Technocracy without society: a critique of nudging as an approach to managing risk

ABSTRACT

This article considers the evolution of public risk management over the past half century in the United States, focusing on ‘nudging’ as a technique to manage a variety of risks – environmental, health, and financial – through shifts in individual behaviour. I argue that nudging operates according to a privatised, market-based logic of security that displaces more democratic approaches. I further show how nudging aims to go beyond the political – which is to say beyond the realm of democratic contestation over the assessment and mitigation of risk, thereby reinforcing an unsustainable view of risk management as an apolitical set of ‘best practices’. I further argue that this technocratic approach to risk has become particularly problematic amid a populist backlash against scientific expertise and elite institutions, and may even leave advanced democracies less able to manage the risks they face: the erosion of public trust in experts and government undermines both the attempt to nudge individuals towards ‘prudential’ choices and government mandates to manage risks through more aggressive regulatory means.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk society
• risk management
• technocracy
• democracy
• regulation
• political rationality
• behavioural economics
• nudge

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• Q58
• N40
• D81
• D03

1. Introduction: the risk management society

In Risk Society: Beck (1992), Ulrich Beck argued that the late twentieth century inaugurated a new stage of capitalist modernity wherein acts of technical and industrial progress became the source of new, potentially catastrophic risks. Beck contended that the globalised nature of contemporary risks differentiates them from the dangers that humanity faced in earlier eras, which stemmed largely from personal confrontations with nature or localised social conflicts: an angry sea or lightning strike, for example, or an unfortunate encounter with a better-armed tribe. In contrast, contemporary risks like environmental destruction or nuclear annihilation are not by and large ‘natural’ phenomena but the by-products of industrialisation and modern forms of social and political organisation. Moreover, these hazards are no longer tied to their place of origin, creating a mismatch between localised attempts at remediation and the potentially global scale of catastrophe.

Alongside the risk society, we have witnessed the rise of what might be termed the risk management society: one in which the imperative to manage risk operates at every level, spurred on both by enhanced regulatory scrutiny and public wariness towards an ever-expanding list of possible dangers. Although commonplace risk management has become as a mode of governance or broader episteme, it is worth noting its emergence is of relatively recent vintage. Even as recently as the 1980s, few universities offered courses or degree programs in risk management and only a handful of professional journals tackled the subject of risk outside of finance or insurance. Today, in contrast, risk management products and services represent an established and rapidly growing industry, with a projected CAGR of 15.4% between 2022 and 2032 according to Market Research (2023).

This article approaches risk management as a form of political rationality,¹ and in particular focuses on ‘nudging’ as an attempt to manage risks via individualist mitigation strategies and a market-based logic of security. I argue that nudging displaces more democratic approaches to risk by attempting to go around politics – which is to say, to situate risk and its management beyond the realm of democratic contestation. I argue that this technocratic approach to risk has become increasingly unsustainable amid a populist backlash against scientific expertise and elite institutions. Finally, I suggest that several decades of ‘nudging’ has left advanced democracies less able to manage the risks they face, as the erosion of public trust in experts and governments undermines both the ability to nudge individuals towards ‘prudential’ choices and the public mandate to manage risks through more aggressive regulatory means.

Before turning to the analysis of nudging, we must briefly consider the emergence of the risk management society alongside the contemporaneous reconfiguration of Western democracies beginning in the 1970s. Per Beck, the passage from industrial society to risk society was characterised by a breakdown in the ‘security dream’ (2006, 334) that previously found institutional expression in the welfare state. As Esmark states, ‘The regulatory rationale of the welfare state, viewed as a provident state tackling risks, was essentially that discernible and properly calculated risk could be met with a combination of legislative measures and financial tools such as insurance and compensation, thus providing adequate security and certainty’ (2020, 158). In contrast, the existence of risks that are globalised, incalculable, and non-compensatory (333–334) upended the mid-twentieth century security dream and with it the primacy of the nation-state system as a container for managing risk. ‘These modes of determining and perceiving risk, attributing causality and allocating compensation have irreversibly broken down, throwing the function of bureaucracies, states, economies and sciences into question’ (Beck, 1992, 16). Finally, the inability to manage such global risks via the old nationalist framework threatens to produce ‘failed states’ even in West, ‘characterized in terms of both inefficiency and post-democratic authority’ (1).

In this account, the risk society hastens the decline of the welfare state by producing hazards that by their very nature escape the state’s capacity to control.

However compelling, we could also invert the argument and posit that the risk society is the result of a decades-long attack on the welfare state’s regulatory and social capacities. As Madi writes regarding the deregulation of finance:

Throughout the last forty years, most governments around the world supported the long-run process of neoliberal reforms that turned out to be characterized by the financialization of the capitalist economy. In this historical scenario, monopoly-finance capital became increasingly dependent on bubbles that, both in credit and capital markets, proved to be globally the sources of endogenous financial fragility. (2020, 80)

From this perspective, we could posit that many of the hazards that constitute today’s global risk society – climate change, pollution, Artificial Intelligence, financial crises – look less like the inevitable byproducts of a runaway modernity than the consequences of a neoliberal political and economic pivot that aimed to ‘free’ capital from democratic oversight.

