Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness

Well, never judge the book by the cover. Here it claims being downright amazing ;) It's OK and describes choice architecting - i.e. how to structure choices in a way so as to achieve a better societal result. For someone completely new to choice research the book might be a good first step (although the plentiful work by people like Kahnemann & Tversky is probably a faster and more comprehensive option).

I'd give it another star, if the authors would not fall prey to extreme carelessness and commit horrible cases of innumeracy on several occasions. They are supposed to be university professors and one of them in a relatively quantitative field (economics). So claiming that 60 or 70% of drivers cannot be better than average is not really helping their points. And while they often provide some salient evidence supporting their points, they occasionally do not and I was constantly left wondering, whether those are instances, where there is none, or all is stacked against the points they are trying to make.

Fine as entertainment, though :)

after reading this book you are aware of how the choice architectures around you guides (or attempt to guide) you! It changes the way you think about the world.

This is a good book, but a bit dry to read. It took me a while to get through it, and I'm normally a quick reader. I read several other books whilst I trudged my way through this one.

The content is good, being well described, with relevant examples. The style is serviceable but a bit like a text book.

The key ideas of the book are very useful, and come down to there being no such thing as a "neutral presentation of options" and no such thing as a neutral choice to do nothing. We cannot avoid choosing between options- we can either be architects of our own choices, or we can be shaped by someone else's preferences. In NLP work I think it was Richard Bandler who gave us the phrase, "Who sets the frame sets the game." This book explains why this saying is accurate.

I liked the ideas of safe settings for defaults- nudges that make you do something that is at least basically sensible. There may well be better options available, but for many choices we face we lack information, interest or the ability to interpret it well. And too many choices tend to make decisions harder as we get distracted by minor differences between products (e.g. several different house insurance products), rather than by basic questions about function and purpose. (e.g.my house must be insured so I need to buy an insurance policy.) And as for the future...well I try not to make predictions about it. But I'm glad I joined my pension scheme more or less by default...otherwise I would have spent the money.

Choice architecture will be a key idea for policy makers and sales people for many years to come. It will allow the state to give people a nudge in the right direction, without destroying their liberty to choose differently if they so wish. It allows some sensible persuasion whilst protecting our right to take our own road to hell if we so wish. The problem with the great rhetoric of "freedom to choose" is that many of us do not get around to exercising it well enough and often enough, or even at all. In many areas of our lives we need to be nudged to do something, and this book describes well how to set up the choice architecture to achieve this.

This is a good book, but you could pick up most of its key ideas from a good summary, or by scanning the reviews on here. So a partial nudge from me towards buying it on grounds that it is useful, but a partial nudge away from buying it as I cannot get fully enthusiastic about it.

Was expecting a book on personal decision making. It was not to be; rather I was presented with case studies on higher level decision making (for civil servants and political decision makers). Shame really, but it does re-enforce the theme of the book;every decision and every message comes with a bias. You are warned.

"Nudge is the book that changes the way we think about choice, showing how we can influence people, improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness"

Having read this blurb from the back cover of the book, it led me to believe this book will shed some light on how I can improve my decision making about health, wealth and happiness. It did not - this is what not the book is about at all.

While this book turns out not to be what I was after, it was still a nice book to read. Nudge is an interesting, easy-to-get-into book, and I find this one of the better written books in this genre. Nudge presents the concept and importance of "choice architecture", which is essentially the way in which choices are presented to a mass population can powerfully influence the majority outcome. This book uses plenty of day-to-day examples as case studies, most are common sense and easily understood, but the downside is they don't come across as very clever ideas.

The key conclusion that I took away from this book, in the authors' own words, is: "No choice is ever presented in a neutral way". I totally agree, and have even learned a lesson by choosing this book: the blurb gave me a false nudge, would not have picked this read otherwise.