If Books Could Kill - ＂Nudge＂ Part 2： Mr. Nudge Goes to Washington

00:00:00.000 what are we doing for zingers for part twos yeah i was thinking peter i don't know that we can i

00:00:04.800 don't right it doesn't make a ton of sense michael peter what do you know about the second half of

00:00:09.660 the nudge book that you make a joke even less i feel like we need something else something that's

00:00:18.260 not the usual format something about getting nudged into a part two wait do it do it do it

00:00:23.000 do something dance for me okay how about this okay uh peter michael how do you feel about

00:00:34.120 coming back for part two of our nudge episode yeah i actually didn't want to do it initially

00:00:38.840 but then you manipulated me using choice architecture and here we are

00:00:43.480 so today we are talking about the rest of nudge improving decisions about health wealth and

00:01:04.220 happiness by richard thaler and cass sunstein peter do you want to give us a little uh previously

00:01:09.600 on yeah yeah so in part one we learned what a nudge is they initially described it as um something

00:01:20.080 that impacts the choice architecture like when you order things on a cafeteria menu a certain

00:01:27.140 way it impacts a person's choices and then they gave other examples which became steadily less

00:01:34.640 and less like what they initially defined as a nudge to the point where i think we both lost

00:01:40.860 track of what it actually means yes and i think we sort of landed on the basic idea that what

00:01:48.200 they're really trying to do is endorse like a framework for policy analysis where nothing

00:01:56.280 large ever happens yes and instead you are only ever doing tiny little incremental nudges

00:02:04.220 Right. Here and there, rather than, for example, regulating coal emissions.

00:02:10.900 Yes. Stuff. They don't want the government to do government stuff.

00:02:14.120 Right. Right.

00:02:14.760 So this is our first two part episode. There are a couple reasons why I wanted to do a deeper and more detailed dive into this book than other ones we've covered that are like maybe a little bit longer, like maybe more bestselling or whatever.

00:02:28.760 the first reason is i'm doing this as a form of penance because when this book came out i was

00:02:38.380 super nudge pilled oh no to the point where like i gave a presentation at work on like the nudge

00:02:45.440 concept and like how good it was i was 26 years old i was just starting at my first job in human

00:02:53.400 rights and international development. And like, I, I had a lot of confidence and not very much

00:02:59.780 knowledge. And like, I really thought that this stuff, like a lot of people was going to be very

00:03:05.260 useful for international development and human rights and like advocacy campaigns and like how

00:03:09.860 to solve poverty. Like I really thought this was going to be a very important tool. And then over

00:03:15.480 the subsequent 10 years, especially as I spent more time in the developing world and like realized

00:03:20.500 what the actual problems and challenges were, I became really radicalized against this concept

00:03:27.020 and this kind of like, oh, this technical tweak can solve this like complicated social problem.

00:03:32.740 Yeah.

00:03:32.900 That's another reason why I wanted to do this as a two-part episode is because I want to talk about

00:03:38.020 what happened to this idea and the authors after the book came out. So one of the aspects of Nudge

00:03:45.940 that we didn't cover last episode is throughout the book, they not only describe nudges as good

00:03:53.040 policy, they also describe them as good politics, right? Everyone is in their little ideological

00:03:59.140 silos. And because nudges are technical and procedural, they offer a third way forward.

00:04:06.640 The final chapter of the book is literally called a real third way. So the best example of the kind

00:04:12.420 of political analysis that they're doing in the second half of the book is the chapter I alluded

00:04:17.400 to at the end of last episode. This is the chapter where they take on the tricky debate

00:04:24.520 over same sex marriage. God damn it. This is going to piss me off. So I am going to send you the 0.99

00:04:31.600 first couple of paragraphs of this chapter. We now turn to the very old institution of marriage

00:04:37.440 and explore some of the questions that have recently been raised about marriage and same

00:04:41.740 sex relationships. We begin by offering a proposal that is highly libertarian, that would protect

00:04:47.620 freedom, including religious freedom, and that should, in principle, prove acceptable to all

00:04:52.160 sides. We recognize that many people, including members of many religious groups, strongly object

00:04:57.900 to same-sex marriage. Religious organizations insist on their right to decide for themselves

00:05:02.400 which unions they are willing to recognize with attention to gender, religion, age, and other

00:05:07.340 factors. We also know that many members of same-sex couples want to make lasting commitments

00:05:12.940 to one another. To respect the liberty of religious groups while protecting individual

00:05:17.480 freedom in general, we propose that marriage, as such, should be completely privatized. 0.78

00:05:22.800 Privatize it.

00:05:23.640 Under our proposal, the word marriage would no longer appear in any laws and marriage licenses

00:05:28.540 would no longer be offered or recognized by any level of government. The state would do its

00:05:33.840 business while religious organizations would do theirs we would eliminate the ambiguity created

00:05:39.660 by the fact that the word marriage now refers both to an official legal status and to a religious one

00:05:45.660 fixing marriage okay gay folks i i have a solution for you what if we destroyed marriage altogether 0.92

00:05:52.760 rather than allowing you into our club what if we burned the club to the ground so that no one 0.99

00:05:58.580 could be here would that make you feel accepted by society i fucking love this because again 0.96

00:06:03.740 they're trying to do political analysis right we're taking the temperature down what are we 0.98

00:06:08.340 going to do we're going to destroy the institution of marriage something that first of all would piss 0.98

00:06:15.080 off gay people because you'd rather destroy this institution than let us into it and also would 0.96

00:06:19.060 piss off religious people of course because they want to protect the institution of marriage and 0.99

00:06:22.300 they like the fact that their religious thing gets state recognition this is this is the worst 0.93

00:06:28.840 proposal and in terms of like oh i have a solution that everyone would love it's like no no this is

00:06:35.380 actually the opposite of that this is genuinely something that everyone would hate just because

00:06:40.360 you have like forced massive concessions from both sides does not mean that you have found a workable

00:06:46.780 political solution. Exactly. This is the worst politics. So their actual plan is they want to

00:06:54.280 protect all of the, you know, estate rights and inheritance and all the sort of legal stuff that

00:06:59.720 comes along with marriage. But they're going to shunt that into a new institution called like

00:07:04.220 civil unions or domestic partnerships or whatever. You remember a couple of states did this? Yeah.

00:07:08.380 They then bring in some sort of liberal bona fides, right? So they say most people who enter

00:07:13.180 into marriage contracts don't investigate the divorce laws of their state right because like

00:07:18.100 i'm not going to get divorced and it turns out that a lot of divorce laws in a lot of states 0.99

00:07:22.080 are actually like really exploitative especially to women right so a lot of women get fucked over 0.80

00:07:25.640 in divorces so this institution that they are creating from scratch the new marriage 0.89

00:07:29.960 is also essentially going to include a prenuptial agreement as part of the marriage contract i love

00:07:38.160 how they're like we're solving the gay marriage debate and then they what they propose is just

00:07:44.840 like five separate terrible policies it's also darkly funny to me because it's like

00:07:49.200 they're proposing this not as ideology but as politics right right but it's like okay we're 0.61

00:07:54.740 going to destroy the institution right and we're also going to empower women and make it basically

00:08:00.640 easier for women to get decent benefits in divorces is the religious right gonna love this 0.70

00:08:07.440 Right. That's that's what's so telling is, like, if you just proposed the let's reform divorce laws because they're unfavorable to women in isolation, that would get shot down by the right.

00:08:20.900 Right. And that's like step three of this convoluted plan that they think is the apolitical solution to gay marriage.