Regardless of how one regards the causal relationship between the risk society and the welfare state, it is apparent that the technocratic, nationalist modes of risk management that arose in the mid-twentieth century no longer reign supreme. Building on Hood, Rothstein, and Baldwin’s categorisation of risk regulation regimes (Hood, Rothstein, and Baldwin 2001), Esmark has identified three major approaches to risk management that have emerged alongside the breakdown of the welfare state: precaution, laissez-faire and resilience (2020, 158). The first is embodied by the precautionary principle that attempts to preserve some form of the security dream through ever-greater vigilance, testing, and ‘assumption of guilt (harm) until proven otherwise’. The second, laissez-faire approach, represents ‘the core of the “individualist” risk regulation regime, placing risk management in the hands of individual citizens and firms relating through markets and courts, based on a justice model of free choice, minimal legal intrusion and taxation of behaviour’. Finally, there is resilience, which ‘offers a way out of the impasse of risk society’ by accepting ‘the assumption that crisis, failure and catastrophe is inevitable, but nevertheless maintains that some form of security is possible in risk society through reflexivity, awareness, adaptation, innovation and recovery’ (158–161).

It is the second, laissez-faire, approach that surged in popularity in the United States beginning in the mid 1990s (Shapiro and Glicksman 2002). Nudging grew out of this laissez-faire attack on the regulatory state, tempered with a layer of ‘libertarian paternalism’ that steers citizen-consumers towards prudential choices. In this sense, nudging offers a way of preserving neoliberalism’s hyper-individualist social and political order while still trying to extend some protection to citizens. ‘Here we see how it is the irrational, neoliberal subject, acting through their freedom, that must be tempered by yet more neoliberal techniques of governance, namely the mobilisation of behavioural expertise to steer those freedoms in directions that are less self-defeating and socially harmful’ (Jones, Pykett, and Whitehead 2013, 169).

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, authors of the bestselling book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Leonard 2008), have done the most to popularise the approach. Nudge can be read as a sequel to (Sunstein’s 2002) book, Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment—which argued for market-based incentives as an alternative to ‘command-and-control’ regulation of environmental risks – that expands the latter’s framework to encompass a broader range of possible hazards and focus more intently on individual behaviour. Policy makers across a range of Western democracies and other institutions have embraced nudging for goals as disparate as preventing mortgage default (Barboni, Cárdenas, and de Roux 2022) to lowering the smoking rate (DeCicca et al. 2016), decreasing energy consumption (Allcott and Rogers 2014), and increasing rates of influenza vaccination (Milkman et al. 2011). The widespread adoption of these tactics has led some to argue that nudging represents a new mode of governance, one which is distinct from rule through hierarchy, persuasion, markets, or networks (Mols et al. 2015).

This article continues this line of inquiry by outlining the assumptions that inform nudge theory, describing how nudges are deployed to mitigate risks of varied sort and asking why such tools fall short. While several scholars have called attention to the ‘dark side of nudges’ (Madi 2020) and questioned their legitimacy within the context of democracies (Kemmerer et al. 2016; Mols et al. 2015), there has been less focus on nudging as a mode of risk management. In what follows, I aim to look beyond questions of illegitimacy to highlight those of inadequacy: not only do nudges embody a mismatch between systemic and global risks and individualist mitigation strategies, they further the fiction that risk can be effectively managed outside of formal political channels. While the attempt to go around politics might appear strategically sound given the polarised nature of American democracy, such approaches further entrench a democratic deficit that undermines the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of many. Managing risk democratically rather requires a process of re-politicisation, one that counteracts the neoliberal drift towards the market as the optimal distributor of security and other social goods. But before looking more concretely at the theoretical bases and material effects of nudging, we must say something more about how nudging relates to the broader tradition of technocracy.

2. Risk and the technocratic tradition

With its emphasis on a class of experts who objectively identify risks and guide decision-making, nudging is an obvious heir to the technocratic tradition. Yet, as we will see, the neoclassical economic assumptions that underlie nudge theory – methodological individualism, market-based solutions, and the diminishing realm of public goods – also distinguishes it from early and mid-twentieth century technocracy. Before we turn to that discussion, it is useful to review how the broader practice of risk management relates to the emergence and maturation of technocracy.

It is impossible to review the vast literature on technocracy in any comprehensive fashion,² but certain historic and philosophic points are particularly salient to the current discussion. Already in 1932, the labour economist George Soule questioned the claim made by Howard Scott and his allies (many of whom joined together to form The Technical Alliance) that technocracy existed beyond existing forms of power or ideology. ‘It abolishes politics and economics. It will have no traffic with such outworn ideas as those, not only of the standard economists and social theorists, but of economic planning, socialism, communism or fascism’ (Soule 1932, 178). As Daniele Caramani has written, ‘Technocracy’s vision is the removal of “politics” from “policy”, and it points to a Hegelian vision of a universal state above and beyond clashes of interests. It sees itself as anti-political, external to, or “above” conflict, confrontation and opposition’ (Esmark 2020, 6). It is this claim to reside outside circuits of power that supports the technocratic argument that there is an objectively correct course of action that any rational person should agree to (Pellizzoni 2001).

