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Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness Paperback – February 24, 2009

by Richard H. Thaler (Author), Cass R. Sunstein (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 4,044 ratings
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There is a newer edition of this item:

Nudge: The Final Edition
Nudge: The Final Edition
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Now available: Nudge: The Final Edition

The original edition of the multimillion-copy New York Times bestseller by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Richard H. Thaler, and Cass R. Sunstein: a revelatory look at how we make decisions—for fans of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow

Named a Best Book of the Year by TheEconomist and the Financial Times

Every day we make choices—about what to buy or eat, about financial investments or our children’s health and education, even about the causes we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. Nudge is about how we make these choices and how we can make better ones. Using dozens of eye-opening examples and drawing on decades of behavioral science research, Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein show that no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way, and that we are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions. But by knowing how people think, we can use sensible “choice architecture” to nudge people toward the best decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society, without restricting our freedom of choice.
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  1. Print length
    312 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin Books
  4. Publication date
    February 24, 2009
  5. Dimensions
    5.4 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    9780143115267
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0143115267
  8. See all details
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NUDGE: THE FINAL EDITION
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4.4 out of 5 stars
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Price $8.93

Editorial Reviews

Review

One of The Strategist’ s “13 Best Personal Finance Books, According to Money Experts”

“One of the few books . . . that fundamentally changed the way I think about the world.” —Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics

“Engaging and insightful . . . The conceptual argument is powerful, and most of the authors’ suggestions are common sense at its best. . . . For that we should all applaud loudly.” —The New York Times Book Review

“An essential read . . . The book isn’t only humorous, it’s loaded with good ideas that financial-service executives, policy makers, Wall Street mavens, and all savers can use.” —The Boston Globe
 
“This book is terrific. It will change the way you think, not only about the world around you and some of its bigger problems, but also about yourself.” —Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker

“This gem of a book . . . is a must-read for anyone who wants to see both our minds and our society working better. It will improve your decisions and it will make the world a better place.” —Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize–winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
 
“Utterly brilliant . . . Nudge won’t nudge you—it will knock you off your feet.” —Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness

“Nudge is as important a book as any I’ve read in perhaps twenty years. It is a book that people interested in any aspect of public policy should read. It is a book that people interested in politics should read. It is a book that people interested in ideas about human freedom should read. It is a book that people interested in promoting human welfare should read. If you’re not interested in any of these topics, you can read something else.” —Barry Schwartz, The American Prospect
 
“Engaging, informative, and thoroughly delightful.” —Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things and The Design of Future Things
“A wonderful book: more fun than any important book has a right to be—and yet it is truly both.” —Roger Lowenstein, author of When Genius Failed
 
“Save the planet, save yourself. Do-gooders, policymakers, this one’s for you.” —Newsweek
 
“Great fun to read . . . Sunstein and Thaler are very persuasive.” —Slate
 
“Nudge helps us understand our weaknesses, and suggests savvy ways to counter them.” —The New York Observer
 
“Always stimulating . . . An entertaining book that also deeply informs.” —Barron’s
 
“Entertaining, engaging, and well written . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice
 
“This Poor Richard’s Almanack for the 21st century . . . shares both the sagacity and the witty and accessible style of its 18th-century predecessor.” —Law and Politics Book Review
 
“There are superb insights in Nudge.” —Financial Times

About the Author

Richard H. Thaler was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where he is the director of the Center for Decision Research. He is also the co-director (with Robert Shiller) of the Behavioral Economics Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research and in 2015 was the president of the American Economic Association. He has been published in several prominent journals and is the author of a number of books, including Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.
 
Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is by far the most cited law professor in the United States. From 2009 to 2012 he served in the Obama administration as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, appeared on national television and radio shows, been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, and written many articles and books, including Simpler: The Future of Government, Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter, The World According to Star Wars, and Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide. He is the recipient of the 2018 Holberg Prize, awarded annually to a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts, humanities, the social sciences, law, or theology.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 014311526X
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Revised & Expanded edition (February 24, 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 312 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780143115267
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143115267
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.4 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 4,044 ratings

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  1. Cass R. Sunstein

    Cass R. Sunstein

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is by far the most cited law professor in the United States. From 2009 to 2012 he served in the Obama administration as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, appeared on national television and radio shows, been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, and written many articles and books, including Simpler: The Future of Government and Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Richard H. Thaler

    Richard H. Thaler

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Richard H. Thaler is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business where he director of the Center for Decision Research. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research where he co-directs the behavioral economics project. Professor Thaler's research lies in the gap between psychology and economics. He is considered a pioneer in the fields of behavioral economics and finance. He is the author of numerous articles and the books Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics; Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (with Cass Sunstein), The Winner's Curse, and Quasi Rational Economics and was the editor of the collections: Advances in Behavioral Finance, Volumes 1 and 2. He also wrote a series of articles in the Journal of Economics Perspectives called: "Anomalies". He is one of the rotating team of economists who write the Economic View column in the Sunday New York Times.

    See more on the author's page
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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
4,044 global ratings
Nudge your mind
4 Stars
Nudge your mind
Have you ever tried to set a new year resolution such as weight-losing but gave up in the end? Such things usually happen!For example, on Saturday morning, people might say they prefer exercising to watching TV, but once the afternoon comes, they are on the couch watching Netflix. How can such behavior be understood?The author of “Nudge”, Nobel behavioral economy award, introduced two factors, temptation and mindlessness choosing, to explain this phenomenon.The term "temptation" is easier to recognize than to define. We call something tempting if we consume more of it. Mindlessness choosing can be explained in many situations when people put themselves into an “auto-pilot” mode, in which they are not actively paying attention to the task at hand.We usually think we can decide for ourselves. In fact, many effects around us influence our behavior, and we even don’t know about them. That’s why most people will use some self-controlled strategies to overcome this kind of issues.By reading “Nudge”, we could understand these effects and use what the writer called “nudge”, a small and subtle pushes, to make decisions between real-world choices and then improve our life.While some of the anecdotes are funny, many of the writer’s proposals contain the America social and economic issues that will take a while to comprehend for a reader of a non-American.Until you are fascinated by these scenarios the author is addressing, I would suggest others read related books that explore in a much more engaging way.
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Top reviews from the United States

Mark B Gerstein
5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughts on Thaler & Sunstein's Nudge: General thoughts about human decision making, with practical implications for one's day-t
Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2018
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I read Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's Nudge with great interest. This work provides an overview of choice architecture from a policy planning perspective but also offers practical thoughts and tips that are related to how people might make their decisions in day-to-day life. It introduces the notion of essentially two brains. The one of the prefrontal cortex and the rational decision making and also the human brain that is rooted a little bit lower down. These make decisions differently, and all too often we think about decision making only regarding a mythical species called the homo economicus that is making decisions entirely irrationally. The authors go over some places where choice architects can help structure decisions either through creating defaults, placing options intelligently to help us make faster decisions with our less econ-like brain. They give some examples from simple design in food placement in cafeterias to default choices for organ donation that produce a relatively significant difference, without apparently affecting issues related to fairness. They discuss the notion of libertarian paternalism where people are free to choose but the State steps in, in a paternalistic way, to help them with these choices. People have the hardest time making decisions that they do not often confront, which often have significant consequences such as those they have to make when facing a disease, when choosing a job and so forth. Whereas they are good with everyday choices that they get rapid feedback on, deciding what to eat, products in a store and so forth.

The authors go through some simple situations where people tend to make misguided choices, forgetting the total costs in economic ventures such as buying a car in relation to the cost to rent or use one. They also talk a bit about practical ideas for changing things such as having taxes precomputed for us or having lights to remind us to change our air conditioner filters. I thought a lot of this was useful for simply arranging one’s everyday life, putting reminders out to help them make quick decisions and remembering that people, while they do have a rational brain, are also human.