00:08:29.640 Exactly. They're like, let's all sit around the table and be adults about this, guys.

00:08:33.800 It just goes to show how little they understand conservatism, that they're like, and let's throw in reforms that benefit women. 0.99

00:08:41.400 Right. 1.00

00:08:41.540 Like, why not?

00:08:42.720 This to me illustrates the limits of this entire behavioral economics approach, right?

00:08:47.420 Because they pepper this entire chapter with behavioral economics, quote unquote, insights, right?

00:08:53.300 So like people choose the default option, right?

00:08:55.260 And people have these biases, these ways that they're predictably irrational where no one thinks they're going to get divorced.

00:09:00.280 So they don't look up the divorce laws, right?

00:09:02.240 And that's kind of a problem for society because all of a sudden people are in these legal contracts that they haven't really investigated in advance.

00:09:07.460 Right.

00:09:08.080 So it sort of seems academic and savvy.

00:09:12.020 Yeah.

00:09:12.300 Yeah.

00:09:12.480 But then much more traditional aspects of human psychology they're totally uninterested in, such as bias.

00:09:18.440 Right. 0.86

00:09:18.860 People are biased against gay people. 0.89

00:09:21.140 Right.

00:09:21.340 They might say that they want to protect the institution of marriage, but they don't actually want that. 0.96

00:09:26.600 They want gay people to continue to be excluded from establishment institutions of American life. 0.92

00:09:32.240 And as well as completely ignoring, like, ordinary psychological principles, they also ignore history, right?

00:09:37.820 Conservatives were against abolishing slavery.

00:09:40.340 They were against giving women the vote. 0.78

00:09:41.760 They were against women joining the workforce. 0.60

00:09:43.300 They were against allowing interracial marriage.

00:09:45.900 Conservatives object to social progress.

00:09:48.280 Also, that is, like, the definition of conservatism.

00:09:51.860 Right. This is—they're very proud of this.

00:09:54.460 Right. This isn't some ancillary thing that you can work around.

00:09:58.400 Like, right. What sincere opponents of gay marriage actually wanted was the maintenance of a second class status for gay people. Yes. You cannot wiggle your way out of that.

00:10:12.280 And also what's what's so frustrating about this approach, too, is, you know, as we talked about last episode, a lot of these like little behavioral principles that they cast as gospel are actually quite conditional. Right. They apply in some cases and not in others. That is quo bias, loss aversion, all these things.

00:10:26.860 What this amounts to is boiling all of human psychology down to like seven or eight psychological principles, right?

00:10:34.760 They always kind of refer to the same things.

00:10:37.520 It's like a really shallow approach and it's a shallow approach that pretends to be empirical.

00:10:44.340 Right.

00:10:44.620 So speaking of which, the other argument that they make for why nudges are good politics is that they're non-ideological.

00:10:53.620 Sure.

00:10:53.840 Right. Things like changing a form at the DMV or moving the desserts at the cafeteria, these don't have obvious left versus right valence.

00:11:05.340 So one of the things they say in the intro is they say Democrats want bigger government and Republicans want smaller government and we want better government.

00:11:13.760 So all we're trying to do is identify places in America where we can apply these technical fixes without getting bogged down into like a big political fight.

00:11:23.840 Right. So after we have solved same sex marriage, we then turn to the U.S. health care system.

00:11:31.840 Put yourself in a 2007, 2008 mind space, Peter. This is the U.S. health care system pre Obamacare. 0.57

00:11:39.400 Sure. Think of all of the problems with the U.S. health care system, all of the challenges we face in trying to fix it.

00:11:45.980 Now, now entirely within the past.

00:11:47.940 Now that everything is perfect, this is the first couple paragraphs where they lay out the problems with the health care system, and then they propose a counterintuitive solution to fix them.

00:12:00.120 Okay.

00:12:01.200 Every election cycle, presidential contenders unveil plans to make health care coverage available to the tens of millions of Americans who lack health insurance.

00:12:09.600 The candidates decry our government's failure thus far to implement an effective plan.

00:12:14.980 Whatever happens in the long run, such plans are hard to design for a simple reason.

00:12:19.440 Healthcare is really expensive.

00:12:21.540 It is expensive in part because Americans want access to all the best services,

00:12:25.660 doctors, hospitals, prescription drugs, medical devices, and nursing homes, to name a few.

00:12:30.040 Of course, we can try to keep healthcare affordable on our own by maintaining healthy lifestyles

00:12:35.120 and by buying only the healthcare products and services that we need.

00:12:38.520 We can save money by visiting the doctor no more often than necessary,

00:12:41.760 and if we purchase insurance, we can choose a plan that covers only catastrophic illnesses

00:12:47.040 instead of coverage with low deductibles.

00:12:49.860 We have choices.

00:12:50.940 But there is something that every healthcare customer in America is forced to buy,

00:12:55.640 whether she wants it or not, the right to sue the doctor for negligence. 0.99

00:12:59.940 God damn it. 1.00

00:13:01.000 God damn it. 1.00

00:13:02.380 Oh my God, that caught me off guard. 0.99

00:13:05.520 I was going to skip this chapter, but then I was like, wait a minute,

00:13:07.900 My co-host is a lawyer and I want to make Peter melt down about their ideas for this.

00:13:14.000 I forgot that 15, 20 years ago, one of the main right wing talking points was that malpractice

00:13:21.760 suits are driving the cost of health care.

00:13:25.480 This is this whole chapter is laying out the fact that we are forced to buy the right to

00:13:32.860 sue our doctors.

00:13:33.880 So they say the principal claim here is that patients and doctors should be free to make their own agreements about the right to sue doctors.

00:13:42.320 If patients want to waive the right to sue, they should be allowed to do exactly that.

00:13:46.500 This increase in freedom is likely to help doctors and patients alike and to make a valuable, even if modest, contribution to the health care problem.

00:13:56.280 All right.

00:13:56.880 There's like so much packed into this that my brain is just sort of loses control.

00:14:00.820 I wish that I could like cleanly articulate the feelings that it makes me feel but I get

00:14:06.860 overwhelmed. It's so frustrating to hear people talk about liability from like a cost perspective

00:14:13.580 because like yes it's an imperfect thing to be like well you can sue them if they hurt you but

00:14:20.320 the alternative is always like well you can't. Right. The idea that that is just like well

00:14:26.960 can't we all agree? No. No. Fuck no. They then compare this. They make an analogy

00:14:33.880 to haircuts. They say, suppose, for example, that people had the right to sue their hairdressers

00:14:41.400 if a haircut went badly wrong and that the cost of this insurance raised the price of haircuts

00:14:46.500 by $50. After someone who had received a particularly gruesome haircut won a $17 million

00:14:52.100 judgment would you be interested in saving fifty dollars per haircut to give up the right to sue

00:14:57.460 if you got a bad one okay would you be angry if you were prevented from doing so okay okay i think

00:15:04.200 it's telling when you have to create an analogy that a is like facially absurd like when your

00:15:11.840 haircut is bad it grows out yeah and then you're talking about malpractice where it's like walking

00:15:18.260 is harder forever because the doctor fucked up right like right it's an awful comparison but

00:15:23.880 even if you eliminated that critique right the analogy they use is a 50 increase in haircuts 0.77

00:15:32.000 no so basically doubling or tripling the price of a haircut this is funny because for um

00:15:37.520 most women's haircuts this is actually negligible uh but for men's haircuts you're like tripling it

00:15:42.580 there's a place downstairs that does it for like 17 bucks so for me i'm like this is like a 400

00:15:46.880 percent increase you know there's also a 20 haircut place in my building and i've i've always

