Nudge-it's another book review chock full of ideas.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler

I have trouble with Nudge.

Not with its first premise: people make bad decisions. Nudge backs up my current understanding of our lower lizard brain (as opposed to our higher (literally) thinking brain--the good-at-reasoning and math and statistics, real-smart-monkey brain) that I talked about earlier when reviewing the book Kludge—a sibling monosyllabic title that also explicates the two-brain theory of humans, but starting from evolution. (I understand that Blink does something similar but celebrates the lizard in us all).

Nudge avoids evolution and draws from research. Rather than dwelling on the non-evolving lizardness of your brain-bottom, it demonstrates lower functioning with examples from personal finance, health and school choice, and extended warranties. Homer Simpson personifies the lizard-brain man and pops up often. His inability to delay any gratification, start anything worthwhile or plan more than two seconds out from the present demonstrates our brain at work.

Then the book presents its second big idea. In crazed optimism the authors expect the government to exploit these tendencies of non-thought for the good of us all. Not by prohibitions or enforced actions, but by a nudge--a method that exploits our weakness to guide us to be our best selves. An example is to make the default option in any choice the best option, taking advantage of our inertia against making change (for example, 401Ks should be opt out rather than opt in).

The authors seem to forget how things are done here in the USA. We aim folks on the path to hell for an extra buck. We advertise exploiting sex (part of the lizard brain appeal) to sell toothpaste and floorclearner. But most of all, we don’t buy our congressfolks to make life better for everyone; we buy them to make life better for me, right now. That’s the American way. We have a marketplace and the market decides. He who pays most, gets most--and that means controlling those default choices, hiding outcomes, and downright lying.

Nudge technology, like atom bombs, can lead us to good choices or to very bad choices (well maybe there are no good choices with atom bombs, come to think of it). That most likely path is not discussed.

The Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw

Sometimes you see something you missed in your life of reading.
GBS was one of those. He was only an icon to me with a pointy beard, no longer popular, especially with the hip and then hippie set. I only knew of him thru references on Sesame Street –Miss Piggy-malion--and reading the credits to My Fair Lady.
So last week I ran into him lying on a shelf in the local library, an edition about 60 years old. Why not?
GBS was witty and could write dialogue for Bringing up Baby or any of the fast talking, screwball comedies. Oh, I forgot, they copied him, not the other way around.
How class-bound England was/is. Sometimes I forget about social class when I hang out in Silicon Valley (where they hide their fancy-pants au-pairs and yardmen). Those Victorians cemented class but left cracks for upward money. And you forget how eccentric and extreme edge political those landed lords (and their lesser cousins) could be without disrupting upper class manners.
GBS writes polemics about mistreatment of the working class in the middle of snappy dialog. But readers skipped those pages to get to the characters spitting it out at each other as they danced around rituals of love and old fashioned hate, too.
You see how socialism was perceived b4 the communists took over Russia and hatched Stalin. GBS watched England losing its markets for manufactured goods because the rest of the world made things cheaper and predicted an England going broke. (sounds familiar?) , where they could only export workers. He didn’t forsee our overstuffed world and ad-driven continuous style-change buying that remade the world in its own image.
He sought a moral force that was rational. Religion was hocus-pocus; the church was just finishing up dealing with Galileo and the Pope declared himself infallible. GBS looked for non-revolutionary change to a more equitable world thru education. And he started the London School of Economics to explain it all.
But in this book, GBS creates the rational man as hero, the anti-romantic, that would have been a detective if he were born in the 40’s, I bet. And the tough thinking woman could be played by Kate Hepburn or maybe Becky Sharpe if she gets incarnated in the computer game world. These two finally marry after his first wife sentimentally dies off and they accidentally get engaged in about a paragraph and realize love would only mess things up.
Hope I didn’t mess up the ending for you.