Nudging People toward Freedom

            I have just finished an interesting little book by Cass Sunstein. On Freedom (2019) is not about the broad subject of personal and political liberty but about the narrower subject of how we might improve people’s “navigability” within it. If we can’t figure out how to get to the things we need, we are less free. Being able to find our way to the airport, to information, to health care, to the right decision, or to other necessary or wished for things Sunstein calls “navigability.” The trick is how to improve navigability without limiting freedom, which would defeat our purpose.

            Sunstein here extends ideas he and Richard Thayer introduced in Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2009). They use the word nudge to indicate any intervention to influence behavior for the better, not by a mandate (“you must buy health insurance or pay a penalty”) or a ban (“you may not buy tobacco products or alcoholic beverages unless you are x years old”). A nudge may be informative, such as a nutrition label or a calorie chart at McDonald’s or a health warning on a pack of cigarettes or on a bottle of wine. A nudge can be procedural, such as your employer’s automatically enrolling you in a pension plan unless you opt out.

            The problems about such interventions are several. It is important to act so as not to limit freedom. But there is also a big question about what constitutes influencing behavior “for the better.” What criteria does one use to decide what is “for the better?” Sunstein says one criterion that works most of the time is if the choosers who have been nudged decide after the fact that they are better off.

            Unfortunately, this “judge oneself better off” criterion can fail: the choosers may make this judgment when choosing either way, or the choice may very clearly not leave the chooser better off. The would-be nudgers have to make their own judgment about which choice results in the well-being of the chooser. Such decisions are difficult and they may be wrong, of course, but as long as free choice is preserved, the stakes are not very high.

            The book seems to me a classic liberal analysis: if we judge freedom a good thing (and even non-liberals agree with that), then it makes sense to try to remove obstacles to freedom and to nudge people toward choices they agree are better ones, without impeding their ability to make another choice of they wish.