00:15:51.320 just been like no i don't know what goes on in there but it can't be good i'm gonna go i'm gonna

00:15:55.780 go spend 40 oh my haircuts are unbelievably bad peter my my head looks tilted like a golden

00:16:00.040 retriever at all times so to make this case they have three arguments the first argument is that

00:16:07.300 all of the malpractice lawsuits in the united states health care system are spiking health

00:16:12.880 care costs. So they say these lawsuits cost a lot of money. Estimates range from 11 billion to 29

00:16:18.520 billion per year. Exposure to medical malpractice liability has been estimated to account for five

00:16:23.820 to 9% of hospital expenditures. Of course, these particular figures are controversial and may be

00:16:29.340 exaggerated, but no one doubts that many billions of dollars must be paid each year to buy insurance

00:16:34.900 and to fend off liability. This is also this weird thing where they're like, this is how big the

00:16:41.040 problem is it might not be that big but anyway also like health care spending is like real in

00:16:47.840 the trillions of dollars yeah it's four trillion a year yeah in like a vacuum 10 20 billion might

00:16:53.860 seem like a chunky number but no it's not and i am um you know generally speaking a defender of

00:17:02.060 malpractice suits but if they truly doubled the cost of health insurance then i think we could

00:17:09.020 have a conversation. Sure. So this is this leads to their second argument against medical malpractice

00:17:15.380 liability. They say that the system is flooded with frivolous lawsuits. We all know it's too

00:17:22.680 easy to sue each other in America because that lady sued McDonald's. That's right. We all know

00:17:26.120 that there's no details that have emerged about that case since then to make it slightly more

00:17:30.360 complicated. So they're talking about how the argument for medical malpractice liability is

00:17:34.480 that it deters doctors from making mistakes yes and they say the deterrence argument is undermined

00:17:40.440 by the stunningly poor fit between malpractice claims and injuries caused by medical negligence

00:17:46.020 to put it bluntly most patients don't sue even if their doctor has been negligent and many of those

00:17:51.200 who do sue and end up with favorable settlements don't deserve the money what don't how what are

00:17:56.680 they basing that on don't deserve the money they're the word they're just speaking words

00:18:00.180 into the world. Just speaking, just writing words on paper. And then the third argument

00:18:05.580 is basically what happens throughout the entire medical system when everybody's afraid of getting

00:18:10.760 sued. They say many doctors practice defensive medicine, ordering expensive but unnecessary

00:18:16.480 treatments for patients or refusing to provide risky but beneficial treatments simply in order

00:18:21.420 to avoid liability. So first of all, I just maybe this is a little too in the weeds, but if you

00:18:27.380 allow for waivers of liability, then every doctor would refuse to give care unless you signed a

00:18:36.060 complete waiver of liability. This is literally just magical thinking, right? There's absolutely

00:18:41.600 nothing other than some like loosely correlated numbers and concepts floating around in the void.

00:18:49.800 And they're like, well, what if this worked really well?

00:18:53.360 So this chapter is so bad that there's an entire academic article responding to it.

00:18:58.680 That's what I'm talking about.

00:18:59.860 It's called Allowing Patients to Waive the Right to Sue for Medical Malpractice,

00:19:03.620 A Response to Thaler and Sunstein.

00:19:05.580 It's by Tom Baker and Timothy Litton.

00:19:08.080 So this is a fascinating article.

00:19:10.420 And like the reason I wanted to talk about this was not just to dunk on this terrible

00:19:14.800 chapter of their book, but also like to talk about medical malpractice and the fact that

00:19:18.480 like a lot of these myths are still around now.

00:19:20.600 Yeah.

00:19:20.800 So the first thing the authors of this paper note is that, like, of course, there are costs to the medical malpractice system.

00:19:27.420 There's also benefits.

00:19:28.680 Right.

00:19:28.840 Hospitals dedicate significant resources to understanding why mistakes happen and trying to avoid them in the future.

00:19:35.160 Medical journals have thousands of articles on, like, how to improve surgical procedures.

00:19:40.300 This is, like, a major activity of the medical system.

00:19:43.940 Yeah.

00:19:44.080 Do we wish that that was improving only for patient care and, like, altruism and not to avoid lawsuits?

00:19:49.100 Sure.

00:19:49.500 But we also know that when people are punished for bad behavior, they will act to avoid the bad behavior.

00:19:56.200 So, like, it's weird to just talk about this.

00:19:58.860 It's like we should remove this form of accountability.

00:20:01.420 Well, that's that's why they use that quick line about person getting a reward that they don't deserve.

00:20:06.840 Because if you hand wave away the utility of this stuff, then you don't have to worry about the consequences of removing liability for doctors.

00:20:19.260 Right.

00:20:19.500 Well, another thing that really bugs me about the hair salon example is that it smooths over

00:20:24.860 the fact that like you're going to get a $17 million payout for a bad haircut.

00:20:30.840 You know, juries and judges are looking at these cases, right?

00:20:33.500 And you have to assume that thousands of people are looking at like, oh, like I stubbed my

00:20:38.960 toe at the doctor's office and I get $10 million.

00:20:41.760 It's like this just isn't human behavior in any meaningful sense.

00:20:45.140 And what they point out in this article is that if you actually look at the specifics of medical malpractice lawsuits, the median payout is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which is not terribly much.

00:20:56.000 Less than four percent of payouts are one million dollars or greater.

00:20:59.700 And the vast, vast, vast majority of those large payouts are like permanent grave damage.

00:21:06.420 Yeah. Right. These are people who are paralyzed.

00:21:08.400 These are people who who cannot see.

00:21:10.700 These are people who like have the wrong limb amputated.

00:21:13.380 Like, these are grievous harms.

00:21:16.600 And so the idea of just like, oh, people don't deserve it.

00:21:19.560 Like, that's not based on anything.

00:21:22.220 Right. 0.98

00:21:22.560 There's a reason that the tort reformers, including in the MedMal context. 1.00

00:21:27.480 Oh, MedMal.

00:21:28.480 Oh, he is a lawyer.

00:21:30.540 Focus on these outlier big payouts, right?

00:21:35.100 Because you will just as often find people who win but don't get any money or don't win

00:21:42.780 due to some technicality or, you know, that there was some doubt as to the doctor's negligence,

00:21:47.840 et cetera, et cetera. People get screwed over all the time. And it's just not a serious 0.53

00:21:53.840 perspective. And it's provably driven by industry interests in almost every case, right? The people

00:22:00.400 who are aggressively pushing to limit med mal liability. Guess what? It's not interested

00:22:07.020 academics, right? It's industry players who would directly financially benefit.

00:22:11.680 There's also the broader systemic effect. So this this thing about defensive medicine and doctors ordering a bunch of scans because I'm afraid of getting sued is basically an urban legend. It's something that doctors will often say. They're like, oh, I have to order these scans because I'm going to get sued otherwise. But the main reason that doctors order extra scans in the United States is because they get paid. We have a fee for service model.

00:22:37.040 That's the thing is I I've had I've had a doctor that like no matter what small problem you went in with, like you would get a battery of tests.

00:22:46.460 It's so obvious that that's the primary driver of doctors like that, assuming that there are some decent population of doctors who are sort of overemphasizing tests.

00:22:56.220 The literature on this is actually really interesting because it is clear that the U.S. does like way more scans and like way more screening and way more stuff of this nature than other health care systems.

00:23:05.520 But we also actually have like better cancer survival rates than other countries.

00:23:09.340 And like we're more likely to catch rare cancers.

