132. 17A reminder message that included the name of the client, the name of the adviser, and the words ‘Good luck!’ increased attendance rates from 10 per cent to 27 per cent: David Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference, WH Allen, London, 2015, pp. 120–2 18Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, pp. 275–8. 19Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, p. 340. In France, the Youth Ministry has set up an experimental laboratory, ‘Le Fonds d’Expérimentation pour la Jeunesse’, to test programs that help young people: see http://experimentation.jeunes.gouv.fr. 20Premier and Cabinet Behavioural Insights Team, ‘Understanding people, better outcomes: Behavioural insights in NSW’, Sydney: NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet, 2014. 21The control message was: ‘You have an appointment with [Doctor name] in [Clinic name] on [Date] at [Time].

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The competition continues to operate through a non-profit foundation, which has announced that it will fund all proposals that receive a high rating from its review panel.8 Simplicity is at the core of the approach taken by the behavioural insights teams which are emerging in central government agencies across the globe. In 2010 the British government became the first to establish a so-called ‘Nudge Unit’, to bring the principles of psychology and behavioural economics into policymaking. The interventions were mostly low-cost – such as tweaking existing mailings – and were tested through randomised trials wherever possible. In some cases they took only a few weeks. Since its creation, the tiny Nudge Unit has carried out more randomised experiments than the British government had conducted in that country’s history.9 The Nudge Unit focused on ‘low cost, rapid’ experiments.10 It found that letters asking people to pay their car tax were 9 percentage points more effective if they included a photograph of the offending vehicle, along with the caption ‘Pay Your Tax or Lose Your Car’.11 A personally scribbled note on the envelope along the lines of ‘Andrew, you really need to open this’ increased taxpaying by 4 percentage points.

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey

Well-being: Nudging ourselves, and each other, to happier lives 10. What works? The rise of experimental government Section 4 Where next? 11. Risks and limitations 12. Conclusion: Where next? Notes Index Acknowledgements Copyright About the Book This is the story of an experiment. The Behavioural Insights Team, or ‘Nudge Unit’ as it came to be called, was set up in Downing Street in 2010 by Prime Minister David Cameron. The team’s objectives read like a mission impossible: to transform the approach of at least two major departments; to inject a new and more realistic understanding of human behaviour across UK government; and to deliver a 10-fold return on its cost.

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Nothing came of the French effort aside from an excellent lunch, but we made good use of our time together on the Eurostar to think about what the team might do and other important matters, including deciding what it should be called. We eventually settled on the Behavioural Insights Team, though Rohan prophetically predicted that the formal name of the team would be irrelevant since everyone would just call it the ‘Nudge Unit’. Now, five years later, it is hard to imagine what would have become of the effort had Rohan not convinced David Halpern to come back from the comfortable, good life working at the UK’s Institute for Government and as an academic at Cambridge, to resume a full-time role in government. David had a unique background that made him the ideal person to lead this new effort.

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Left-leaning sceptics thought that participation should be mandatory, and that the mere nudge provided by automatic enrolment would not suffice. These fears turned out to be misplaced. At this point, three years into the roll-out, the opt-out rate has been less than one in ten. But these results were not known in 2010, and I think it was fair to say that most observers did not give either the Nudge Unit or its general approach much chance of succeeding. Of course, some scepticism was warranted. No one had ever tried before to create a special unit of government devoted to implementing behaviourally informed policies, and even those of us involved knew enough about cognitive biases to be wary of overconfidence.

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton

active measures, behavioural economics, call centre, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Firefox, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, loss aversion, nudge unit, Ocado, placebo effect, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, TED Talk, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, World Values Survey

Nudges aren’t occult magic; they merely improve ad effectiveness through an understanding of how the mind works. If we accept that nudges don’t bamboozle consumers, then what really is the complaint? That the communications are successful? Surely, if ads for a product are permitted, you can’t then object to them being effective? David Halpern, CEO of the Nudge Unit, says: If we think it’s appropriate and acceptable for such communications to occur, it seems sensible to expect those designing or writing them to make them effective and easy to understand. And if it’s powerful communications that Dzamic objects to, why single out behavioural economics?

