Insightful essay. The nudges he describes were elaborated in great detail in the book called Nudge by Richard Thaler. In the book, Thaler describes nudges such

Insightful essay. The nudges he describes were elaborated in great detail in the book called Nudge by Richard Thaler. In the book, Thaler describes nudges such as placing the fresh fruit in the school lunch line in a more easily reachable location than the junk food. The idea is that kids will be more inclined to choose a piece of fresh fruit if it's in easy reach but the chocolate bar requires bending down, etc. While such nudges may sometimes be measurably effective, we must also realize that the idea of socially beneficial nudges evokes a sort of utopian paternalism. The idea behind Nudge paints the picture that there is a light-weight, unobtrusive version of central planning (or central nudging) that can achieve some of the utopian outcomes that planners wish for, but which is less encroaching upon individual freedom. At what point do situational nudges start to feel like social nudges? What if the chubby kid who wants the chocolate has to humiliate himself by reaching far overhead and fishing around blindly in an out-of-reach bin to find the chocolate while everyone else waits impatiently? When does spending hours to opt out of helpful services become an inappropriate encumberment? Google just launched sentence completion in gmail. Combine this with nudges and fuck you won't be corrected to duck you, the typist will see an autocompleted hey I'm feeling really frustrated about what you said right now ready to accept with the tap of a single button. Nudges are meant as a mechanism of social control. Gal points out wisely that if we rush to judgment about the why of behaviors, then our behavioral economic remedies (nudges, etc.) might be terribly wrongheaded.