Listened to an Economist magazine interview with one of the authors of a fascinating new book called Nudge.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

… how to steer people toward better health, sounder investments, and cleaner environments without depriving them of their inalienable right to make a mess of things if they want to.

Thaler is a hard core economist who believes government should intervene in our lives. But only by giving us better information to make decisions.

… policymakers should “focus on making the world easier”, he argues in a new book, “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness”, written with Cass Sunstein, a law professor (and an adviser to Barack Obama). By this he means defining more carefully and simply the financial choices that people have to make, and building “sensible default options” into the design of financial products …

Getting it right on the money – The Economist