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References Introduction ‘37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police’, New York Times, 27 March 1964 ‘Effect of colour of drugs: systematic review of perceived effect of drugs and of their effectiveness’, by Anton J M de Craen, Pieter J Roos, A Leonard de Vries, Jos Kleijnen [British Medical Journal, Vol. 313; 21 Dec 1996] How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp [2010] The Wiki Man by Rory Sutherland [2011] Bias 1: The fundamental attribution error ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’, by John Darley and Daniel Batson [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 100–108, 1973] Marketers Are from Mars, Consumers Are from New Jersey by Bob Hoffman [2015] ‘Social Roles, Social Control, and Biases in Social-Perception Processes’, by Lee Ross, Teresa Amabile, and Julia Steinmetz [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 35, No. 7, pp. 485–494, 1977] Bias 2: Social proof Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini [1984] Behind the Scenes in Advertising: More Bull More (Mark III) [2003] Bias 3: Negative social proof ‘Crafting Normative Messages to Protect the Environment’, by Robert Cialdini [Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 105–109, 2003] Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern [2015] ‘Perils of Perception: A Fourteen Country Study’ by IPSOS MORI [2014] Bias 4: Distinctiveness ‘Aging and the von Restorff Isolation Effect in Short/Term Memory’, by Richard Cimbalo and Lois Brink [The Journal of General Psychology, Vol. 106, No. 1, pp. 69–76, 1982] Bias 5: Habit ‘Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion, and Action’, by Wendy Wood, Jeffrey Quinn and Deborah Kashy [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 83, No. 6, pp. 1281–1297, 2002] ‘Sainsbury’s – How an idea helped make Sainsbury’s great again’, by Tom Roach, Craig Mawdsley and Jane Dorsett [IPA Effectiveness Awards 2008] ‘People Search for Meaning When They Approach a New Decade in Chronological Age’, by Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 111, No. 48, pp. 17066–17070, 2014] Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern [2015] Bias 6: The pain of payment ‘Always Leave Home Without It: A Further Investigation of the Credit-Card Effect on Willingness to Pay’, by Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester [Marketing Letters, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 5–12, 2001] ‘$ or Dollars: Effects of Menu-Price Formats on Restaurant Checks’, by Sybil Yang, Sheryl Kimes and Mauro Sessarego [Cornell Hospitality Report, Vol. 9, No. 8, pp. 6–11, 2009] ‘“The Best Price You’ll Ever Get”: The 2005 Employee Discount Pricing Promotions in the U.S.

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References Introduction ‘37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police’, New York Times, 27 March 1964 ‘Effect of colour of drugs: systematic review of perceived effect of drugs and of their effectiveness’, by Anton J M de Craen, Pieter J Roos, A Leonard de Vries, Jos Kleijnen [British Medical Journal, Vol. 313; 21 Dec 1996] How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp [2010] The Wiki Man by Rory Sutherland [2011] Bias 1: The fundamental attribution error ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’, by John Darley and Daniel Batson [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 100–108, 1973] Marketers Are from Mars, Consumers Are from New Jersey by Bob Hoffman [2015] ‘Social Roles, Social Control, and Biases in Social-Perception Processes’, by Lee Ross, Teresa Amabile, and Julia Steinmetz [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 35, No. 7, pp. 485–494, 1977] Bias 2: Social proof Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini [1984] Behind the Scenes in Advertising: More Bull More (Mark III) [2003] Bias 3: Negative social proof ‘Crafting Normative Messages to Protect the Environment’, by Robert Cialdini [Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 105–109, 2003] Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern [2015] ‘Perils of Perception: A Fourteen Country Study’ by IPSOS MORI [2014] Bias 4: Distinctiveness ‘Aging and the von Restorff Isolation Effect in Short/Term Memory’, by Richard Cimbalo and Lois Brink [The Journal of General Psychology, Vol. 106, No. 1, pp. 69–76, 1982] Bias 5: Habit ‘Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion, and Action’, by Wendy Wood, Jeffrey Quinn and Deborah Kashy [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 83, No. 6, pp. 1281–1297, 2002] ‘Sainsbury’s – How an idea helped make Sainsbury’s great again’, by Tom Roach, Craig Mawdsley and Jane Dorsett [IPA Effectiveness Awards 2008] ‘People Search for Meaning When They Approach a New Decade in Chronological Age’, by Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 111, No. 48, pp. 17066–17070, 2014] Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern [2015] Bias 6: The pain of payment ‘Always Leave Home Without It: A Further Investigation of the Credit-Card Effect on Willingness to Pay’, by Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester [Marketing Letters, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 5–12, 2001] ‘$ or Dollars: Effects of Menu-Price Formats on Restaurant Checks’, by Sybil Yang, Sheryl Kimes and Mauro Sessarego [Cornell Hospitality Report, Vol. 9, No. 8, pp. 6–11, 2009] ‘“The Best Price You’ll Ever Get”: The 2005 Employee Discount Pricing Promotions in the U.S.