00:23:11.500 And there's quite a bit of, I think, good faith debate about like whether we do too

00:23:16.500 much screening and treatment in the U.S. versus other places maybe doing too little.

00:23:19.760 That's fine.

00:23:20.220 But it's not even clear at the most basic level that like we do practice defensive medicine.

00:23:25.600 This is like a big outgrowth of econ 101 sort of thought, which is these guys will identify

00:23:32.980 a theoretical problem that economics might predict and then just proceed as if it is a real material

00:23:39.360 problem that they have actually identified in the real world. There's also a legal standard thing

00:23:43.180 here where all this stuff about defensive medicine is actually totally separate from the medical

00:23:49.200 malpractice thing because you can't sue a doctor for like ordering an MRI when you didn't need one

00:23:53.900 or doing a blood test that comes back negative. Well, no, but they're saying the opposite,

00:23:57.300 right? They're saying that the doctor is concerned about being called negligent because they didn't

00:24:01.260 order the mri that's just nuts though like you can't say that doctors are ordering extra scans

00:24:07.980 because they're afraid of getting sued and also they refuse to order scans like that doesn't make

00:24:13.160 sense and the legal standard for negligence is somebody didn't do a test that was required by

00:24:21.760 like the main professional body in his field so if you come in and you say like oh i have a lump

00:24:28.500 in my breast and your doctor is like, oh, don't worry about it. Go home. That's just a straightforward

00:24:34.620 case of medical negligence. That's why we have these laws. Yeah. I didn't realize that that was

00:24:39.520 the, um, the heart of their argument. And that is very stupid. It's very stupid. Yeah. And then 1.00

00:24:46.220 the other thing that they, that they note is that like, there's no evidence that this would 0.99

00:24:50.720 actually reduce healthcare costs because we don't pay for fucking healthcare. It's not like you're 0.98

00:24:54.740 looking at like, oh, my knee replacement could be at this hospital for $8,000 and this other

00:24:58.740 hospital for $9,000. And if I waive medical liability, they'll knock a thousand bucks off

00:25:03.200 of it. That's not how it works. You don't shop for healthcare. Like this is somewhere where the

00:25:08.260 nudge framework just completely breaks down because, you know, it's all about choice architecture,

00:25:12.340 but like our choices in terms of medical care are not remotely free because no one has any 0.92

00:25:17.980 fucking information on which to base their medical decisions. Like I once asked at the doctor's 0.95

00:25:23.720 office. How much is this appointment going to cost me? They acted as if I like spoke to them

00:25:28.920 in like Esperanto or something. They're like, what do you mean? How? I was like, I'm about to

00:25:33.180 receive a service. How much is this service going to cost? They were like, we couldn't possibly give

00:25:38.140 you a ballpark. No, no. My favorite thing is when you're like, hey, do I have to pay? And they're

00:25:42.840 like, no, absolutely not. And then you just get a bill later. Yeah, like four months later. And

00:25:46.540 they're like, they're mad at you in a letter about it. Like I was in the office. I offered to pay.

00:25:52.840 There's also a principled thing here where we wouldn't accept signing away your legal rights to get a discount in other areas, right?

00:26:02.920 You get a $500 discount on a car, but you waive your right to join a class action in case it, like, catches fire.

00:26:09.720 Or, like, you get a $50 discount on your rent if you, like, waive the right to sue your landlord.

00:26:16.500 This should not be how rights work.

00:26:19.440 Right.

00:26:19.500 We know that at a systems-wide level, if it is cheaper to not have legal rights, people, especially poor people, will sign away their legal rights.

00:26:28.940 And the reason that those rights exist is because we had that system before.

00:26:34.580 And it did not work.

00:26:36.340 It was exploitative, et cetera. 0.51

00:26:38.120 It really takes a creative mind to make the U.S. health care system worse.

00:26:43.940 So at the end of this chapter, they basically say, like, look, we're not monsters, right?

00:26:49.360 Of course, there's bad doctors out there.

00:26:51.120 And of course, there's like really significant harms.

00:26:53.640 Yeah.

00:26:53.900 So they say patients will still be permitted to sue for intentional or reckless wrongdoing,

00:26:59.320 just not for mere negligence.

00:27:01.480 OK.

00:27:01.940 Negligence is normally defined as the failure to meet what is called the ordinary standard

00:27:06.180 of care, a vague concept that tends to make lawyers fight and judges scratch their heads.

00:27:12.180 Intentional or reckless wrongdoing is a harder standard for plaintiffs to meet.

00:27:16.220 I like how they're casting doubt on the concept of legal negligence, which, by the way, is like the entire backbone of our tort system. And like, without it, there's sort of a level of chaos that I don't think our society would tolerate. But like, it's right that it's a grayish concept. But the purpose of having a grayish standard there is to allow for juries to interpret dynamic situations and figure out what is reasonable and what is not.

00:27:44.840 It's like, what are you proposing? We're just going to do this on like a case by case basis.

00:27:48.540 Right.

00:27:48.820 It's like, well, kind of. Yeah, that's kind of the legal system. Of course, these things are

00:27:53.000 really nebulous and difficult to define. But the recklessness standard is also hard to define.

00:27:59.460 It's just harder to meet.

00:28:01.140 Right.

00:28:01.420 So in the end, they haven't actually solved the problem that they started out with.

00:28:06.480 Right. Doctors are still going to have medical malpractice insurance.

00:28:10.020 Patients are still going to sue their doctors. It's just going to be harder to win.

00:28:13.920 No question. And again, this is claiming to be non-ideological. This is a huge part of the

00:28:20.360 argument for nudges, right? They're technical, they're small, they're procedural. Who could

00:28:24.760 disagree? We're bringing everybody to the table. Right. And then you zoom out and you look at this

00:28:29.780 idea as a whole. This is a deeply ideological policy change, right? What you're essentially

00:28:35.900 doing is trading away rights to save money on healthcare. That is the definition of ideology.

00:28:43.560 How come 99% of the time someone is like, we're going to do apolitical engineering to solve this political problem. 1.00

00:28:52.720 They're just doing right wing shit. 1.00

00:28:54.600 Yeah. Oh, yeah. 1.00

00:28:55.120 You can't say that this is like post politics or something.

00:28:58.700 Peter, I have led you to the river again.

00:29:00.260 This is like where we were going with this chapter.

00:29:02.320 So reading the second half of this book, what I kept thinking of was like a lot of the diet books that me and Aubrey read for maintenance phase, where in the intro, they're like, you never have to be hungry again.

00:29:17.640 It's easy to follow.

00:29:19.260 It's a lifestyle for the rest of your life.

00:29:21.840 Right.

