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Five years ago, legal scholar Cass R Sunstein wrote Nudge in collaboration with economist Richard Thaler. The book, which argued that policymakers had much to learn from understanding how people really make decisions, was "the most influential of the recent crop of behavioural economics books", says Tim Harford in the Financial Times.
Sunstein was appointed by US president Barack Obama to run the American body that scrutinises new regulations on everything from cutting carbon emissions to overhauling health care. He stepped down last August. Simpler: The Future of Government is the account of how Sunstein applied his theories it's "Nudge shifted to the past tense".
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As Fortune's Tory Newmyer notes, Sunstein disagrees with conventional economists who think people are "rational actors who will act in their own best interest". Instead, they often make flawed and irrational decisions. So the government's job is to encourage them to make better choices and "protect them from their more self-destructive impulses" via small, well-targeted, policy "nudges".
Sunstein therefore came up with four principles for rulemaking: "keep regulations simple and clear; let citizens choose while giving them information and encouragement to choose well; make sure regulations don't impose a disproportionate burden; and keep track of how well they are working".
Some critics took an instant dislike to Sunstein's approach former Fox News host Glenn Beck once labelled him "the most evil man in America". As Publishers Weekly notes, many conservatives felt he advocated state interference where there should be none, while liberals disliked his pro-regulation approach. Yet overall, Sunstein should be praised for his "vision of technocratic government that's both efficient and humane".
Nonsense, says Lisa Heinzerling, writing for ThinkProgess, a blog. The main message of this "revealing book" is that Sunstein was quite capable of disregarding the basic principles of transparency, and even explicit laws, in pursuit of his goals. His ability to veto other government bodies and agencies allowed him to make decisions without proper justification. He was "politically unaccountable" and "preternaturally secretive".
Harford is also ultimately sceptical. Many of Sunstein's ideas are "worth a try" and "US political junkies" will find his war stories "engaging", but he would prefer to see "an independent analysis of how well all these nudges' are working". As he warns, "simplicity is a sound ambition but in a complex world we should also check for unintended consequences".
Simpler: The Future of Government by Cass R Sunstein. Published by Simon & Schuster (£17.07).