Notably, it was a desire to determine how the rational man should act under conditions of uncertainty that concerned many intellectual pioneers of risk, from Blaise Pascal’s famous wager over God’s existence to Laplace’s probability of testimony (Daston 1988; Hacking 1975). The idea that there was a singular, rational choice that could be determined via sound reasoning was rooted in the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, and reanimated in the twentieth century by game theorists and neoclassical economists (Kay and King 2020). While they abhorred central planning and the idea of a rationally directed economy, neoclassicists like Milton Friedman and Gary Becker were arguably no less technocratic than their socialist counterparts. Aiming to transform a broad field of social life into market transactions undertaken by atomised, utility-maximising individuals, they too worshiped at the altar of and rationalism and advanced the cause of depoliticisation. ‘What the market does is to reduce greatly the range of issues that must be decided through political means, and thereby to minimize the extent to which government need participate directly in the game’ (Friedman 1982, 15).

In her public policy work, Deborah Stone has situated risk management within the context of a technocratic, twentieth-century ‘rationality project’ that aims to purge science, law, public policy, and economics from the scourge of politics (Stone 2012, 10). ‘Risk analysis, like the rationality project of which it is a part, purports to be a science and to provide objective answers to problems of security that all rational people can agree upon. Indeed, policy analysts often disparage lay people for disagreeing with the logic of risk assessment, as though anyone who assesses things differently is irrational or stupid’ (135–6). As we will see in the discussion below, this is indeed how the Nudgers-in-chief view the populations on which they act.

In its prevailing form, contemporary risk management purports to offer a systematic approach to making projections informed by empirical data, the existence of which lends risk models the sheen of technocratic neutrality: objective ‘best practices’ for avoiding harm or achieving security. It is not that practitioners deny the role of subjective reasoning in making risk determinations, but that they envision human judgement as subsequent, and subservient, to objective data that can only be properly interpreted by an expert class:

Data and information, gathered through testing and analysis, about a phenomenon provides the evidence. These data and information contribute to a knowledge base which is the collection of all ‘truths’ (legitimate truth claims) and beliefs that the relevant group of experts and scientists take as given in further research and analysis in the field. The evidence and the knowledge base are supposed to be free of non-epistemic values. Such values are presumed to be added only in the third stage. Concluding that an activity is safe enough is a judgement based on both science and values. The interpretation of the knowledge base is often quite complicated since it has to be performed against the background of general scientific knowledge. We may have tested a product extensively and studied its mechanism in great detail, but there is no way to exclude very rare occurrences of failures that could materialise 25 years into the future. Although the decision to disregard such possibilities is far from value-free, it cannot in practice be made by laypeople, since it requires deep understanding of the available evidence seen in relation to our general knowledge about the phenomena studied. (Aven 2016, 3)

In this account from Terje Aven, subjective values only enter the picture after data has been assembled, obscuring how the data we choose to measure is itself the product of biases and preferences. Aven further emphasises that risk determinations are the prerogative of an expert class who can systematically assess risks based on scientific criteria and characterises risk management as a scientific practice. He notes that his approach concurs with the idea that ‘science is the practice that provides us with the epistemically most warranted statements that can be made, at the time being, on subject matters covered by the community of knowledge disciplines’ (Aven 2016, 1). Depicting risk management as a ‘science’ is as much a political claim as an intellectual one. It suggests high principles of empiricism and objectivity, with the associated charge to ‘just follow the numbers’, as if this exercise was somehow unburdened by political priorities, social position, or economic pressures (Porter 1995). However theoretically underwhelming, such conceptualisations of risk are particularly well-suited for the technocratic state, in which supposedly objective experts manage public affairs in a maximally advantageous fashion (Bertsou and Caramani 2020).

We find a complimentary tendency in the work of sociologist Anthony Giddens – a former advisor to Tony Blair and champion of New Labour – who tried to conceptualise risk without making use of power, class, or inequality as categories of analysis. Many contemporary risks, he argued, ‘do not respect divisions between rich and poor or between regions of the world’, but rather transcend[s] all social and economic differences” (Giddens 1990, p. 125). As Steven Loyal has argued, ‘By substituting the notions of interest and power for that of risk, which applies equally to everyone, Giddens fails to examine how power differentiates within social formations or how it dominates groups by shaping social processes so that they only benefit some groups’ (Loyal 2003, 168). This notion of risk as universal and unifying has been particularly noticeable in public conversations about climate change, which often stress that ‘we’re all in this together’ (Chaudhary 2024). Such conceptualisations fail to consider that risks can be both universal and unevenly experienced, as the mortality data for COVID-19 among racial minorities has underscored (Luck et al. 2022; Lundberg et al. 2023).

