Did a review of a deeply patronising and frankly tendentious new policy book, doing the rounds of the political classes at the moment (particularly the New Tories), called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, for the Independent last week. The printed version is online here, and the unedited version (with some interesting comparisons with other writers that didn't make the cut) is in 'extended post' below. In so many ways, Cameron is the heir of Blair (who was the heir of Thatcher)... here's more scholarly proof.
Review of Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge for the Independent, Friday 11 July, 2008
By Pat Kane
[Unedited version]
Across the squeaky-floored corridors of British politics and power, huddled groups of advisers are currently muttering one question to themselves. A question that, if correctly answered, will generate a raft of policies that might win or lose a government. To wit: "What would Homer do?"
And no, this isn't some bunch of Classics-trained wonder-wonks drawing elegant allusions from dead Greeks. They mean Homer Simpson. Yes, the custard-yellow cartoon everyman has become the bulbous figure stalking the political calculations of both major parties, but particularly Cameron's Conservatives.
Backed up a clutch of Nobel-prize winners, and a coterie of less illustrious academic chancers, the current "big idea" of the policy world would streach easily across Homer's too-taut t-shirt. In short, it's this: people are dumber than they think they are.
In essence, this is the argument of a much-hyped book from the US by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. Reguarly cited as being members of Barack Obama's kitchen cabinet, Thaler and Sunstein have found their ideas circulating among the Cameronistas as well.
In a speech at the Eden Centre in Cornwall last month, David Cameron explicitly harnessed Sunstein and Thaler's work to that most familiar of conservative axioms: go with the grain of human nature. "Policy-making must always take into account how people actually behave", said Cameron, "not how an artificial system would like them to behave".
And one of those actual behaviours is our tendency to go with the herd. Or as Homer might not put it, to fall in with "social norms". That means "recognising that one of the most important influences on people's behaviour is what other people do", Cameron continued in his speech. "With the right prompting - or what Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their latest book have called a "Nudge" - we'll change our behaviour to fit in with what we see around us."
Cameron gave an explicit example of what a Tory "Nudge", or prompt to good behaviour, would be: energy efficiency. "If you tell people from above 'you must be more energy efficient', not much happens". But if you made each house's energy use visible to every other house in a local neighbourhood, you would "transform their behaviour". (In Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein suggest we use a Orb, connected to our house wiring, that glows green when we're doing well, and red when we're not).
So Homer will go eco, runs the theory, when he's socially embarassed (or socially aspires) to do so. And government could pass a law that seems like a mere act of public information, but ends up getting a better result – better, at least, than some heavy-handed penalty system imposed by some Clunking Fist (guess who).
If you think this sounds like the principle of Neighbourhood Watch taken to new extremes of suburban oppression ("Is your environmental orb not actually working then, Mrs. Wilson?"), then you'd shudder at the academic term Thaler and Sunstein give to their approach. They call it 'liberal paternalism'.
It's paternalist to the extent that they encourage governments to create policies that "nudge" our forked human nature in the right direction – which is based on their research claims about how we don't always act in our best interests. And it's liberal to the extent that a "nudge" allows you to ignore its injunctions, if you really want to.
So in his commitment to holding up the national obesity rate, Homer can go right on eating as many chilli fries as he likes. But if he's walking through malls where fresh fruit is prominently stacked and promoted, and the crowds around him are munching happily, he might begin to pause before stuffing his face.
In one especially apposite example, Homer (like most men) finds it difficult to pee straight in the urinals. But his splash-rate will improve if he finds himself in the loos of Schiphol airport. There, a fly has been printed on the porcelain – a target, or behavioural "nudge", that improves the penile aim by up to 80 percent. (At this point one wonders, more than idly, whether a 'liberal maternalism' would be any different in its emphases).
Nudge is the latest in a lengthy recent line of what could be called "intellectual self-help" books. This isn't to say that self-help books don't have any theories (usually a rich stew of psychology and spirituality). But the "selves" that the intellectual versions are helping are, as it were, "public" rather than "private" selves.
Books like Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan, Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and Blink, Gerd Gigerenzer's Gut Feelings, or in the UK Richard Layard's Happiness, Charles Leadbeater's We-Think, are making the same basic proposal (the only one, frankly, that can get them some display in the bookchains). How can I make sense of my personal behaviour, these authors ask, as I face the crisis of work, the shocks of globalisation, the pervasiveness of technology, the distractions of consumerism, the churnings of gender and ethnicity?
