Still, a certain ambivalence is apparent in the nudgers' thinking. Sunstein discusses the merits of "active choosing" by the public, as opposed to default rules intended to promote a certain result. Active choosing sometimes makes sense, he says. "But in many contexts, default rules are indispensable, because it is too burdensome and time-consuming to require people to choose." I can imagine a phishing salesman saying much the same. But don't be concerned: When it comes to public policy, the behavioral-economics team will let you know how much information you can handle.
Advocates of nudging like to point out that almost every choice involves a context (a "choice architecture") which itself constitutes a nudge. In effect, they argue, it's pointless to oppose nudges as such: There's no escaping them. That's true. Nonetheless, the question remains, who is doing the nudging and why?
Last year, Stephen Littlechild, formerly a U.K. monopolies regulator and now a fellow at Cambridge University, produced a spoof paper, "Applying behavioural economics at the Regulatory Conduct Authority." This took a (real) paper from Britain's Financial Conduct Authority on the mistakes and biases to which consumers of financial services are prone, and recast it. Littlechild replaced each instance of baffled, error-prone consumers with a reference to regulators getting things wrong in much the same way.
Biases can cause regulators to misjudge important facts or to be inconsistent, for example changing their choices for the worse when essentially the same decision is presented in a different way. In other words, our normal human thought processes can lead us to make choices that are predictably mistaken.
Regulators left to themselves will often not work to reduce these mistakes, so supervision of regulation may be needed. While it is common sense that people make mistakes, behavioural economics takes us beyond intuition and helps us be precise in detecting, understanding, and remedying problems that arise from regulatory mistakes.
The fashion for behavioral economics is itself a nudge. It inclines public officials to think of citizens not as their employers but as their charges -- lazy, distracted and dumb, needing to be guided to better choices by smart people who always know what they're doing. Littlechild's advice is a good corrective: Officials, heal thyselves.
The White House unit says it has found a nudge to increase the government's use of double-sided printing, significantly reducing paper costs. That, I welcome unreservedly.