“Nudges can turn into shoves pretty quickly.”
– via Glenn Reynolds
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“Nudge turns to shove, shove turns to shoot”.
Glenn Beck.
As one of the commenters there recognized, this means the government taking your money and then using that money to manipulate you to act as they desire, for your own good of course. I think C.S. Lewis had a quote about the worst form of tyranny.
I confess that I have a certain amount of sympathy with the theory of nudging. If the government wishes to make me do X, I would far prefer to be nudged to do it than be ordered to do it on pain of punishment. (Whether the government has any right to nudge or order on the subject of X is a quite separate point.) So I accept the nudgers point – nudging is usually going to be much less illiberal than ordering.
But here’s the thing – the reality is not so pretty. For I have never ever seen a professional nudger propose that something which is currently the subject of government orders should instead become the subject of government nudges. It’s all about moving unregulated matters into nudge territory. Because, obviously, nudgers are really dyed-in-the-wool bossyboots folk and they favour nudging because they think public opinion will not, at present, wear ordering for the next set of things they want to regulate.
I am uncertain as to whether to embrace nudging. If employed – as all current nudgers wish – to coax a reluctant public opinion to regulate even more stuff, it’s a horrid threat. But if employed to coax a reluctant public opinion to deregulate currently regulated stuff, it could be very useful. Obviously for pure blood libertarians it’s a ghastly idea – just ordering in a different form. But for liberal minded conservatives such as myself, I can see that it could be used as a deregulatory tool. But in the end the Tory in me wins. Any new thing that might have benefits is still probably a bad thing. For reformers always overestimate the benefits and overlook the true extent of the costs and risks.
Moe Szyslak
@RickC:
I think you mean this one:
— C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock
Or as the sage of Baltimore put it: “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
We don’t hear much from Cass these days. Wonder if he is looking back in wonder (or regret).
And it already is, in small ways. Consider the work of Hans Monderman on roadway design, or the use of feedback loops to “nudge” drivers to slow down in school zones. Granted, these examples are very much more the exception than the norm, and they’re applied to a narrow and relatively unimportant set of problems. But they show the potential for a more mature and refined approach to striking a balance between competing interests.
To make up a quote from an Indonesian General Dealing with a Maoist uprising:
“Do not shoot the Nudgers, bullets are too good for them, use knives!”.
Of course, he never said that, which is just as well.
I say, I say, I say!
I say, original.
There are some words that cause the samizdata site to reject the message.
Any message with the word ‘S-c–l-sm’ gets deleted, i find.
Eve caused original s-c–l-sm, by giving her apple to Adam, instead of selling it. Then they both got fat and Fell down- the true Fall of Man.
insert o-ia-i, and you’ll have the message!