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

de ov er heid a l s k eu z e a rchi t ec t
known as 41k plans. The employee has to join the plan and decide
how much to save and how to invest the money. Some employees never
get around to joining. Now a simple solution to that is to change
the default. So under the usual regime when you are first eligible to
join the plan, you get a big pile of forms to fill out and if you do not
fill them out you are not in. What some firms have done is switch to
automatic enrollment. You get that first pile of forms, but the first
page also says: if you do not fill this out we are going to enroll you at
this savings level and this investment plan. Now this greatly speeds
enrollment, but there is a downside: whatever the default options
are, specifically the savings rate and the investment vehicle, those get
sticky.
14
I am going to talk about a solution to that in a minute. Let me give you
another example with respect to organ donations. In many countries,
including the us and the Netherlands, if you want to make your organs
available if you should die, you have to do something, sign some
form. Countries are varied in how difficult it is to find that form and
turn it in. Some European countries have adopted what is called ‘presumed
consent.’ This flips the default. You are assumed to give your
consent unless you opt out. Spain is the world’s leader in producing
organs that are available for donation and one of the methods they use
is presumed consent. That has some appeal, although some people
object to this politically. I actually favor a third option, neither opt in
nor opt out, but what I call ‘mandated choice’. It is actually the system
we use in Illinois, where I live. The way it works in Illinois is that
every few years you have to get your drivers’ license renewed and get
your picture taken. When you do this, they ask you: do you want to
be a donor yes or no? You must answer that question to get your drivers’
license. So you can say no. You are free to say no, but you can’t
just say: huhhhhh, I don’t know. This has increased the proportion
of people who agree to give their organs to 68 per cent. Nationwide
in the us it’s 38 per cent. This costs nothing. I wrote a column about
this in the New York Times a couple months ago and I mentioned that
Steve Jobs had recently received the liver transplant. I suggested that
our goal should be to make it as easy to sign up to donate your organs
as it is to download an app on an iPhone. I nudged Steve Jobs to make
an app available on the iPhone for the people to sign up. Jobs didn’t