Today, technocratic approaches risk management persist despite critiques that have highlighted their neglect of uncertainty (Kay and King 2020; Scoones and Stirling 2020) and revealed the subjective determinations and political priorities that fuel them (Jasanoff 1999; Stirling 2014). As Adam and van Loon caution, ‘even the most restrained and moderate-objectivist account of risk implications involves a hidden politics, ethics and morality’ (Adam and van Loon 2000, 1). Scholars have likewise disputed the utility and supposed neutrality of quantitative risk models – the worst of which data scientist Cathy O’Neil has termed Weapons of Math Destruction (Brown 2017; Saltelli and Fiore 2023). As O’Neil has shown, many risk models replicate – and in many ways intensify – prevailing social and economic hierarchies, from those that target poor people for predatory loans to those that calculate an incarcerated person’s recidivism risk based on the composition of their community. As Harcourt (2018) has argued, analytic models inevitably ‘involve choices regarding the scope of the metaphorical system that are invariably normative and political in nature’.

And therein lies the problem: systems-analytic methods are portrayed as scientific, objective, and neutral tools, when in fact they necessarily entail normative choices about political values at every key step. When those choices are made by technocrats, the methods no longer merely implement political decisions. They no longer serve democratic politics. Instead, the methods reshape our politics. (421)

That such models ground their projections in proprietary algorithms and almost unfathomable amounts of quantitative data makes them even more difficult to interrogate democratically (Saltelli and Fiore 2023).

3. Technocracy without society

Historically, technocracy has flourished in a variety of political contexts, from Soviet socialism to colonial governments, authoritarian regimes in Latin America, and Western neoliberal democracies.³ Nudge theory has emerged out of the latter, a natural complement to the end-of-history thesis and the supposed transcendence of ideological conflict (Fukuyama 1989). While it exhibits similar depoliticising tendencies as earlier instantiations of technocracy and shares the belief in an objectively defined, singular rationality, neoliberal technocracy nevertheless departs these predecessors in several key ways.

Neoliberal technocrats tend to emerge from neoclassical economics rather than engineering or the sciences, embrace a market-driven view of both social life and security, and centre the preservation of individual freedom against the possible encroachments of the state (Sánchez-Cuenca, Bertsou, and Caramani 2020, 45). In contrast, it was social engineering – not the autonomous individual – that had concerned earlier generations of technocrats, many of whom emerged from progressive political movements. Ulrich Beck associated ‘advanced industrial technocracy’ with ‘the security pact of the welfare state … based on the “scientific utopia of making the unsafe consequences and dangers of decisions ever more controllable”’ (Beck 2006, 334). In contrast, nudge theory represents a conservative form of technocracy that accompanies the retreat of the welfare state and the ‘empowerment’ of individuals to navigate risk on a personal basis. We might call it technocracy without society.⁴

The embrace of behavioural economics as an approach to managing risks stemming from health, safety, finance, and the environment offers an important example of the turn towards neoliberal technocracy. Building on the pioneering work of cognitive psychologists Amos Twerksy and Daniel Kahneman (Tversky and Kahneman 1974, 1979), the field of behavioural economics is arguably the most important academic export of the past 30 years. It is broadly concerned with charting the ways that actual humans depart from the utility maximising, rational decision-makers that form the cornerstone of neoclassical economics. In lieu of homo oeconomicus, behavioural economics charts the flawed logic, biases, and heuristics that characterise human decision-making. As Sunstein and Thaler write:

If you look at economics textbooks, you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. Really. But the folks that we know are not like that. Real people have trouble with long division in they don’t have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse’s birthday, and have a hangover on New Year’s Day. They are not homo economicus; they are homo sapiens. (Leonard 2008, 6–7)

Curiously, the authors do not use the observed departures of human behaviour from mainstream economic theories to question other premises of the neoclassical approach – such as the idea of markets as the optimal distributor of social goods – or to interrogate the economic conception of rationality more generally.

Nudgers present their tools as a moderate policy alternative to either burdensome regulations or choice-maximising, free market libertarianism. Nudgers claim that governments and other institutions can steer better decision-making among individuals by creating optimal ‘choice architectures’ that ‘nudge’ people in the right direction (Sunstein and Thaler 2008). For example, placing fresh fruit at eye level in a school cafeteria will encourage students to eat healthier foods, and automatically enrolling employees in 401k plans – asking them to opt out, rather than opt in – will result in higher levels of retirement savings. Importantly, nudges cannot be coercive (no shoving allowed) and cannot reduce the range of options available even if some options prove to be harmful.

Notably, Sunstein and Thaler only spend considerable time addressing the concerns of libertarian critics. Though they profess to share the latter group’s scepticism regarding the virtue of government interventions, they argue that nudges’ non-coercive nature should make them ‘acceptable even to those who most embrace freedom of choice’ (Sunstein and Thaler 2008, 10–11). The argument between paternalistic and classic libertarianism often hinges on whether nudges can be considered genuinely non-coercive. Many critics (Hausman and Welch 2010; Qizilbash 2011; Mols et al. 2015) argue that nudges operate via covert manipulation and obviate public deliberation about which choices are truly optimal. Yet, even many critics do not dispute the premise that individual – and in most cases, consumer – choice is the core meaning of freedom. As we will see, this narrow conceptualisation of freedom as consumer sovereignty has outsized effect when it comes to managing contemporary risks.

