SHAWN MACOMBER: The Man Whisperers Nudge: Improving Decisions Abount Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Sunstein, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R.
booKs In RevIew intention, signification—that tell you so clearly and so forcefully that these stones were put in place according to a philosophy of awesome proportions.” C hartres’s crowning...
...Even moneychangers were allowed to set up shop in this temple, the canons carefully stipulating that their dues go to the chapter as a whole and not only to the dean...
...So do the illustrations, from architectural line drawings explaining the fine points of the ribbed vault, pointed arch, and rose window, to color photos of many of the magnificent windows...
...So, tell us again, what do you mean we, Kemosabe...
...Thaler and Sunstein believe the government designing choice architecture is a good use of taxpayer funds...
...Never since surpassed in quality, they were colored with metal oxides while molten, using copper for ruby, antimony for yellow, iron for green...
...The Dog Whisperer: You can shape virtually any behavior you want from your dog, including wagging his tail at various speeds, a very fast or very slow sit, sneezing three times in a row, or nodding his head yes and no...
...Besides being a temple, it was also a town hall, social club, marketplace, and dormitory...
...Competing in the 400meter freestyle, I refused Rome 1960: The Olympics to shave, insisting that it That changed the World would have negligible conBy David Maraniss sequences while doing (simon & scHUster, 478 pages, $26.95) irreparable damage to my dignity...
...Sculptured motifs in the south door show the liberal arts—Euclid’s figure denoted geometry, Aristotle dialectics, Boethius arithmetic, Ptolemy astronomy—while those in the north portal show signs of the zodiac and months of the year symbolized by figures planting, cultivating, and harvesting, with February showing a sturdy peasant warming his feet by a fire...
...I was not aware either of our fleeting innocence or of our role in changing the world...
...it was apparently imported specially from the Mediterranean area...
...Granted, a private sector “nudge” is, indeed, non-coercive...
...Not all the recent windows are entirely French: one in the south transept was financed by the American Institute of Architects...
...T he explicit, if mostly rhetorical, support for freedom of choice is welcome, of course, and preferable to Clintonism, neo-New Dealism, etc...
...Spock lurking within you”) and The Doer (“everyone’s Homer Simpson”): The Planner is trying to promote your long-term welfare but must cope with the feelings, mischief and strong will of the Doer, who is exposed to the temptations that come with arousal...
...Sorry...
...Which is to say, not very...
...Craftsmen from carpenters to wheelwrights and stonemasons contributed windows depicting them in bright colors at work...
...Their main focus is getting a dog after the campaign...
...As editor in chief Tyrrell has reported in these pages before, I certainly tried to change the world, at least the world of swimming...
...When they broke open a new barrel, one of their cries went, “New wine, just freshly broached, smooth and tasty, pure full-bodied, leaps to the head like a squirrel up a tree...
...The 1960 Olympiad was the first in which swimmers shaved their bodies...
...The long nave (built to accommodate 10,000 to 15,000 people) slopes toward the entrance so the floor could be sluiced with water to clean up after the hordes of pilgrims who slept there...
...They’ve come to influence, not decree, the pair admirably insist, even while remaining blissfully unaware that they’ve cut the heart out of the libertarian carcass they’re prancing around in...
...There is a reason Milton Friedman called his book Free to Choose and not Less to Gain...
...The Man Whisperers I n a seminal 1962 episoDe of the twilight Zone alien visitors enrapture humanity with plati tudes about intergalactic fellowship, advancedtechnology solutions to earth’s most intractable problems, and, finally, offers of an all-expense-paid trip to a utopia among the stars...
...My ever-charitable wife diagnosed this behavior as “separation anxiety,” and in search of a cure I purchased Paul Owens’s The Dog Whisperer...
...C hartres’s crowning glory, its stained glass, casts the nave into a mystical reddish-blue gloom, flooding it with what the poet Paul Claudel called “darkness made visible...
...booKs In RevIew intention, signification—that tell you so clearly and so forcefully that these stones were put in place according to a philosophy of awesome proportions...
...Individual liberty granted as a political herding tactic rather than out of philosophical conviction is doomed...
...Fear not, friends, you shan’t be eaten on the glorious planet Hope-monger...
...What a portrait that paints of the average American...
...they snark at one point—Thaler and Sunstein are supremely confident of their ability as “choice architects” to properly guide our decisions from above...
...shawn Macomber is a contributing editor to The American Spectator...
...I qualified first and Reviewed by alan b. somers in doing so set an Olympic alan b. somers, a former American and World record holder, was a Pan American Games champion and member of the 1960 Olympic swimming team...
...If you walk into a room three seconds after your dog has eliminated on the carpet, there’s no use even commenting on it.…As far as he’s concerned, you’re yelling because of what he’s doing at that exact moment— lying quietly on the floor...
...Coercion for my own good equals libertarianism...
...Nein...
...If you want to nudge people into socially desirable behavior, do not, by any means, let them know their actions are better than the social norm,” the duo write, advising our societal vanguard on how to play our soft, pliable little brains like an orchestra of fiddles...
...Thaler and Sunstein dismiss fears of politically empowered nudgers slouching toward Oceania out of hand (“If our policies are unwise, then it would be constructive to criticize them directly rather than to rely only on the fear of a hypothetical slippery 72 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR ocTobeR 2008 booKs In RevIew slope”), fretting instead over how the little people (“somewhat mindless, passive decision makers”) will react to nudges, warning that “choice architects” must understand how to “encourage socially beneficial behavior, and also how to discourage events like the one that occurred in Jonestown...
...During a recent interview with Denver Magazine, Barack Obama admitted his two young daughters “definitely don’t think I’m a rock star” and that they so far had little interest in the presidential race...