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being by William Davies

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business logic, corporate governance, data science, dematerialisation, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gini coefficient, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Leo Hollis, lifelogging, market bubble, mental accounting, military-industrial complex, nudge unit, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Philip Mirowski, power law, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social contagion, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, you are the product

In 2013, the British government was embarrassed when a blogger discovered that jobseekers were being asked to complete psychometric surveys whose results were completely bogus.19 Regardless of how the user answered the questions, they got the same results, telling them what their main strengths are in the job market. It later transpired that this was an experiment being run by the government’s ‘Nudge Unit’, to see if individual behaviour was altered by having this survey offer them these findings. Social reality had been manipulated to generate findings for those looking down from above. This logic of experimentation allows for policies to be introduced which would otherwise seem entirely unreasonable, or even illegal.

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In that sense, due process becomes viewed as an inefficient blockage, standing in the way of behaviour change. The much-celebrated HOPE (Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement) programme, which builds directly on this body of evidence, ensures that repeat offenders know they will be jailed immediately if found up to no good. Projects such as the Hudson Yards quantified community, the Nudge Unit’s fake survey and HOPE share a number of characteristics. Most obviously, they are fuelled by a high degree of scientific optimism that it may be possible to acquire hard objective knowledge regarding individual decision-making, and then to design public policy (or business practices) accordingly.

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Today, the fact that it is ‘quants’ (mathematicians and physicists, equipped with algorithmic techniques to explore large data sets) who are rendering our behaviour predictable is deemed all the more promising, given these individuals are not burdened by any theory of what distinguishes human beings or societies from any other type of system. Secondly, the surveillance. As examples such as Hudson Yards or the Nudge Unit indicate, the new era of behaviourist exuberance has emerged on the basis of new high-level alliances between political authorities and academic researchers. Without those alliances, social scientists continue to labour under the auspices of ‘theory’ and ‘understanding’, as indeed we all do when seeking to interpret what each other are up to in our day-to-day lives.

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

Chapter 9 1 Disciplined pluralism is described in his book The Truth About Markets, London, Penguin, 2004, among other writings. 2 My Radio 4 colleague Tim Harford has suggested we encourage more Kay-like discipline with a prize for the best public change of mind. 3 David Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference, London, W. H. Allen, 2015. 4 The Behavioural Insights Team (aka the Nudge Unit) has useful resources on its website, including papers about experiment in government, such as: ‘Test, Learn, Adapt’. 5 Gabriel Ahlfeldt et al., ‘The Economics of Density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall’, Econometrica, vol. 83, no. 6, 2015, pp. 2127–2189. 6 Lurking behind this sentence is an increasingly fraught argument about the value of randomized controlled trials.

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A recent practical example of the attempt to put the theory to use came when advisors to the UK government used social proof to try to persuade more people to sign up to a register to donate their organs for transplant after their death.12 Given a straw of hopeful theory, governments often grab it, especially if it’s congenial for other political reasons. Wisely, the Behavioural Insight Team – also known as the Nudge Unit – didn’t do that. Instead, they ran an experiment in which they tested messages inspired by the theory against others. The organ donation campaign targeted people visiting a government website to renew their driving licence. Some were shown one of three messages embracing the principles of social proof, in essence: ‘lots of people agree to donate their organs after their death, perhaps you’d like to do the same?’

Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism by Cass R. Sunstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, energy security, framing effect, invisible hand, late fees, libertarian paternalism, loss aversion, nudge unit, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler

See The Behavioural Insights Team, CABINET OFFICE, http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/behavioural-insights-team (last visited Dec. 10, 2012). 26. Id. 27. Various reports can be found at the website of the Behavioural Insights Team. See id. 28. See Oliver Wright, Steve Hilton’s “Nudge Unit” Goes Global, INDEPENDENT (London), Sept. 20, 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/steve-hiltons-nudge-unit-goes-global-8157492.html. 29. See Consumer Policy Toolkit, ORG. FOR ECON. COOPERATION & DEV. (July 2010), http://www.oecd.org/sti/consumerpolicy/consumerpolicytoolkit.htm. 30. See DG SANCO, Consumer Behaviour: The Road to Effective Policy-Making, EUR.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

“Reading Aloud,” Washington Post, October 25, 1899, p. 6. 4. See Colley, 2003. 5. Regarding women, see Driscoll et al., 2009. 6. OECD, “Behavioral Insights,” 2017, http://www.oecd.org/gov/regulatory-policy/behavioural-insights.htm. See also Zeina Afif, “ ‘Nudge Units’—Where They Came From and What They Can Do,” World Bank “Let’s Talk Development” blog, October 25, 2017, http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/nudge-units-where-they-came-and-what-they-can-do. 7. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-4-1933-first-inaugural-address. 8. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-12-1933-fireside-chat-1-banking-crisis. 9.

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Fortunately, the behavioral economics revolution of the last few decades has brought economic research closer to that of other social sciences. No longer do economists routinely assume that people always behave rationally. One widespread and important innovation is the creation of economic think tanks interested in creating policies based on the insights of behavioral economics. These think tanks have been called “nudge units,” following the Behavioral Insights Team in the UK government in 2010. Working with the ideas popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, these units try to redesign government institutions toward “nudging” people away from their irrational behavior without coercing them.

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See also brain Newcomb, Anthony, 35 “New Deal,” coined by Stuart Chase, 185 The New Financial Order (Shiller), 38 news media: creative during major stock market corrections, 75; economic narratives spread through, 3, 21; improving retention with narrative presentation, 77; international economic narratives and, 110; marketing-driven, 61–62; in modified SIR model, 297; reminding public on anniversaries of events, 76; searching for words and phrases in, x Nixon, Richard, 173 normalcy, 244, 252 North, Douglass, 14 Northern Rock bank run in 2007, 119, 135 novels: classical symphony as, 35; understanding human experience and, 16. See also fiction Noyes, Alexander Dana, 127, 164, 231 Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein), 278 nudge units, 277–78 NVIDIA Corporation, 20 O’Barr, William M., 15 Occupy Wall Street protest, 8, 225 office workplace: automation of, 204; labor-saving machinery narrative and, 186 Ohanian, Lee E., 132 oil embargo of 1973, 256 one-hit wonders, 41–42 Only Yesterday (Allen), ix–xi, 139 organ donation, narrative presentation of, 78 overlapping generations model, 24–25, 27f, 303n8 overproduction or underconsumption theory, 187–92 “Ownership Society” (Bush reelection slogan), 155 oxytocin, 54 Oz: The Great and Powerful (film), 172 Palme, Olof, 48–49 panic: at beginning of World War I, 93–94; creation of Federal Reserve and, 117; in financial crisis, 55–56, 86; following complacency, 55–56; Great Depression seen as, 128; inflation in 1970s and, 262; stock prices and, 228.