Over the past 15 years, governments across the world have embraced behavioural approaches to healthcare, education, workplace safety, finance, and the environment. Both the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the European Union have adopted nudges in their dealings with institutional and retail investors (Choi 2005; Serdaris 2021). As Tor describes the situation, “Reports by the European Commission (2016) Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2017) detail over 100 case studies of behaviorally informed interventions in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, while the UK-based Behavioural Insights Team (2019) – the most active among the various international organizations in this field – recently reported having run more than 780 projects in dozens of countries since 2010” (2022, 224). While Oliver (2015) has shown there are alternative policy frameworks (including asymmetric paternalism and behavioural regulation) that make use of the sub-discipline’s insights, in practice it has been the libertarian paternalists who have made the most public policy inroads.

In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Sunstein head of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – essentially, the country’s top regulator. The former president followed this move in 2015 with Executive Order 13,707, “Using Behavioral Science Insights to Better Serve the American People, which created the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team to apply nudge principles at scale.⁵ Similarly in 2010 David Cameron created the ‘Nudge Unit’ (officially called the Behavioural Insights Team) to apply behavioural findings to policy in the UK. The Nudge Unit was spun out of the government in 2014 as Behavioural Insights Limited, and was wholly acquired in 2021 by Nesta, a charitable foundation dedicated to supporting innovation.

While there have been abundant critiques of nudge theory in the years since Sunstein and Thaler’s book was released, most of them have come from the perspective of libertarian or neoclassical economists and focused on the paternalism inherent in steering individuals towards ‘better’ choices (Brennan 2016; Grüne-Yanoff 2012; Hausman and Welch 2010; Qizilbash 2011). Conversely, Schnellenbach (2012) has noted the inherently conservative nature of governance-via-nudge, which he argues is not mere rule by technocrats, but also a means of enforcing existing social norms. Meanwhile, and drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Maria Alejandra Madi has called attention to how nudging reinforces neoliberal processes of self-regulation and normalisation, ‘foster[ing] the responsibility of individual subjects for social risks, such as illness and unemployment’ (2020, 72). In a related vein, Jones, Pykett, and Whitehead (2013) have argued that behavioural policies re-centre power in state hands and nurture a new type of passive citizen-subject.

While I agree with aspects of this argument, I do not accept the assumption that neoliberal governance ever involved a diminution of state power that is now being re-established on the sly via behavioural policies. Rather, I view neoliberalism as a process of selective hallowing out-of-state capacity, regulatory capture, and upward wealth redistribution that is wholly dependent on an increase in the punitive powers of the state (Best 2018; Gilmore 2007). From this perspective, nudging can be understood as an approach to risk management that eschews meaningful interventions in the neoliberal political economic order. Finally, while I have termed this approach ‘technocracy without society’, we should not lose sight of the fact that nudging – like the neoliberal project out of which it emerged – is also a form of social engineering: one in which the attempt to foster rational consumer behaviour conditions citizens to accept the superiority of the market and the atrophied state of public goods and services.

4. Why nudges fall short

Having situated nudging in the broader technocratic tradition and contextualised its appeal amid the pivot towards neoliberal capitalism, the remaining sections will examine nudging in action. Despite some promising applications, nudging represents at best an inadequate set of tools to address risks stemming from health, safety, or the environment. While many nudges may be harmless or moderately beneficial, the danger comes in regarding these tweaks and hacks as a genuine alternative to either robust protective regulations or ambitious policy goals that aim to tackle risk at the structural, rather than individual, level. In what follows, I examine three major shortcomings that characterise nudging as a form of risk management, each of which underscores the inadequacy of libertarian paternalism for tackling the risks that accompany twenty-first-century life.

4.1 Methodological individualism

Perhaps the most serious challenge to nudging as form of risk management is that many if not most risks that beguile developed democracies operate at the level of collectives and systems – from climate change to healthcare to the workings of global finance. The idea that managing the risks present within these complex systems can be predominately achieved through individual interventions results in a serious mismatch between the scope of problems and the nature of tools offered to address them.