00:29:22.220 and then you keep reading and once you get into the actual like meat like the specifics of the

00:29:28.620 diet it's like so you'll be meticulously weighing all of your meals right you can never eat out at

00:29:34.000 a restaurant if you go to any family gathering you have to like bring your own carrot sticks

00:29:38.100 like the way that they describe the diet in general does not remotely match the specifics

00:29:42.800 right and they're doing the same thing with nudges right where in the intro they're like oh these are

00:29:48.720 technocratic tweaks they're non-ideological they're going to bring all the parties to the

00:29:54.000 table right but then you get to the second half of the book and like not only are they not nudges

00:29:59.960 they're just libertarian policy ideas right one of the examples that they want the u.s to implement

00:30:06.020 is motorcycle helmets this is like if you read reason magazine there's like 200 articles about

00:30:11.080 this that they're like against you know seat belt and helmet laws and stuff yeah so they want to

00:30:15.260 have like you you you basically get an extra license if you want to not wear a helmet on

00:30:20.340 your motorcycle so like there's an extra testing requirement and you sign away some of your legal

00:30:25.200 rights or whatever and it's like okay now you don't have to wear a helmet on your motorcycle

00:30:29.000 right to contextualize this my understanding of this is that like motorcycle helmets are important

00:30:35.160 because the fatality rate in motorcycle accidents without them like skyrockets yeah it's like it's

00:30:41.880 worse than like hang gliding yes right they also have this thing that apparently some states have

00:30:46.120 already implemented where if you have a gambling addiction you can voluntarily put yourself on a

00:30:52.100 like do not allow list at casinos so if you're trying to quit you can like call the gaming

00:30:56.680 commission and they just like if they see your face they won't let you in yeah which i just seems

00:31:01.400 honestly fine to me but also like it's it's very clearly just an excuse not to regulate gambling

00:31:07.140 Right. It's interesting because the concept of nudging is all over casinos. They're constantly

00:31:12.800 nudging you towards slot machines. That might be one of the most interesting places to study

00:31:18.380 choice architecture. They also have a bunch of weird libertarian programs to like take people's

00:31:26.500 money and give it back to them. So this is an excerpt from the second to last chapter,

00:31:33.360 which is like a lightning round of like little nudges.

00:31:36.420 They're like, these are promising nudges.

00:31:37.900 It's the ideas section.

00:31:39.700 Yeah, exactly.

00:31:40.340 Just like bang them out, right?

00:31:41.840 CARES, Committed Action to Reduce and End Smoking,

00:31:45.000 is a savings program offered by the Green Bank of Caraga in the Philippines.

00:31:50.580 A would-be non-smoker opens an account with a minimum balance of $1.

00:31:54.980 For six months, she deposits the amount of money

00:31:57.640 she would otherwise spend on cigarettes into the account.

00:32:00.780 after six months she takes a urine test to confirm that she has not smoked recently if she passes

00:32:07.860 the test she gets her money back if she fails the test the account is closed and the money is 1.00

00:32:13.680 donated to a charity why why it's insane what it's insane i don't what the fuck is this i fucking 0.97

00:32:21.820 there's there's a world bank report on this this is like a world bank funded project and like they 0.97

00:32:25.660 literally walk up to people with flyers in a poor country and they're like okay we are going to take

00:32:31.920 your own money from you and then in six months we are going to piss test you and then if you pass

00:32:39.460 the piss test you get your own money back so we're going to like introduce a system where if they

00:32:45.280 fail they lose money poor people were taking poor people's money and giving it away with no benefit

00:32:52.060 with no like and we'll give you 20 percent exactly more nothing so like there there is a pilot where

00:32:59.520 they tested this where they handed out these flyers to 800 people they got 83 people to sign

00:33:04.480 up which is incredible to me that anybody signed up for this right and around 10 percent of people

00:33:10.820 quit smoking which in the study they describe as like a triumph that like in the control group

00:33:15.540 only eight percent of people quit smoking bang two two percent gains and all it took was robbing

00:33:21.080 the other uh 90 percent exactly of their money basically in any given year roughly 10 percent of

00:33:28.160 smokers quit because most smokers want to quit and are trying to quit so the fact that this program

00:33:33.640 got 11 percent of 10 percent of people who got the flyer basically represents nothing like this is

00:33:40.400 not scalable right if you gave this to 20 000 people you'd get 2 000 people who sign up and

00:33:46.200 then 200 people who actually quit smoking most of whom end up starting again if i was in this program

00:33:51.440 and like lost my will a little bit and had a cigarette and then they like stole my money i

00:33:56.640 would spite smoke for the rest of my life but this is like the whole weird libertarian thing right

00:34:01.260 where they don't want to have any governmental anything it's just like oh we should give people

00:34:05.480 the frameworks to do what's best for them right this sucks is this even like choice architecture

00:34:11.460 You're just like, you're trapping someone's money.

00:34:14.840 They also have a chapter about school choice. 0.99

00:34:17.780 God damn it. 0.97

00:34:18.420 So they say, Carolyn Hoxby, a leading economist who has analyzed both voucher and charter school programs, 0.98

00:34:24.420 finds that when facing competition, public schools produce higher student achievement per dollar spent.

00:34:29.620 Test score improvements can range from 1% to 7% a year depending on the school and student.

00:34:34.520 And improvement is usually greatest among younger students, low-income students, and minority group members.

00:34:39.680 So we solved it. School choice is good. When exposed to competition, public schools do better

00:34:46.140 because they have to compete in the marketplace for the children. The study that they're referring

00:34:51.020 to is from 2001. It's of a privatization project in Michigan in the 1990s. There are numerous other

00:34:58.760 studies with this same data. And so if you look at actual meta-analyses, what they find is that

00:35:04.480 in Michigan, what actually happened was a bunch of charter schools opened and the charter schools

00:35:09.140 tended to take the lowest performing kids, kids that needed more attention. So once you pull all

00:35:14.660 of like the troubled kids out of public schools, like, yeah, the test scores at the public schools

00:35:19.600 go up. Right. But that's not because they were exposed to more competition. The composition of

00:35:25.400 the classes has changed. There's more like high achieving kids in the classes. So like, yeah,

00:35:29.240 they're going to have high achieving test scores. And then they very deliberately write around the

00:35:34.580 effect of the charter schools on the kids who went to charter schools, which were almost universally

00:35:38.980 negative so the kids that went to charter schools were already low performers after they went to

00:35:43.340 charter schools they were lower performers and i don't want to make this whole thing rest on like

00:35:47.360 what happened in michigan in the 1990s yeah but like this is a fucking field of academia right 0.81

00:35:53.600 school choice what is effective teaching what is effective testing like people have been thinking 0.95

00:35:58.460 and writing about this for decades right right and these guys who are presenting themselves as

00:36:03.100 academics right like we're smart we've looked at all the data we're like policy wonks they stumble 0.92

00:36:08.180 into this they cite one fucking study and then the whole rest of the chapter is about like how 0.94

00:36:13.480 to help parents choose the right school yeah this is a classic um academic in over their head sort 0.99

00:36:19.020 of thing where they spent a lot of their life being smarter than the people around them yeah

00:36:25.460 so the idea that you are inadequately informed to tackle a subject does not compute well this 0.95

00:36:33.280 is what's actually so chicken shit i think about this book is that in most of these chapters they

00:36:37.800 they very openly propose these as like solutions to problems, right? Like, like the organ donation 0.95

00:36:43.140 thing, like change the form, right? And then at the end of the chapter, they're like, well,

00:36:46.980 we're not saying you should change the form. Obviously changing the form isn't going to do

00:36:49.800 anything, right? So they're, they're trying to have it both ways. They're trying to keep their

00:36:52.980 academic credibility by not stating openly that they want these policies to pass. Like,

00:36:58.720 obviously it's complicated, but they're also not doing the work to actually understand these

00:37:02.940 issues. Yeah. Policymakers on some level are relying on academics and like they shouldn't be,

00:37:08.840 but they are relying on books like this to determine what the right policy is because 0.99

00:37:12.920 they assume you have done your fucking homework. They assume if you're telling me to change the 0.98

00:37:18.340 donation wording on a form, you have looked into this, you have consulted with actual experts in

00:37:23.540 this field and you are qualified to make that recommendation. Right. But what these guys keep

00:37:27.520 doing is they're obviously prioritizing like things that are cute right look at this project

00:37:33.080 in the philippines where they took people's money and gave it back yeah they're not doing the basic 0.79

00:37:37.820 work that you would expect from a fucking harvard and university of chicago academic behind the 0.96

00:37:43.060 scenes to be like hey we've actually stress tested these ideas right we've thought about it we've 0.97

00:37:47.660 talked to people who are way more knowledgeable in the specifics of these issues than we are

00:37:51.180 they're not doing that and at the end of the chapter they're like hey don't make this the

00:37:55.980 defining framework for your presidential administration's policy analysis.