Overall, a good book that I recommend heartily.
6 people found this helpful
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Gary Moreau, Author
4.0 out of 5 stars Nudging the human econ - we do it now, let's do it right
Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2017
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I admit to buying this book after Richard Thaler received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in “understanding the psychology of economics.” And to be fair, this book was published in 2008, so I’m sure Mr. Thaler and Mr. Sunstein both have a large body of work that post-dates it.

The book is well written and the authors are methodical in both laying out their case and pointing out its potential flaws. It doesn’t compromise the book in any way, but I did find it a bit odd that they refer to themselves throughout the book in the third person. When I first came across it I had to recheck the cover to make sure they weren’t referring to someone else, but it’s a minor point of style.

I was enthused by the idea of mixing sciences; in this case psychology and economics. As the authors note, economists have historically worked with a proxy of the average person that is fully informed, completely rational, and lives in a vacuum. That’s not where the people who actually make, spend, and invest money actually live and that gap between what the authors term Econs and Humans has historically compromised a lot of otherwise sound economic theory.

The ideas in the book are built around what the authors call libertarian paternalism. Over-simplified, it’s paternalism with choice, in which the paternalism is achieved by nudging the choices in ways that are effective, but otherwise cheap in cost, modest in sacrifice, and easy to avoid. It’s a kind of win-win solution in which one win is slightly favored by human decency or universal standards of justice.

We are constantly nudged without always being conscious of the nudging. When you stand in front of a retail display deciding which shampoo to buy you may have no idea how deliberately that display has been constructed by the retailer and the manufacturers. Tremendous amounts of thought and research are behind it. It’s established fact that positioning drives sales, often more than the variations in products and prices themselves.

Most of the nudges that Professors Thaler and Sunstein introduce are less invasive and more transparent than the commercial nudges we are already subject to. How to get people to save more for retirement? How to get more organ donors? How to combat obesity and encourage people to live healthier life styles?

In all cases, there is ample evidence that this is what people themselves want. They are impeded in their efforts, however, by the realities of human psychology. Things like the “status quo bias”, “pluralistic ignorance”, and “loss aversion” are all existing nudges common to the human psyche. Fitting in, going along with the crowd, and irrational optimism are as natural as the sunrise.

Thaler and Sunstein just want to use these commonplace and natural biases to nudge people toward decisions that they probably want to make but frequently don’t, for reasons having little to do with the value of the intention. The idea makes a lot of sense and I found myself in general agreement most of the way.

I admit to having some difficulties with the context at times, however. For example, in their discussion relating to retirement savings, one chapter is titled, “Naïve Investing”, and the authors suggest ways in which savers could be enticed into more astute strategies by way of theoretically painless nudges. There is, however, an inevitable bias underlying the nudge itself. In this case it is the conventional wisdom that equities outperform fixed income investments over a long period of time. This is true in the aggregate and over a long period of time, of course, but not universally true when considering the investment needs and horizon of a single investor.

My point is not to argue that bias, however, which they, in fact, acknowledge. My point is merely that the nudge itself introduces its own contextual bias, creating, in effect, a multi-level bias that the “choice architects,” in the vernacular of nudging, must be cognizant of if the nudging is to realize the original objective of positive paternalistic influence.

The authors don’t ignore this incremental bias, mind you. On a related note, they cite the example of an Enron employee who lost his entire life savings in company stock, making a sound and appropriate argument in favor of further limiting 401k and defined benefit plan investments in company stock. They’re right, of course, although in this case I think an outright ban is ethically warranted.

The “nudge” is, more or less, an aggressive form of default planning that recognizes the weaknesses in human behavior, particularly our seemingly instinctive inability to understand probability theory. (As Peter Hollins points out, in a sample of 23 people the chances of two of them sharing a birthday is 50-50.)

