Fall 2008 Reading Group

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wellness, and Happiness

by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

During the fall of 2008, facilitator and former President of the College Les Garner met with selected students to discuss Thaler and Sunstein's look at "how thoughtful choice architecture can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice."

Here's a brief synopsis of the book, provided by Yale University Press: "Every day, we make decisions about how to invest our money, where to send our children to school, and what to put on our dinner plates. Unfortunately, we often make poor choices - and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself.

Our errors are what make us human, but up until now, they have been largely ignored by those around us, whether they make a complex public policy or sell us a plain old bottle of wine.

In this ground-breaking collaboration, two extraordinary, if ultimately human, thinkers, economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein invite us into an alternative worlds, one that takes our humanness as a given. They show us that by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for them to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society."

On November 12, 2008, the Reading Group went to the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for a Becker Brown Bag Lunch and discussion and book signing with author Richard Thaler.