00:38:03.280 Thank God this doesn't take over the entire like liberal elite institutional apparatus for the 0.97

00:38:09.100 next two decades. God, this is like truly the mindset that like held our policy and politics

00:38:18.060 on the left back for like at least a decade because coming out of the Bush era,

00:38:24.500 there was like this belief that we could sort of move past that and re-center ourselves.

00:38:31.780 And I think the idea that you could create policy from a place of sort of apolitical

00:38:40.320 technocratic meddling rather than these like great ideological projects took hold in places

00:38:47.880 like the Obama administration, in like, you know, the major liberal think tanks. 0.60

00:38:53.660 Yeah, that's why they got fucking blindsided by Trump and the modern Republican Party, because they did not understand the contours of the political debate that was happening.

00:39:04.520 This book is right in that tradition, that sort of like embarrassing, totally missed the point tradition of liberal politics in the late 2000s. 0.69

00:39:15.920 I love it when you transition us, Peter. This is the perfect little ramp up to the next thing I want

00:39:21.080 to talk about, which is what happened to the authors after this book came out and what happened

00:39:26.180 to this idea after the book came out. So as I mentioned last episode, Cass Sunstein, one of the

00:39:31.980 co-authors of Nudge, a year after this book is published, is appointed by Obama as the director

00:39:38.980 of something called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, OIRA. The Office of

00:39:44.920 information doesn't sound like a real office. You can tell that this was created by Reagan

00:39:49.780 as like a fake thing to throttle government regulation by how it has like the world's

00:39:54.520 most boring name. So it was invented under the Office of Management and Budget with a mandate

00:40:00.220 to apply a cost benefit analysis to every single regulation that is passed by the U.S. government.

00:40:06.300 Right. So it's like we're going to create this little bottleneck of a bunch of people,

00:40:09.920 none of whom are like subject matter experts in the kinds of things that like, you know,

00:40:13.280 the epa is doing or clean air particulates these people don't have any expertise in that right

00:40:18.460 they're all accountants and economists and what we want them to do is apply a cost benefit analysis

00:40:24.100 to every single thing to make sure that they're not like wasteful government regulation right 0.94

00:40:27.960 of course of course and of course rather than seeing right through this thing and just fucking

00:40:33.600 destroying it when they come into office democrats basically reify this so like clinton didn't really

00:40:38.780 do anything with it he just like staffed it with his own people yeah it then gets more power and

00:40:43.280 becomes like even more of like a central just like let's kill everything right graveyard under

00:40:49.060 george w bush and then when obama comes in he appoints cast sunstein to run this weird little

00:40:56.520 bottleneck department of the government just got just like mission statement destroy the country

00:41:02.820 if you think about the actual concept of the book and what we talked about last episode as like the

00:41:07.760 core insight of the book, right? That like our decisions are profoundly affected by choice

00:41:13.820 architecture, right? By the options that are presented to us, the way that they're described,

00:41:17.960 the thing that is easy versus the thing that is hard, right? If you think about government

00:41:22.040 regulations, this is like where a lot of that like choice architecting happens. This is where

00:41:28.420 you can actually have a huge impact on the world, right? If you believe the core concept of your

00:41:35.820 book and you mentioned last episode that like you were kind of vaguely aware of cast sunstein

00:41:43.120 yeah i was just kind of a sort of standard issue center left guy like okay some good some bad

00:41:49.360 whatever but after spending the last like week reading up on his record and his work i i am truly

00:41:56.680 convinced that he is the antichrist no one who looks into this man comes away with anything but

00:42:04.340 like utter unmitigated contempt you have i'm sorry but you have to be like cool and charismatic to be

00:42:11.040 the antichrist i feel like i feel like you're giving him a lot of credit so the primary thing

00:42:18.180 that he did with all of this huge power was just delay and water down necessary regulations shocking

00:42:26.140 the best example of this is silica dust which is basically these like tiny little particulates

00:42:31.180 that come off when you're like cutting concrete.

00:42:33.180 Yeah, yeah.

00:42:33.680 You breathe it and it causes silicosis and lung cancer.

00:42:36.640 It's like really nasty stuff.

00:42:38.060 Okay.

00:42:38.300 And in 2011, the EPA proposed a rule to make companies provide protective equipment, to

00:42:45.740 give free medical checkups to their employees, to ban certain kinds of activities that kick

00:42:51.600 up a lot of silica dust.

00:42:52.980 They send it to Cass Sunstein's department in 2011.

00:42:56.780 his agency is legally required to make determinations on laws after 90 days.

00:43:03.080 He then sits on it for two years.

00:43:06.080 Jesus.

00:43:06.660 With no explanation.

00:43:08.400 There's then like a whole kind of like lobbying effort that has to take place.

00:43:12.540 There's like actual sitting senators put out all these open letters of being like,

00:43:17.200 Cass, we need you to move on this.

00:43:19.440 Right.

00:43:19.780 Finally, he returns with his answer and he basically says,

00:43:23.040 oh we don't disagree uh but we'd like the agency to do one more round of public consultation on

00:43:28.480 this oh my god so it's like okay just red tape so reagan creates this little agency to what i

00:43:35.240 i imagine he conceptualized it as like eliminating the dead weight loss of bureaucracy or whatever

00:43:41.720 job killing regulations and then you have the actual output of it which is the creation of 0.95

00:43:49.200 red tape on behalf of industry exactly and then this fucking law doesn't even end up coming into 0.94

00:43:54.940 place until 2016 under trump's epa which then of course waters it down even of course of course

00:43:59.500 and there's numerous think tank reports published about all of the regulations that cast sunstein's

00:44:05.880 little nudge unit delayed and watered down for no reason so there's at least 38 rules that were

00:44:12.260 delayed by more than a year oh my god of the regulations that were actually passed during

00:44:16.460 the Obama administration, three quarters of them were changed by Cass Sunstein's nudge unit. And

00:44:23.000 almost all of them were like watered down and made less stringent. Yeah, I do think it's sort

00:44:28.380 of the Senate's fault for just sending him letters when they could have started a PR campaign, like

00:44:34.660 don't mess with our regs, you know, don't lay that trash on. Oh, Ira. Although it's better 0.93

00:44:43.460 the Oklahoma one. Yeah, that's not bad. The worst example of this during Cass Sunstein's time in the

00:44:48.580 White House is there's a process where the EPA is trying to regulate ozone smog. Sure. The Bush

00:44:56.700 administration in 2008 said that the limit should be 75 parts per billion, even though the EPA wanted

00:45:02.120 it to be 65 parts per billion. Okay. Finally, Obama gets in. The EPA looks at it again and is

00:45:07.680 like, okay, let's let's reduce this to 65 ozone smog. It's just straightforwardly bad. They say

00:45:13.100 that this change would save 7,200 lives and 38,000 cases of asthma every year.

00:45:20.640 Oh, that doesn't really sound like a nudge. That's more like a push.

00:45:23.920 Yeah, it's really command and control. We need to be really careful. So they start the process

00:45:28.240 of passing this. And then again, it gets blocked by Cass Sunstein's OIRA department. The reason

00:45:34.280 that he gives for blocking this is that the EPA is obligated to revisit these regulations every

00:45:41.680 five years. It's on a five-year cycle, right? So he's like, okay, they passed this in 2008.

