Unseen Hand: Big Brother Is Nudging You

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 116-119

116 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

Unseen Hand:

Big Brother Is Nudging You

By Oliver Houck

Nudge: Im proving Decisions Abo ut Health, Wealth, and

Happiness, by Ric hard H. Thaler and Cass R. Suns tein. Penguin Books.

320 pages.

From the March/ April issue of The Environmental Forum.

Most ideas are lea rned young and

then defended for life. One

of them is that government is

good, or bad, depending on the school you

went to. If you went to the University of

Chicago, the government is quite bad, it

is the enemy, really—inecient, counter-

productive, a self-perpetuating regime of

functionaries immune to common sense

and personal freedoms.

e free market, by contrast, is the

ideal governor of human conduct, includ-

ing, front and center, environmental con-

duct. Such was the theory of the Chicago

School’s intellectual prophet, the econo-

mist Ronald Coase, whose famous theorem

was posited on the proposition that if a railroad is polluting a neighborhood

as it pa sses by then, when pollution levels bec ome unacceptable, the neigh-

bors will simply band together a nd buy out the railroad, problem solved. If

you buy this, everything else Chicago follows. Including a new book by two

accomplished Chicago School scholars with t he beguiling title, Nudge.

e book by Richard ayer and Cass Sunstein has rec eived high praise

for insights and readability from the “law and economics” community and

its media outlets. While I do not know the work of economist ayer, I have

followed the many faces of law school professor Sunstein for decades—and a

more prolic, eclectic and persua sive body of writing (constitutional theory,