Invisible shove: how choice is becoming the favored social engineering tool of the twenty-first century.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, David
• Position: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness - Book review

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

Yale University Press, 304 pp.

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A Russian man defects from the Soviet Union in the years before perestroika, arrives on our shores, and walks into an American supermarket. He discovers, for the first time, abundance: brilliantly lit aisles of long shelves stacked to a high ceiling and loaded with dozens of varieties of every imaginable good, each more or less affordable even to minimum-wage American workers. He finds the choice--and the market plenitude that demands it--overwhelming, and he faints.

This fable--which draws on the experience of Boris Yeltsin, who described a visit to a Houston supermarket as "shattering," and of Soviet exchange students in the 1950s and '60s, who were sure that American stores were Potemkin emporiums, erected for their benefit--was staged in the movie Moscow on the Hudson, and persists years after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. It is not, of course, a tale about Russian deprivation or the sclerotic central planning of the Soviet state. It's about our own spectacular case of material abundance. Choice is what makes us flee, the fable goes, and the market forces freed up by choice are what make Americans wealthy.

But choice is also what makes us fat and unhappy. Put two plates in front of the average American and he'll eat both. He'll eat whatever is put in front of him, basically, and stop only when the food runs out. (There have been some playfully sadistic experiments showing this by means of bottomless soup bowls, and in one study, moviegoers chowed through large buckets of popcorn that they later described "as like eating Styrofoam packing peanuts.") This is a public health issue, but there is also a public happiness problem: as sociologists from Daniel Bell to Barry Schwartz have shown, living in a land of plenty is not necessarily paradisiacal. In many cases--particularly high-stakes cases such as choosing colleges, careers, or mates--the opportunity can be psychologically crippling. We might not faint before a buffet of options like the proverbial Russian emigre, but we block out the experience of confronting choices in other ways, overlooking available information, neglecting due diligence, and arriving at decisions often contrary to our own interests by economic autopilot.

And, as behavioral economist Richard Thaler and legal theorist Cass Sunstein show in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, a wonky little book on public policy, even when we are able to make decisions, we invariably make bad ones. We sign up for free trial subscriptions, and fail to cancel them once the bills start coming. (Economists call this "status quo...