De overheid als keuzearchitect? - Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het ...

public policy nudges: the government as choice architect
public policy nudges:
the government as choice architect
Richard Thaler
Thank you very much for having me. It’s wonderful for all of you to
come and listen. I hope we have an interesting afternoon of nudging
ahead of us.
Let me first remind you that much of what I am going to say today is
based on my book that was written with a very good friend of mine,
Cass Sunstein, who was a colleague at the University of Chicago for
many years. He is now working for his former friend and colleague at
his law school, president Obama. Cass’ job – or at least the title of his
job – is quite boring: he is the Director for the Office of Information
and Regulatory Affairs. But the media call him the Regulation Tsar
and I call him the Nudger in Chief. Cass is busy implementing these
ideas and he sends me around to spread the gospel. So this church is a
good place for spreading the gospel.
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Let me start by saying what our goals were in writing this book. We
had two ambitious goals. The first one was to try and create a framework
for thinking about public policy that employed the idea of
behavior economics and could possibly show how these ideas could
be applied to many of the important problems that face the world
today. So this was the merely ambitious goal. The ridiculously ambitious
goal was to create a framework that could somehow span the
political debates that, at least in America, are becoming increasingly
polarized between the left and the right. We tried to create a framework
that might be acceptable to both sides. As was mentioned in the
introduction, there is some glimmer of hope for that. Both Cass and
I have worked and campaigned on behalf of the Obama team, but I
have never been named as an advisor to David Cameron, who is from
the Conservative Party. And the president of South Korea, who is
actually quite conservative, has also read the book and assigned it to
his cabinet. So we are hoping that spanning the political divide might
possibly work.