Like their neoclassical predecessors, Nudgers accept the primacy the autonomous, utility-maximising individual as the fundamental building block of the economic and social order. They merely contend that most people are bad at it, and aim to close the gap between idealised, rational human subjects and actually-existing ones.⁶ Human irrationality is said to be particularly pervasive at the level of assessing risks. As Sunstein wrote in Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment:

With respect to risk, the persistent split between experts and ordinary people raises some of the most interesting problems in all of social sciences. For purposes of understanding these disputes, we might distinguish between two approaches: the technocratic and the populist. Good technocrats tend to think that ordinary people are frequently ill-informed and that the task of regulators is to follow science, not popular opinion. On the technocratic view, the central question is what the facts really show, and when people are mistaken on that point, they should be educated so that they do not persist in their errors. (2002, 54)⁷

This methodological individualism – combined with a dim view of human rationality – shapes the way that nudges help individuals qua consumers navigate consequential choices, from mortgages and student loans to health insurance and personal health. As Oliver summarises the approach:

… a nudge is meant to bring the instantaneous decisions of those who think that their non-reflective actions are irrational into better alignment with their deliberative preferences, and therefore relies on the assumption that deliberative preference is necessarily rational. Thus, the focus is on reducing negative internalities – the longer term harms that people impose on themselves through their own ill-considered automatic decisions.

(2015, 703)

Nudging thus aims at creating alignment between what Kahneman (2013) characterises as intuitive (fast) thinking and rational (slow) thinking. One of the key strategies for closing the rationality gap is to ensure that individuals have better access to clearly presented information that enables them to weigh the merits of different options. Sunstein and Thaler recommend a light regulatory approach called RECAP (Record, Evaluate, and Compare Alternative Prices) to facilitate this form of decision-making. For instance, RECAP would require phone, utility, and financial services providers to clearly lay out costs and fees over time in everyday language (Sunstein and Thaler 2008, 96). This is an ideal sort of regulatory nudge because it is inexpensive to implement and does not require any legislative action, merely a shift in the writing of disclosure agreements and pricing plans.

The limitations of this approach are apparent when Sunstein and Thaler discuss the US mortgage market. They note that unsophisticated mortgage shoppers – particular the poor and other ‘risky’ buyers – often have a hard time navigating the legalese of mortgage agreements or understanding the true risks associated with a variable interest rate (2008, 136–137). This risk factor became particularly salient in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis that initiated the Great Recession. But unlike those who have lost faith in the self-regulating mechanisms of the market, Sunstein and Thaler do not believe that it is appropriate for governments to restrict the types of mortgages that exist or ban predatory lending features (a term they contest) such as negative amortisation or balloon payments. Nudgers do not accept that financial risks of this sort can be ameliorated by making it harder for sharks; instead, they offer swimmers goggles.

Two further difficulties accompany this methodological individualism: first, the presumed stability of the subject; and second, the neglect of social bases for decision-making. According to many behavioural economists, human irrationality operates on a systematic basis, rooted in a variety of heuristics and biases (e.g. anchoring, availability bias, loss aversion) that have been identified during empirical testing by cognitive psychologists and other scholars. These studies – and the public policy interventions derived from them – assume a remarkable stable human subject whose patterns of behaviour are innate and biological rather than social and historically contingent. Humans are ‘predictably irrational’, in the words of Ariely (2008). Yet over the past several years, the fields of social and cognitive psychology have been in the throes of a replication crisis, with as many as half of the studies published in top journals failing to replicate (Open Science Collaboration 2015). These include landmark studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Marshmallow Test.⁸ In 2021, Ariley himself was accusing of falsifying data in experiments related to human honesty (Stern 2023). There is little discussion at present of how this replication crisis impacts the policy prescriptions that have grown out of experiments undertaken by behavioural economists.

Meanwhile, Mols et al. (2015) have offered a critique of nudging from within the field of social psychology itself. They argue that nudges are often insufficient or ineffective because their designers fail ‘to target individuals as social beings’ whose norms and behaviours develop dialectically with those of the groups they either belong to or aspire to join. Rather, Nudgers resemble the ‘proponents of scientific management’ by advancing a hyper-individualistic view of social problems:

The first and most fundamental similarity concerns the attribution of failure to achieve relevant collective goals to pernicious, individual-level human propensities operating at a subconscious level. This narrow, individualistic conception of human behaviour – which informs conviction in both ‘scientific management’ and ‘nudging tactics’ – in turn paves the way for individualistic interventions that neglect the many social factors that shape individuals’ behaviour. (Mols et al. 2015, 87)

The authors contend that, even if one’s aim is to merely to influence individual behaviour, doing so requires recognising and working through the social identities and networks that shape how decisions are made.

Finally, we should note that a narrow focus on tweaking individual behaviour tends to ignore quite obvious structural forces that affect one’s capacity to ‘make better decisions’. Yeo (2022) argues regarding calorie labelling:

Calorie labelling will, in all likelihood, have a small but measurable effect, at least in the short term, on the food purchasing habits of those of us in the ‘academic classes’ reading this piece. Most of us are privileged enough to be able to, should we wish, make those choices. Those who are underprivileged lack cash, time and, ultimately, choices. Underprivileged people are going to have to make the decisions they make to feed their families, regardless of the nutritional content of the food. The cold hard truth is that the risk of obesity in those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds is not going to be fixed with calorie labelling, but by making healthy food cheaper and more convenient, and by solving poverty. (454)

Yeo reminds us that are no replacement for politics that look to manage public risk at the structural, rather than individual, level.