In the closing chapters of the book the authors acknowledge the potential criticisms that will be leveled at libertarian paternalism from both the right and left extremes of the political spectrum. Their defense is a strong one but there is an implicit admission that said defense relies on the duality of paternalism and libertarianism. I agree with their assessment that the combined term is not an oxymoron, but one without the other will render the concept less defensible. And that’s where the execution, as they fully acknowledge, could compromise the intent. Or as the old adage goes, the only difference between theory and practice is the practice.

When all is said and done I think that what the authors are really advocating is simpler than it reads—moderation, compromise, and common sense. “With respect to government, we hope that the general approach might serve as a viable middle ground in our unnecessarily polarized society.” Nudge on.
35 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Bruno Santos Cunha
5.0 out of 5 stars Nudge!
Reviewed in Brazil on June 17, 2020
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Apesar de relativamente novo (2008), "Nudge" já pode ser considerado um clássico da economia comportamental (behavioral economics), da teoria dos incentivos e da ciência das escolhas. De fato, a simples "presença" de Cass Sunstein (ganhador do Holberg Prize) e Richard Thaler (ganhador do Nobel Prize) como autores já diferencia o livro e, por si, torna a leitura recomendável.

Partindo da ideia de um "paternalismo libertário", Sunstein e Thaler desvendam uma verdadeira arquitetura das escolhas públicas e privadas, de forma a demonstrar como seria possível, a um só tempo, preservar a liberdade de escolha dos indivíduos (caractere libertário) e influenciar a direção das atitudes individuais em um sentido economicamente ótimo (caractere paternalista).

A fim de demonstrar que a suposta incongruência entre libertarianismo e paternalismo pode ser muito menor na prática cotidiana do que na teoria, os autores dissecam exemplos de arquitetura de escolhas nas mais diversas áreas de atuação humana: do incentivo à poupança e aos investimentos a questões saúde pública; do casamento a questões de sustentabilidade ambiental; de previdência à educação pública e privada.

Recheado de exemplos de como pequenos incentivos podem alterar substancialmente as escolhas individuais em direção a níveis ótimos, "Nudge" foge de estereótipos ideológicos pra mostrar uma realidade passível de mudança a partir de critérios racionais facilmente realizáveis. Enfim, um livro muito bom.
2 people found this helpful
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Beginner Youtubertobe
5.0 out of 5 stars The is the precursor to Daniel Kahneman's book which is also a must read
Reviewed in Canada on April 22, 2020
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As an educator, I seek ways to guide my students better. after reading this book, I can say that it applies not only to governors and policymakers, which have been the majority of what this book aims to tackle, but also any person in the position to make decisions that impacts the wellbeing of others.

It redefines the idea of manipulation so that we, as a society, are aware how inevitable it is in our daily functioning but also how to make better educated and informed decisions, which is then true to our idealistic practice of freedom.
One person found this helpful
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Javier.
5.0 out of 5 stars Obra fundamental de la economía del comportamiento.
Reviewed in Mexico on December 27, 2019
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Es una obra básica para entender la implementación de políticas aplicando la economía del comportamiento. Junto con “Misbehaving” y Thinking fast and slow” ofrecen un panorama comprensivo sobre esta rama de la economía.
5 people found this helpful
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Jay Mehta
3.0 out of 5 stars The product is perfect as expected.
Reviewed in India on September 6, 2020
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The product is perfect as expected no issues there. Check out the uploaded image, the MRP of book is 499 and it is being sold at 599. I was not sure about the reason for this. Please refund the rest of the amount if it is not right way to price the product.
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Jay Mehta
3.0 out of 5 stars The product is perfect as expected.
Reviewed in India on September 6, 2020
The product is perfect as expected no issues there. Check out the uploaded image, the MRP of book is 499 and it is being sold at 599. I was not sure about the reason for this. Please refund the rest of the amount if it is not right way to price the product.
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Mnomad
5.0 out of 5 stars Something to think about
Reviewed in Germany on April 14, 2020
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Great book - the concept has a lot of practical applications. I purchased this for my 12 year old who had to read it for school. While he appreciated its value, some of the explanations were a little complex for him and dry.
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