00:45:46.340 So the review is in 2013. And right now it's 2011. So there's kind of no reason for us to

00:45:53.860 look at this now, right? We're just going to have to look at it again in two years.

00:45:56.980 But people, actual, you know, people who work at the EPA and who know this stuff point out that

00:46:01.220 that's not how it works. It's a five-year cycle from when you pass the regulation.

00:46:05.220 and at no point does he ever actually argue with like the the lives that it will save or the cases

00:46:11.840 of asthma he's just like i just don't think this is the right plan for us right now and the regulation

00:46:16.460 gets killed oh my god like this is kind of his mo in government it's like he will he will insert

00:46:22.360 himself as a block for all of these regulations that are just like straightforwardly good he will 0.81

00:46:27.460 result in them getting delayed by years or killed and then when people are like hey dude why did you

00:46:32.440 kill this regulation he's like i didn't kill it right i don't understand why you would say that i

00:46:37.480 have this kind of power all i'm doing is bringing all stakeholders to the table and having a 0.99

00:46:41.740 conversation yeah i mean god damn it it's wild to me that we have not accepted as a society that men 0.99

00:46:50.780 like this are functionally murderers yes right sociopaths right i mean you have to be you have 0.99

00:46:56.500 to be. It's very hard to look at what he did with power and not conclude that this was always the

00:47:02.640 project of nudge as well. Yeah. The book is very openly just a manifesto for the government to do

00:47:11.000 less. Yeah. You know, it's interesting because the book is not a particularly good idea. And you can

00:47:17.720 look at it on its own and be like, this is libertarianism dressed up. Right. And yet Cass

00:47:25.160 sunstein is actually even worse than that right he didn't even have the sort of loose sympathies

00:47:33.340 with progressive ideals that he alludes to in the book right it's kind of remarkable every time i

00:47:39.200 think i'm like being too hard on this guy i like read more about what he actually did

00:47:44.080 i'm like nope gotta go harder man yeah i mean it seems like they want to present themselves in the

00:47:50.700 book as solutions guys. But the role they end up serving appears to be problem identifiers,

00:47:59.240 right? Not that they are coming up with anything productive on their own. They're just making sure

00:48:05.540 that existing policies follow the bullshit guidelines that they think should dictate 0.97

00:48:12.220 what makes a good policy or a bad policy. This is actually super palpable when you read 0.93

00:48:18.200 descriptions of other nudge units there's now been a number of surveys published of you know

00:48:25.540 what various countries are doing with nudges right 51 countries set up nudge units one of the most

00:48:32.020 interesting documents that i read was from the eu nudge unit and it was just like an alphabetical

00:48:38.700 list of like all of the nudge units and like all of the nudges i only made it to l i only made it

00:48:44.860 because like after a while they were really samey well then you're missing

00:48:48.300 out on when russia nudged into crimea a few years ago

00:48:52.880 but if if you look at the actual nudges right what what improvements in society has this outlook

00:49:02.240 produced uh-huh it's basically just a bunch of marketing efforts it's like public information 0.91

00:49:07.720 campaigns and fucking text message reminders like it's not regulating the kinds of things 0.88

00:49:14.160 that companies are allowed to offer or like meaningfully changing the choice architecture 0.97

00:49:19.100 in any way, it's all kind of like quasi-libertarian austerity adjacent efforts to just like tell

00:49:27.520 people to behave differently. A huge number of them are like trying to crack down on welfare

00:49:33.780 cheats. The infamous UK nudge unit, one of the first things they did was getting people to more

00:49:41.240 accurately report their income. You have to report your income every two weeks if you're

00:49:44.980 on welfare in the UK. And it's like, here's a text message reminder for people to send in their

00:49:48.620 income. No matter what era it comes from, all economic concepts eventually will just be used

00:49:53.980 to crack down on welfare. A lot of them are also like, I don't know how else to put this, but like

00:49:58.860 they're trying to be cute. Yeah, of course. Like by far the largest category of nudges

00:50:05.040 is weight loss efforts, right? Trying to get people to like eat different and move more.

00:50:09.960 and a lot of them seem like they're auditioning to be like the opening anecdote of a fucking 0.92

00:50:16.320 magazine article okay so i'm going to send you an example from the uk nudge unit on this okay 0.92

00:50:24.360 if you can get through it the nudge unit extends the idea of encouraging exercise by reshaping

00:50:30.880 the choice architecture such that more active daily routines are enjoyable in the moment

00:50:37.200 an example of this concept is piano stairs i.e embedding sensors in stairs to encourage people

00:50:45.140 to avoid elevators and make music with their feet okay great work everyone great work sick idea 0.61

00:50:55.280 i'm a fucking adult involuntarily doing that scene from big every single time i walk up the 0.86

00:51:02.640 stairs to my office i don't think we need to deep dive into the piano stairs concept but i'm going 0.96

00:51:07.700 to regardless uh you're presumably hearing the same little melody or a similar set of melodies

00:51:15.320 every single time you walk down the stairs which not only makes me want to not walk down the stairs

00:51:22.080 but would probably just drive me to the verge of actual insanity absolute murder happening in those

00:51:28.480 stairwells. The other option is that there is not a pre-programmed melody. And in fact,

00:51:33.360 you're just making awful noise as you walk down. And if like two or three people are using the

00:51:38.140 stairs at once, it's just like, it's just hell. This is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard.

00:51:44.860 It's so stupid. That's on par with the office space. Jump to conclusions, Matt. 1.00

00:51:49.980 the uk one is really an outlier with like the sheer insipidness of many of the interventions

00:51:58.480 another one they have is like dedicated yellow areas in shopping carts where like you're supposed 0.97

00:52:04.900 to put fruits and vegetables okay like all right all of these just feel like there's a fucking 0.53

00:52:09.720 board meeting to produce like a 0.2 percent change in behavior yeah that could have very 1.00

00:52:17.900 readily been produced through uh more reasonable means it's so fucking stupid it's such fake smart 1.00

00:52:24.780 guy bullshit another thing that i did not realize until i talked to david gall this economist who's 1.00

00:52:30.300 like on a crusade to debunk this fucking book is that when you have these little nudges about 0.99

00:52:36.560 things like you know reducing food waste or reducing your climate impact through having 0.99

00:52:41.920 like a glowing orb that glows red when you use too much energy of these these little ticky-tack

00:52:46.100 nudges. There's some evidence that this actually reduces the ability to solve these things on a

00:52:51.920 more structural level. I mean, to the extent that political capital or political will is sort of a

00:52:56.780 deteriorating thing, people would be less inclined to take larger steps because they feel like the

00:53:01.640 problem's been addressed, at least to some degree. I've seen this anecdotally with people I know

00:53:05.660 that are like, I'm really into like fair trade clothing, right? Like I'm opting out of the

00:53:10.240 sweatshop system. So like, I don't know that we need these policies for like, you know, trade

00:53:14.880 imports to regulate the working conditions of people right the evidence on this is not great 0.84

00:53:19.900 a lot of it is like these kind of lab experiments on fucking sophomores that are like a lot of the

00:53:23.560 evidence for the nudges in the first place so i don't want to say that this is like a proven 0.85

00:53:27.220 concept but it's at least plausible that these nudges as well as not producing any kind of

00:53:34.540 structural change actually operate as a substitute for structural change and make it harder right and

00:53:40.800 And I do think that that feels like part of the objective of the authors, right, is that

00:53:48.700 rather than dive into these big ideological debates about the shape of our institutions,

00:53:56.500 et cetera, why not do these little technocratic things that can make marginal improvements

00:54:05.640 that we can all agree to and put the politics behind us. Right. It's not supplementary. This

00:54:12.940 is something that is meant to indicate that they think that this is how politics should be done.