4.2 Diminishing public goods

As Shapiro and Glicksman (2002) have shown, a key attribute of the US regulatory state in the 1960s and 1970s was its privileging of democratic, rather than market-based, principles in the management of risk. ‘The supporters of risk regulation believed that a society uses its political system to establish collective social values that define how citizens will interact. Once those values are defined, citizens accept the operation of the market system only to the extent that it does not conflict with collective social values’ (5). In contrast, the libertarian proponents of nudging undermine the democratic management of risk by arguing that market-based tools – rather than political institutions – provide an adequate means to address many public hazards.

As self-described ‘libertarian paternalists’, Sunstein and Thaler do not favour the bans and mandates that have historically been key tools in the regulatory state’s arsenal, particularly vis-à-vis finance and environmental protection.⁹ The rejection of ‘command-and-control’ regulation was also a central feature of Sunstein’s earlier work, which argued that ‘1970s environmentalism’ should give way to ‘free market environmentalism’ (Sunstein 2002, 286). In lieu of traditional risk regulation, nudgers endorse market incentives, better disclosure requirements, and the savvy use of defaults to engineer more rational behaviour among citizen-consumers. Even though Sunstein and Thaler admit the effectiveness of certain command-and-control regulatory acts – such as those that limit vehicle emissions – they contend that philosophically, ‘such limitations look uncomfortably similar to Soviet-style five-year plans’ (Sunstein and Thaler 2008, 184). This judgement is particularly striking when considered alongside the extremely high and consistent levels of public support – ranging between 70% and 80% of Americans across the political spectrum – for mandated vehicle efficiency standards since they were introduced in 1975 (Greene 2019). I will return below to this gap between expert ‘rationality’ and public preferences.

Proponents argue that nudges represent a low-cost alternative to traditional regulatory approaches, thus allowing governments to advance important policy goals in a relatively inexpensive fashion (Benartzi et al. 2017; Sibony and Alemanno 2015; Sunstein and Reisch 2019). ‘We believe that the policies suggested by libertarian paternalism can be embraced by Republicans and Democrats alike. A central reason is that many of those policies cost little or nothing; they impose no burden on taxpayers at all’ (Sunstein and Thaler 2008, 13). It is worth contextualising nudging as a public policy tool amid the turn towards austerity in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. ‘At a time when governments face deeps budgetary constraints, nudges are considered cost effective and behavioural initiatives are organized through a variety of public – private partnerships to promote behavioural changes, that is to say, more profits’ (Madi 2020, 79).

This strategy has proved particularly alluring in the days of budget deficits and legislative gridlock. Recent findings, however, have cast doubt as to the efficacy of nudging. To date, the most successful applications of nudge theory are increasing rates of organ donation and personal retirement savings (Halpern and Sanders 2016). Based on a review of 65 studies that examined nudges of varying sorts, Osman et al. (2020) found that such interventions commonly failed to achieve meaningful shifts in behaviour, backfired, or produced benefits that were offset by other actions. Kristal and Whillans (2020) found that nudges failed to lure commuters away from single-occupancy vehicles, while studies have shown that calorie-labelling has little to no effect on eating habits (Dumanovsky et al. 2011; Joshua et al. 2019; Kiszko et al. 2014).

Looking beyond questions of efficacy, Nudgers’ emphasis on cost-effectiveness reflects an emaciated view of public goods and the role of government in securing them. Like most risk management methodologies implemented since the 1990s, nudge theory uses cost–benefit analysis to build the case for interventions. Yet, with their contested methodologies, models, and assumptions about quantification and efficiency, cost–benefit calculations are notoriously fickle policy tools. Notably, while representing ‘the dominant form of rationality in our contemporary administrative state’ (Harcourt 2018, 420), it was not until 1974 that the United States government began engaging in cost–benefit analysis in a systematic fashion. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was established to counter the budgetary power of the White House’s own Office of Management and Budget and charged with evaluating the cost and efficacy of legislative proposals. As Berman (2022) has shown, the CBO reoriented US government agencies around cost–benefit analysis and fuelled a steady demand of economists to justify their programs. The latter, alongside graduates from newly-created public policy programs, laid the groundwork for the embrace of efficiency – rather than fairness, equality, or even democracy – as the premier political virtue.

Over two decades ago, Shapiro and Glicksman (2002) warned that the fulsome embrace of cost–benefit analysis in public policy deliberations threatened the US government’s capacity to manage risks related to technology, health, safety, and the environment. ‘Employing a utilitarian philosophy and analytical tools such as cost–benefit analysis, the critics claim that risk regulation is excessive and irrational, wasting millions of dollars that could be put to more productive uses’ (ix). Under the ascendent rubric, the costs and benefits of risk regulation had to be weighed, which necessitated quantitative measures of harm for injury and death, with the corresponding suggestion that certain risk-reducing tactics (e.g. reducing the arsenic levels in water) might not pay off. In this way, champions of regulatory pullback mobilised a compensatory logic that abandoned one of the foundational tenets of landmark risk regulation, namely, that the purpose of such statutes was to prevent harm, not merely – as in the law of torts – to compensate victims (6–7).