And what makes these books "intellectual", rather than merely academic, is that they all think they can establish a new public language that can (as that ultimate intellectual self-helper Al Gore once put it) link up "who we are" with "what we do". A link that business and politics is, of course, perennially interested in. "Economics are the method", Margaret Thatcher once mused, "but the object is to change the soul."
Economics is still the method, it seems. But the horizons of its imagined soul would seem to stretch no further than the powerplants of Springfield (and certainly not the olive groves of Mount Ida). According to these thinkers, when faced with the furies and possibilities of the age, our default mental response is an obdurate doltishness.
Nudge rests on what it calls "four decades of careful research by social scientists in the emerging science of choice". Careful, possibly, but not exactly uncontested. Two strains have come together to create the 'behavioural economics' they espouse. One is the advance of evolutionary biology into social science – the attack on the 'blank slate' notion of human nature, conducted first by E.O.Wilson, then popularised by Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker.
The claim is well-rehearsed. Our minds and emotions have been more shaped by our millions of years of existence as barely-surviving hunter-gatherers, than they have been as temple-building, law-forging, artfice-making, philosophy-writing civilians.
These deeply evolved traits can upset the applecart of our best-laid personal and public plans - but they can also support, as Marek Kohn and Steven Rose often remind us, the wellsprings of altruism and community-mindedness. Unfortunately, it's the more Simpson-like limits to human nature which the Nudge writers emphasize - our natural greed, our short-termism, our herd mentality, our laziness in the face of the status quo. (All the better reason to govern you, my dear.)
The other strain, as the Thatcher quote indicates, is more to do with the primacy of economics as a conceptual framework in a hyper-capitalist age. The way they go on, though - it's a bit galling. Shock! Economists have finally realised that human beings aren't the hyper-rational, robot-like maximisers of gain (and avoiders of loss) that their elaborate calculations were based on! So now we have to go along with their equally strident claims about the messy reality of human nature. About which, it might reasonably be claimed, there are more compelling inputs than those emerging from the experimental psych-labs of Chicago or the LSE.
And even as you reel from the copious referencing of books like Nudge (while you simultaneously squirm at its clubbable, safely-tenured prose style), you smell a buried intellectual rat. It's not that every research citation involves a "survey of students" - but it does seem like every other research citation. The problem is obvious, when you think about it: students haven't seen much of the world, haven't much wisdom or patience, indeed haven't learned very much at all.
In last Monday's New Republic, the venerable social scientist Alan Wolfe pointed out this regular flaw in behavioural economics – the danger of the 'Big Slip'. "They glide imperceptibly from a controlled and artificial experiment to breathtaking generalizations about matters that have puzzled philosophers and theologians through the ages", wrote Wolfe acidly. "It makes for entertaining reading. Alas, it tells us little about the kind of creatures we are."
One of the classic experiments of the genre is one which puts different arrangements of chocolates on a table, and shows how "a group of students" always make a short-sighted choice. Better the certainty of a smaller amount of chocolate that's instantly available, mutters the sophomore, than the uncertainty of more (but slightly-more-difficult-to-access) chocolates. The lesson, according to Wolfe? "These students haven't yet realised that there is no such thing as a free Hershey's Kiss".
Going back to the political dimension, the British continuities are striking. Some of us remember exactly the same goulash of research being ladled out in the pre-New-Labour days. The think-tank Demos (run by Blair's eventual policy guru Geoff Mulgan) was very hot on how "evolutionary psychology" might relegitimate the work ethic (and justify the withdrawal of benefits). That Cameron is picking up the Blairite torch intellectually is no great news.
But perhaps the real expediency here lies with the self-help intellectuals themselves, tainted by publishing hype and academic competition. "Why proclaim a revision when you can announce a revolution?" notes Wolfe. Why? It's the ideas-economy, stupid. Get your "talker" placed front-of-store (alongside the fresh fruit). D'oh!
One wonders whether the cachet of wilder intellectual Cassandras like John Gray, Antonio Negri and Slavoj Zizek, sputtering apocalypse, insurgency and totalitarianism from right and left, is to do with their unbiddability. Neither could be easily imagined "inputting" over the Rich Tea biscuits in Portcullis House (or Twinkies beside the Potomac, for that matter). Yet there's clearly a hole in the ozone layer of contemporary thinking – a need for a conception of human nature that's somewhat richer than our friend, Homer Economicus (and somewhat less than the monstrous spectres raised by Gray, Negri and Zizek).
For my money, I'd benchmark all future behavioural economics against The Simpsons' Lisa. You know: the activist with the saxophone.
Pat Kane is the author of The Play Ethic (Macmillan), www.theplayethic.com