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation by Frank Furedi

1960s counterculture, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, behavioural economics, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, lockdown, New Urbanism, nocebo, nudge theory, nudge unit, scientific management, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, work culture

Cameron helped set up the Behavioural Insight Team in 2010, which was charged with the task of developing policies that could shape people’s thoughts, choices and actions. This team, known as the ‘Nudge Unit’, operated on the assumption that attempting to convince the electorate of government policies is pointless; subliminal psychological techniques and manipulation were considered more effective than democratic debate and argument. When Britain’s former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg casually remarked that the Nudge Unit ‘could change the way citizens think’, he spoke a language usually associated with a totalitarian propaganda agency.753 Nudge-like classical forms of social engineering are justified on the assumption that the expert knows best.

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Essays in Sociological Theory, Glencoe: The Free Press, p.160. 745 www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/equality-act/protected-characteristics (accessed 12 February 2021). 746 For a discussion of the politics of behaviour see Leggett (2014) ‘The politics of behaviour change: nudge, neoliberalism and the state’, Policy & Politics, 42(1), 3 – 19. 747 See www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-launches-governments-first-loneliness-strategy (accessed 21 February 2021). 748 Cited in www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-launches-governments-first-loneliness-strategy (accessed 19 September 2020). 749 Tamsin Rutter (2016) ‘New research boosts crusade to embed happiness in public policy’, Global Government Forum, 15 December, www.globalgovernmentforum.com/new-research-boosts-crusade-to-embed-happiness-in-public-policy/ (accessed 4 March 2021). 750 Cited in Mark Easton (2006) ‘The politics of happiness’, BBC Home, 22 May, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/happiness_formula/4809828.stm. 751 Frank Furedi (2006) ‘Politicians, economists, teachers: why are they so desperate to make us happy/’, The Daily Telegraph, 7 May, www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3624819/Politicians-economists-teachers-why-are-they-so-desperate-to-make-us-happy.html (accessed 23 January 2019). 752 Tamsin Rutter (2016) ‘New research boosts crusade to embed happiness in public policy’, Global Government Forum, 15 December, www.globalgovernmentforum.com/new-research-boosts-crusade-to-embed-happiness-in-public-policy/ (accessed 4 March 2021). 753 www.theguardian.com/society/2010/sep/09/cameron-nudge-unit-economic-behaviour (accessed 23 September 2016). 754 See C.R. Sunstein and A. Vermeule (2020) Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press. 755 Cited in F. Jotterand (2011) ‘Will post-humans still need the virtues?’, AJOB Neuroscience, 2(4), 3 – 9, at 4. 756 T.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore

Airbnb, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, call centre, chief data officer, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, data science, Diane Coyle, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, G4S, hype cycle, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, loose coupling, M-Pesa, machine readable, megaproject, minimum viable product, nudge unit, performance metric, ransomware, robotic process automation, Silicon Valley, social web, The future is already here, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture

Digital transformation is not really about replacing old skills with new; it is about balancing old skills and new, and putting them to work together. Retrospective: organ donation In 2012, the UK government began experimenting with new ways to increase the number of people donating organs after they had died. The Behavioural Insight team, also known as the ‘Nudge Unit’ – a crack unit of policy experts and economists – believed a likely route to success would be to amend the paper form that people used to apply for a provisional driving licence, adding a call to action that encouraged donations. They were working with operational officials in the DVLA to make this happen, but the logistical difficulties involved in updating paper-based processes were slowing them down.

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Amending the provisional licence form wasn’t just operationally difficult; it didn’t actually turn out to be that good an idea. Most provisional licence forms were filled out by prospective new teenage drivers or their parents. Neither group was particularly engaged by reading a sentence at the top of a long form that confronted them with their mortality, however elegant its drafting. The Nudge Unit tested one new version of the sentence on the paper form, and the number of donations went down. The early pioneers of e-government in the UK had long said that a goal for the new GOV.UK should be to make better use of the ‘golden page’ – the final page of a transaction. In companies, the golden page had become known as the best point to cross-promote additional or complementary goods.

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

Number 10 advisers Ben Warner and Dominic Cummings showed signs of increasing unease at the SAGE meetings they attended. Patrick Vallance was becoming anxious, too. And then herd immunity stampeded on to the scene. It caused a public outcry. David Halpern, the head of the Behavioural Insights team at Number 10 (often called the ‘nudge unit’), was at the 10 March SAGE meeting. On the same day, he told BBC News: ‘There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows, as we think it probably will do, where you’ll want to cocoon, you’ll want to protect those at-risk groups so they basically don’t catch the disease, and by the time they come out of their cocooning herd immunity’s been achieved in the rest of the population.’