...Wine dealers, for instance, could sell their products tax 70 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR ocTobeR 2008 free in the nave...
...Libertarians who believe the tax system should not be used to redistribute wealth or that corporate managers’ paramount duty is to maximize profit for investors or that the government has no constitutional mandate for social engineering are dismissed by the authors as “ardent” or “extreme...
...Benevolent herders...
...If anything, Nudge reads like an innocuous attempt to cash in on popular Tipping booKs In RevIew Point/Freakonomics-style “transformative concept” books...
...The Dog Whisperer: In order to get the message across to [your dog], you have to give him your signal of approval virtually the exact moment he sits...
...The evolved elite...
...Yet “beneficial direction” manifestly lies in the eye of the beholder...
...When two men with significant voices in the national conversation commit to paper sentences like “Choosers are human, so designers should make life as easy as possible,” readers are left to wonder of what extraction our self-appointed “designers” consider themselves...
...This baby is on board...
...It’s a matter of disposition...
...I disagree...
...How many nudges do you believe selfdescribed paternalists will allow us to ignore before acting in what is so obviously our best interest...
...Hey, these guys feel our pain...
...Of its original 185 windows, an amazing 152 have survived nearly 800 years of war—they were removed to safety during WWII—political vandalism, and acid rain...
...I see the potential for a real Obama family bonding experience: The girls can learn to train the pooch while watching Thaler and Sunstein—The Man Whisperers—teach Daddy how to properly train the nation...
...Here’s Nudge, for example, on the war between our dual-personality inner selves, The Planner (“the Mr...
...That’s a different story...
...But public/ state “nudges...
...He’s doing what he’s doing because it feels good...
...Thaler and Sunstein prefer libertarian paternalists...
...The IRS is not known for relying on persuasion, thus I presume my participation/donation will be coerced...
...Dreamily musing that a carbon tax might lead to These brilliant scholars have no conception whatsoever of what constitutes mainstream libertarian thought...
...Sure, the authors cautiously acknowledge the virtues of school choice, tort reform, and non-authoritarian solutions to other social problems...
...I n a strange twist of journalistic serenDipity, I began reading Nudge the same week the sim mering destructive campaign of my year-old pug Benny erupted into a merciless disembowelment of our sofa...
...Nonetheless, the authors’ sense of elitism nevertheless seeps out occasionally, despite their best efforts...
...By the time a skeptical cryptographer translates the extraterrestrials’ guidebook beyond its warm and fuzzy title, To Serve Man, and realizes it is a cookbook, not a socialist manifesto, hordes of human cattle have already schlepped willingly off to the great slaughterhouse in the sky...
...Fantastic...
...Little decals of black flies in Amsterdam urinals, Nudge relates, have given men something to aim at, reducing “spillage by 80 percent...
...Or, as they frame it, “thoughtful ‘choice architecture’ can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions...
...Lo and behold, mesmerizing dogs isn’t all that different from nudging the human hoi polloi...
...Chartres may well have been a model of God’s universe and the new Jerusalem, but it also existed on a very human level, serving social as well as religious functions...
...Many merchants hawked their wares when there was no religious service...
...ocTobeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 73...
...This only shows that these brilliant scholars, who begin sentences in Nudge with “As libertarians…” or some variation, have, bizarrely, no conception whatsoever of what constitutes mainstream—the term is employed lightly here—libertarian thought...
...The immense rose windows of the west front, with Jesus sitting in judgment, and the north transept, with Mary cradling the Christ Child, radiate starbursts of color as the light changes throughout the day...
...Thus the stone and glass imagery reflected many secular subjects...
...Why the fascination for this Olympics exists escapes me, and I was there as a participant...
...For authors with such a low baseline belief in individuals’ self-determinative ability—“Should pedestrians in London get hit by a double-decker bus to teach them to ‘look right...
...The inimitable bleu de Chartres was created with a cobalt compound unknown in northern Europe...
...Nudge is sprinkled with the requisite examples of faux self-effacement and invocations of societal level “we,” as in: “We all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself...
...That campy cautionary tale came to mind recently as I perused Nudge, a new book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein—of the University of Chicago and Harvard Law, respectively—in which the eminent professors argue for a more sophisticated, subliminal Nanny State led by a less draconian nanny...
...This is not to accuse the authors, both informal advisers to Barack Obama, of surreptitiously selling cannibalistic recipes...
...Again, Nudge: Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time...
...And here’s The Dog Whisperer: From a dog’s perspective, there is no such thing as a problem behavior...
...After all, was it not most beneficial for the hungry alien to nudge his human wards skyward...
...Vignettes like this of medieval life as it was add to the pleasure of this instructive, pleasantly discursive work...
...The reader comes away from it with a new appreciation for this period in Western history: the astonishing skill of its craftsmen and the faith-based richness of their lives, certainly less comfortable physically than ours, but filled with spiritual meaning...
...Nudge: The bottom line, from our point of view, is that people are, shall we say, nudge-able...
...the funding of Social Security and Medicare, of the provision of universal health insurance,” however, is about as philosophically libertarian as positing, “When people have a hard time predicting how their choices will end up affecting their lives, they have less to gain by numerous options and perhaps even by choosing for themselves...
...Wonderful...
...Keeping our budding national cult away from fatty foods and saving for retirement without any neo-lemmings wandering off to the refrigerator for a cool glass of cyanide-flavored Kool-Aid is the cross choice architects must bear...
...Taking Brundage I n 2004, nbc presenteD a program titleD “1960: The Last Olympics of Innocence,” and in 2008 David Maraniss gives us Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World...
...Without respect for those doing the choosing, however, the security of that freedom is tenuous at best...
Vol. 41 • October 2008 • No. 8