00:54:18.700 There's also an aspect of like the times have changed around these guys, like the times have

00:54:24.380 changed since 2008 and like they have not changed with the times at all. So the other author of

00:54:31.260 nudge, Richard Thaler, he has a really telling New York Times op-ed. This is like 10 years after

00:54:38.240 the book comes out. It's called The Power of Nudges for Good and Bad. And he's sort of reflecting on

00:54:43.360 this idea and the legacy of this idea, right? So he apparently got radicalized on this when he saw

00:54:51.120 a review of his own book in the Times of London, and he clicked on the website. And of course,

00:54:56.720 he got like the paywall pop up. And he's like about to sign up for the seven-day free trial

00:55:00.560 so we can read this review and then he looks at the fine print and it turns out that when you sign

00:55:05.440 up for the free trial you have to give them your credit card information you'll automatically be

00:55:09.100 enrolled as a subscriber and to cancel you have to call the times of london at like business hours

00:55:16.420 london time hell yeah and basically like talk someone into letting you out of this contract

00:55:21.860 right right he's like this is this is a nudge for evil the primary way that we experience nudges 0.98

00:55:29.420 in our lives is like through scammy bullshit like this, right? 1.00

00:55:32.840 You receive a fucking newsletter for the rest of your natural life because you ordered a 1.00

00:55:36.700 tank top once. 1.00

00:55:37.880 Right.

00:55:38.020 He also mentions this thing where airlines are constantly trying to upsell you on this

00:55:41.440 like trip insurance thing.

00:55:42.760 I turn that down.

00:55:44.240 I'm a master of economics.

00:55:45.520 I know.

00:55:45.880 Same.

00:55:47.060 Skip.

00:55:47.620 Are you sure?

00:55:48.360 Your flight is dangerously unprotected.

00:55:52.500 But then so he basically lays out like what is what is plainly true, right?

00:55:56.920 That like we're constantly being nudged. 1.00

00:55:58.200 A lot of these nudges are just like total bullshit, right? 0.99

00:56:00.700 And then the final paragraph of his op-ed, he says, 0.99

00:56:05.620 As customers, we can help one another by resisting these come-ons.

00:56:09.280 The more we turn down questionable offers like trip insurance and scrutinize one-month trials,

00:56:13.960 the less incentive companies will have to use such schemes.

00:56:16.980 Conversely, if customers reward firms that act in our best interests,

00:56:20.780 more such outlets will survive and flourish and the options available to us will improve. 0.97

00:56:25.140 he's just so close to getting it yeah it's like this fucking scammy behavior by companies is all 0.99

00:56:33.620 around us and it sucks shit and his solution to it is like well don't sign up for the trial 0.99

00:56:40.180 nudges are bad and everyone hates them god i i think that there's a real problem with these pop 0.99

00:56:47.020 science authors that we sometimes see when you circle back a decade later or so and like it's 0.96

00:56:52.320 that when your career gets tied to this type of concept the admission that it sucks and is useless

00:56:58.520 is like you it's impossible right you can no longer bring yourself to be like oh that yeah

00:57:03.240 that was a bad idea that we put into that book right because your entire career is uh is now an 0.93

00:57:07.800 outgrowth of it right and also it's back to the dog shit political analysis these kinds of like 0.96

00:57:14.360 consumer protections are fucking wildly popular right hey if you sign up for something online 1.00

00:57:20.600 you have to be able to cancel with one click online right people love this shit getting rid 0.99

00:57:25.020 of scam phone calls regulating fucking nutritional supplements like used car dealerships like the 1.00

00:57:29.860 extent to which you are surrounded in the united states by fucking scams does not become clear to 1.00

00:57:35.100 you until you live abroad how are all of our politics about like trans swimmers meanwhile 0.99

00:57:42.460 i get three phone calls a day from someone who is actively trying to rob me i want to end with a

00:57:49.480 quote from a very good Harper's essay by Robert Kuttner about Cass Sunstein and the legacy of this

00:57:55.440 book. He says, at a moment when capitalism needed a major overhaul and the citizenry needed an

00:58:01.180 inspiring leader, libertarian paternalism and visionary minimalism proved woefully inadequate

00:58:06.580 as theory, policy, and politics. And that's really, I think, the main legacy of this book and like

00:58:12.980 this era. We had this promise of non-ideological, technocratic policymaking, right? And as a theory,

00:58:21.500 it's all over the place. You and me can't even fucking agree on what a nudge is. As policy, 0.93

00:58:25.480 it hasn't produced anything all that useful in the end, right? We have like shopping carts that

00:58:31.620 are cordoned off, right? And then as politics, it's also dog shit. People don't like this stuff. 1.00

00:58:36.360 Right. Well, it doesn't address the problem.

00:58:39.080 Exactly. And on a personal note, I don't know another way to put it, but like I felt really betrayed looking into this book because I honestly, when I started looking into it, I thought the organ donation thing held up.

00:58:53.360 Yeah.

00:58:53.580 I thought it was going to be like, OK, this works for organ donation, but a lot of problems don't have the same kind of structure as organ donation.

00:59:00.540 Just a matter of scale, right?

00:59:02.680 Yeah.

00:59:02.820 This isn't a scalable solution to various problems.

00:59:05.820 But then when I was talking to David Gall, this behavioral economist who's written a lot about this book, we were talking about the importance of, like, being fair in an episode like this.

00:59:15.220 And I was like, yeah, you know, it's really important for me to mention, like, oh, it works for the organ donation stuff.

00:59:18.800 And he's like, oh, do you not know that that's fake?

00:59:21.260 Like, do you not know that that doesn't hold up?

00:59:24.000 And then he sent me a bunch of articles, which is, like, how I went down the rabbit hole that we ended last episode with.

00:59:28.560 But what is so frustrating and, like, hurtful to me is that, like, I was really into this stuff, right?

00:59:35.740 I watched all of the animated explainer videos. 0.95

00:59:38.180 I read all of these fucking books and like the spinoff books. 0.99

00:59:40.840 I watched talks by the authors. 0.99

00:59:42.800 At no point did anyone really say to me, this organ donation thing, the central example 0.98

00:59:49.160 of the success of this book doesn't fucking work.

00:59:52.480 I'm sure that it was in there somewhere as like a folded in little footnote or like to 0.98

00:59:57.220 be sure.

00:59:57.780 But like this total indifference to outcomes and this prioritizing of cute solutions over effective solutions is like one of the most corrosive impacts of this brand of airport book. 0.95

01:00:15.160 Now, there's there's a lesson here, I think, which is that if you simply don't read books, you are not at risk of accidentally buying into some bullshit like nudge.

01:00:27.340 right yeah and that's what that's why i am so successful in this role dude a friend of mine 0.72

01:00:32.480 who is a literal librarian she was telling me about how she was like trying to pick the next

01:00:36.440 book to read and she was like mike's just gonna debunk these on his show eventually anyway i was 0.81

01:00:40.940 like fuck did we ruin reading for you that's right this is not what i wanted to do with this show 0.98

01:00:46.720 do not humiliate yourself by reading a book 0.99

01:00:57.340 We'll be right back.

If Books Could Kill - May 19, 2023

＂Nudge＂ Part 2： Mr. Nudge Goes to Washington

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