‘Nudge’ Back in Fashion at White House

Time
August 9, 2013

When a White House adviser sent out an e-mail last month announcing that she was looking to hire social scientists to study human behavior and design public policy based on social experiments, right-wing critics were aghast: Barack Obama was going too far again.

The inspiration for Yale social scientist Maya Shankar’s team, she said in her note, is Britain. It’s in the Old World that the White House has gone looking for something new, calling a gang of consultants in the United Kingdom an inspiration. There, the so-called Behavioral Insights Team has taken a controversial philosophy and found solutions from lowering energy consumption to increasing tax collection.

The squad was established a mere three years ago, following Prime Minister David Cameron’s ascension to power. Referred to in Whitehall patois as the nudge unit, the team was inspired by the 2009 bestselling book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler and Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein. Cameron’s political mandate was simple: influence British policies by constructing cheap, shrewd and local solutions to social problems across governmental agencies.

The nudge unit appears to have succeeded where one of its inspirations could not. During the first three years of the Obama administration, Sunstein led the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where he was charged with approving every new regulation the government issued based on cost-benefit analysis. Sunstein has written that his efforts were hamstrung by a political climate suspicious of his ideas. Last year several important regulations were halted before the presidential election and Sunstein’s subsequent book, Simpler: The Future of Government describes the difficulty of new thinking into government. With an entire team to focus on streamlining costs and regulation across the government, the new team is aiming to improve on Sunstein’s record.

Working at the intersection of psychology and economics, the nudge unit in Britain has tackled a number of problems ranging from reducing car theft by offering containers to de-clutter garages to increasing repayment of court fines through a text message system.

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Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians

by Steven Pinker

New Republic
August 6, 2013

The great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists. Not only did many of them contribute to mathematics, physics, and physiology, but all of them were avid theorists in the sciences of human nature. They were cognitive neuroscientists, who tried to explain thought and emotion in terms of physical mechanisms of the nervous system. They were evolutionary psychologists, who speculated on life in a state of nature and on animal instincts that are “infused into our bosoms.” And they were social psychologists, who wrote of the moral sentiments that draw us together, the selfish passions that inflame us, and the foibles of shortsightedness that frustrate our best-laid plans.

These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data. The mathematical theories of information, computation, and games had yet to be invented. The words “neuron,” “hormone,” and “gene” meant nothing to them. When reading these thinkers, I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block. What would these Fausts have given for such knowledge? What could they have done with it?

We don’t have to fantasize about this scenario, because we are living it. We have the works of the great thinkers and their heirs, and we have scientific knowledge they could not have dreamed of. This is an extraordinary time for the understanding of the human condition. Intellectual problems from antiquity are being illuminated by insights from the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution. Powerful tools have been developed to explore them, from genetically engineered neurons that can be controlled with pinpoints of light to the mining of “big data” as a means of understanding how ideas propagate.

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