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Sunetra Gupta Professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, Gupta was one of three academics responsible for the Great Barrington Declaration, which proposed allowing the virus to sweep through the population quickly so that herd immunity could build up, while the vulnerable were shielded. Her claim that half the UK population had already been infected and therefore acquired immunity was contradicted by antibody evidence. David Halpern Head of the UK government’s Behavioural Insights team (often called the ‘nudge unit’), he gave the first interview that mentioned herd immunity. Matt Hancock MP for West Suffolk since 2010 and Secretary of State for Health and Social Care since 2018. On 19 March 2020, he introduced the Coronavirus Bill, giving the police sweeping powers, to the UK Parliament. On 27 March 2020, Hancock and Boris Johnson revealed they had tested positive for coronavirus; Hancock suffered mild symptoms.

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Colleen Giblin, “The Perils of Large Plates: Waist, Waste, and Wallet,” review of “The Visual Illusions of Food: Why Plates, Bowls, and Spoons Can Bias Consumption Volume,” by Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum (FASEB Journal 20, no. 4 [2006]: A618), Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, 2011, http://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/outreach/large-plates.html. 243. Wansink and Ittersum, “Visual Illusions of Food.” 244. Leo Benedictus, “The Nudge Unit—Has It Worked So Far?” Guardian, May 1, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/may/02/nudge-unit-has-it-worked. 245. Britton Brewer, “Adherence to Sport Injury Rehabilitation Regimens,” in Adherence Issues in Sport and Exercise, ed. Stephen Bull (New York: Wiley, 1999), 145–168. 246. Richard H. Thaler, “Opting In vs. Opting Out,” New York Times, September 26, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/business/economy/27view.html. 247.

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Design deliberately and with intent Nudges are an incredibly powerful mechanism for improving teams and organizations. They are also ideally suited to experimentation, so can be tested on smaller populations to fine-tune their results. Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom established a “nudge unit” in 2010 that has improved collection of car taxes by 30 percent by sending overdue-tax notices along with a bold “Pay your tax or lose your [make of car]” label and a photo of the car. The unit also improved collection of court fines by 33 percent by sending notices by text message instead of mail.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Welcome to the great meta-problem of the twenty-first century. We're at a curious juncture of history. To open the latest Wired, Nature or cultural review is to be treated to a parade of wonders: extraordinary new discoveries, products and achievements. From quantum biology, nanotechnology and exoplanet astronomy to nudge unit governance, blockchain and virtual worlds, surely this is a uniquely fecund moment when the frontier is expanding at a record and still accelerating pace. Mounting evidence suggests the opposite. A lively debate is calling into question these dominant assumptions about our place in history and the default nature of progress.

…

Political tropes, like their cultural counterparts, are endlessly recycled, whether it is the feckless poor or greedy financiers. Most radical policy proposals are decades old: nationalisation; privatisation; fiscal tweaking with tax rises and tax cuts. This paralysis means ‘new anxieties’ are faced with ‘old ideologies’.19 Some new ideas get through: nudge unit governance for example, or perhaps nascent concepts like Universal Basic Income or Modern Monetary Theory.20 But in general, despite progress, we lack ideas to solve questions as diverse and significant as loneliness, homelessness, social care, care of the elderly and child care.21 Even the most energised debates – about race, gender or the environment, for example – have their roots in the 1960s and earlier.

Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

They drew on this connectedness to argue that “medical and public health interventions might be more cost effective than initially supposed, since health improvements in one might spread to others.” Could this insight lead to the great social unwinding project? And who better to involve than the UK Behavioral Insights Team, the so‐called nudge unit. Where would they start? In the same way that one person becoming obese impacted others, one person as a spouse, friend, or sibling could take the lead and be supported by committing to regaining normal weight. We now know a lot more than we did a decade ago about social networks; tackling obesity with this knowledge seems a sensible avenue to explore. 4.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

There is increasing optimism about fifteeen-minute neighbourhoods, with Mayor Anne Hidalgo of Paris knocking five minutes off Adelaide’s 1990s concept of a twenty-minute city – which was itself a reinvention of the USSR’s ‘Microraions’ (microdistricts) and China’s ‘Xiaoqu’.25 The concept of a neighbourhood is increasingly acknowledged as a universally human phenomenon. We think access to transport – the ability to move – should be too. Transport, left at the station? Behavioural science as a discipline emerged within university departments. The past decade has seen the creation of teams of specialists (often nicknamed ‘nudge units’) in dozens of government departments around the world, and businesses have intensified their application of organizational psychology too. But the transport sector has been a late adopter of the approach. We see a tremendous opportunity here to purposefully apply behavioural science, with rigour and creativity.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

If a person can influence another’s decision, one can exercise control beyond one’s self. Perhaps counterintuitive at first, the assertion that humans have some sense of agency (and therefore responsibility) is a key precondition for thinking about and exerting control over them. For example, some governments have “nudge units” to influence people’s actions, such as saving electricity by showing them their usage compared with that of their neighbors. Because people have both agency and responsibility, others can impose some influence on them. If humans had no agency, it would be truly senseless to try to shape somebody else’s views.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

On becoming US President, Obama appointed Sunstein to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, based in the White House. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Conservative Party leader David Cameron told members of parliament to read the book; on becoming Prime Minister in 2010 he set up the Behavioural Insight Team, quickly dubbed ‘the Nudge Unit’, in Downing Street, advised by Thaler. The mandate was to induce people to make ‘better’ decisions, in the interest of ‘society’. Steering people is always questionable. How do we know that the nudgers know what is best for any individual? Today’s conventional wisdom becomes yesterday’s error.

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

For instance, whereas a decade ago it was common practice to ask new employees to opt in to their 401(k), Thaler’s work helped inspire a new standard: it’s now common practice at most major companies to enroll employees automatically, which has hugely increased the numbers of people saving for retirement. (The work has been so successful that an entire governmental agency, a nudge unit, was created in the United Kingdom to study and implement tactics for improving British life.) But Thaler despairs of the human allergy to uncertainty. We sat together in the atrium of the Booth School at the University of Chicago, where he teaches, and he began by explaining to me what he and others have found: that humans are hopeless with probability.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Buttiglione, P. R. Lane, L. Reichlin and V. Reinhart, ‘Deleveraging: What Deleveraging?’, Geneva Report on the World Economy 16 (Geneva: International Centre for Monetary and Banking Studies, 2014). 12 A morally inappropriate response has been proposed by influential behavioural economists linked to the nudge units in the White House and 10 Downing Street. This is to ban people from over-borrowing. As one enthusiast put it, ‘What is the big deal? Let’s limit people’s ability to hurt themselves in borrowing, like we do with seatbelts in driving.’ D. Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions (New York: Harper Collins, 2008).

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

The core idea behind Nudge is that rather than fighting these forces, we should use them, to steer or nudge people to make the choices they would want to make – the choices homo economicus would make, or at least something close. At first, Nudge looked like a passing fashion, just the latest idea from the policy wonks hanging around central government. But it didn’t go away. Sunstein worked for Obama in the White House, Thaler’s ‘Nudge Unit’ advised the Cameron government in the UK, and self-conscious Nudge policies are now being used in around 130 countries.23 Thaler won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2017. Nudge enthusiasts almost always point to the same policy to illustrate the Nudge approach, its flagship success story – automatic enrolment in workplace pensions.

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

Di Sturco, G., “Meet Sophia, the Robot That Looks Almost Human,” National Geographic. 2018. 48. Sagar, M., and E. Broadbent, “Participatory Medicine: Model Based Tools for Engaging and Empowering the Individual.” Interface Focus, 2016. 6(2): p. 20150092. 49. Patel, M. S., K. G. Volpp, and D. A. Asch, “Nudge Units to Improve the Delivery of Health Care.” N Engl J Med, 2018. 378(3): pp. 214–216. 50. Emanuel, E. J., “The Hype of Virtual Medicine,” Wall Street Journal. 2017; Lopatto, E., “End of Watch: What Happens When You Try to Change Behavior Without Behavioral Science?,” Verge. 2018. 51. Marteau, T. M., “Changing Minds About Changing Behaviour.”

Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

See Friedman et al (2015); Laurison and Friedman (2016). 306 Notes: Chapter NotesEight-Nine 35 36 37 38 Gary brings to mind Richard Hoggart’s autobiographical The uses of literacy (2009), the seminal text that charts the possibilities (and pains) of social ascent at a time of expanding opportunities. He eschewed the contemporary language of social mobility embraced more readily by professional service firms, feeling that architecture was now an established level-playing field. See Thaler and Sunstein (2009). The Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the Nudge Unit, is an organisation that was set up inside the Cabinet Office to apply nudge theory to UK government policy in many areas, including social mobility. Erickson’s (1996) classic study finds a similar effect in terms of the use of popular culture as a bridging tool that aids cross-class interaction and coordination in workplaces.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Steve wanted to use the term “behavior change,” which I thought had awful connotations. David Halpern and I were lobbying for Behavioural Insights Team, the name finally chosen. The argument consumed most of the trip to Paris. At some point Rohan took Steve aside and told him to give in, arguing, prophetically, that “no matter what we name it, everyone will call it the ‘nudge unit.’” By the time of my next trip to London, the initial team had been established and was set up in temporary facilities in an obscure corner of the Admiralty Arch, located a short walk away from 10 Downing Street and Parliament. It was winter, and London had been hit with what locals considered a massive snowstorm.

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

A few hours after the fireplace chat, one of the government’s inner team, Dr David Halpern, gave a BBC interview in which he let the cat out of the bag and spelt out what all the delay tactics actually meant. Halpern was the chief executive of the government’s Behavioural Insights Team, known as the ‘nudge unit’, which had been set up in 2010 to advise the Cabinet Office on ways to influence the public to follow desirable policies. In this role he had been advising the prime minister on the virus strategy, and he was also a member of Sage. ‘There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows as it will do, where you want to cocoon, to protect those at-risk groups so they don’t catch the disease,’ Halpern told the interviewer.

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Why a ‘Right to an Explanation ’ Is Probably Not the Remedy You Are Looking For” Duke Law and Technology Review, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2017), 1–65 (43). 54Vijay Panday, “Artificial Intelligence’s ‘Black Box’ Is Nothing to Fear”, New York Times, 25 January 2018, https://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2018/​01/​25/​opinion/​artificial-intelligence-black-box.​html, accessed 1 June 2018. 55See Daniel Kahneman and Jason Riis, “Living, and Thinking About It: Two Perspectives on Life”, in The Science of Well-Being, Vol. 1 (2005). See also Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Penguin, 2011). 56Indeed, the latter is so powerful that the UK Government created a specialist body—the Behavioural Insights Team (popularly known as the Nudge Unit) designed to influence people’s behaviour without them realising. Website of the Behavioural Insights Team, http://​www.​behaviouralinsig​hts.​co.​uk/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 57Campolo et al., AI Now Institute 2017 Report, https://​assets.​contentful.​com/​8wprhhvnpfc0/​1A9c3ZTCZa2KEYM6​4Wsc2a/​8636557c5fb14f2b​74b2be64c3ce0c78​/​_​AI_​Now_​Institute_​2017_​Report_​.​pdf, accessed 1 June 2018. 58For an example of a functional approach to explainable AI, see Todd Kulesza, Margaret M.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book value, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demand response, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, index card, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, nudge unit, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Shai Danziger, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, union organizing, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

Indeed, Britain’s government has created a new small unit whose mission is to apply the principles of behavioral science to help the government better accomplish its goals. The official name for this group is the Behavioural Insight Team, but it is known both in and out of government simply as the Nudge Unit. Thaler is an adviser to this team. In a storybook sequel to the writing of Nudge, Sunstein was invited by President Obama to serve as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a position that gave him considerable opportunity to encourage the application of the lessons of psychology and behavioral economics in government agencies.