Christmas morning surfing on the Internet led me to a book that I intend to put on my reading list for 2010.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness is by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.

A descriptive paragraph about the book from Amazon.com says, that “Nudge is about choices – how we make them and how we can make better ones.”  And what is a nudge and why do people sometimes need to be nudged?  Here’s the response from Thaler and Sunstein in a Q & A reported by Amazon:

By a nudge we mean anything that influences our choices. A school cafeteria might try to nudge kids toward good diets by putting the healthiest foods at front. We think that it’s time for institutions, including government, to become much more user-friendly by enlisting the science of choice to make life easier for people and by gentling nudging them in directions that will make their lives better.

Key to the thinking by Sunstein and Thaler is “libertarian paternalism,” defined as “a kind of minimalist interventionism designed to remedy some of the America’s greatest collective action problems.”

If you’d like to read more from two sources that led me to the book, click on the links below:

Bruce Snook
River Country Journal

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