As Lisa Heinzerling noted, this crude calculus involves ‘describing pain and loss in statistical terms’ under the guise of not getting carried away by emotional considerations:

Describing human lives in statistical terms thus creates the conditions under which human suffering and loss can be conceived of in economic terms, and under which this suffering and loss can be allowed to continue simply because the monetary value we have attached to them is lower than the costs of avoiding them. (2000, 189)

Shapiro and Glicksman (2002) note that this economic mode of reasoning about public policy was an outlier until recent decades, and notably absent from landmark legislation like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. It was also absent from policy debates about the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 to provide health insurance to the elderly and poor. By the mid-1970s, however, the new economic style had made enough public policy inroads to undermine legislation proposing universal healthcare in favour of cultivating a healthcare marketplace that, proponents argued, would operate more efficiently than a public system (Berman 2022, 185). This theoretical efficiency has never manifested in empirical terms, and the United States has rather become an outlier in both healthcare costs per capita and key indices of wellbeing.¹⁰

Significant critiques of cost–benefit analysis, the efficiency trap, and what Berman (2022) calls ‘the economic style’ have circulated for decades, many related to the quantification of non-numerical entities like nature, health, or loss, the difficulty of contending with uncertainty, and the narrow bounds of analysis (Foster 1997; Sen 2000). Regarding the latter, for instance, the costs and benefits of environmental policies that aim to reduce energy usage are often conceptualised in terms of consumer spending and enjoyment. ‘[I]n the real rather than ideal world, an incremental investment in energy efficiency is worthwhile only if the benefit of that investment exceeds the cost of that investment’ (Brennan 2016, 2).

This narrow focus on consumer prices and willingness to pay as a proxy for civic preference ignores many other costs, of course (Foster 1997). Regarding environmental risks, for instance, these might include deaths and property damage from stronger and more frequent storms; an increase in climate refugees; regions becoming ‘uninsurable’ on account of the elevated risk of natural disasters; and the distorting effects of fossil fuels on international diplomacy, just to name a few. Economists might contend that they are under no obligation to think about costs and benefits in such capacious political and social terms. That defence would be more palatable if those making it were not also significant drivers of public policy. It is promising to see waning faith in the sufficiency of economic analysis as a measure of political and social policy, with both academic and popular critics urging far greater humility and attention to the social costs of economic rationalism (Appelbaum 2019; Mazzucato and Collington 2023; Skidelsky 2021).

Finally, we need to highlight how seemingly impartial cost–benefit calculations can exacerbate existing racial and economic inequalities, perhaps most infamously embodied by Lawrence Summers’s argument that ‘the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable’ (Summers 1992). As the former World Bank chief economist argued in a memo leaked to The Economist, pollution would cause less harm in developing countries – not because it affected fewer people, but because the value of their lives was worth less in monetary terms. So too, in writing about the justice of subjecting poor people to higher levels of arsenic in drinking water, Sunstein argues that ‘safety is a matter of degree, and if safer water quality is very expensive, then poor people are better off without it than with it’ (Sunstein 2002, 189). Such assessments have aged particularly poorly after the discovery of dangerously high levels of lead in the water of the predominantly black community of Flint – the result of cost-cutting measures that changed the city’s water source and stopped adding chemical treatments to old lead pipes.

Sunstein substantiated his judgement with a comparison to automobiles; a new Volvo may be much safter than the used cars poor people can reasonably afford, and it would be absurd for the government to mandate that they purchase a Volvo just to reduce their accident risks. Such comparisons contest the existence of public goods: the notion that clean water, much like the fire department, should be equally accessible to all despite wealth or other social distinctions, and that the state’s management of risk should concern itself with the preservation of such public goods. Here, I agree with those who find ‘the very idea that … the prevention of an environmental damage [is] just like buying a private good … quite absurd’ (Sen 2000, 949). As Jacobs has argued regarding the distinction between public and private goods, ‘Whether you buy tomatoes or carrots, this sofa or that one, is a question of personal preference; not, in general, an issue of ethics’ (Jacobs 1997, 212).

The fact that Sunstein’s ideas gained purchase under the democratic presidency of Barack Obama testifies to an overarching shift in the political-economic provision of security under the neoliberal state, one marked by ‘extremely high levels of inequality, the ceding of public power to private entities, the dismantling of the social and the political as fields of democratic intervention, and gated access not merely to wealth or status, but to basic security and social services’ (Schneider 2021, 51). Here we can see how nudging – with its methodological individualism and preference for market-based, rather than democratically driven, solutions – is perfectly compatible with the highly privatised provision of security.

4.3 Expertise and the legitimacy crisis

Behavioural policies of all stripes and colours operate from the premise that most people are poor risk calculators, hence the need to nudge them into alignment with expert rationality. Unlike those who argue that clearer presentations of statistical data and public numeracy initiatives can help people become better risk assessors (Gigerenzer 2014; Sutherland et al. 2022), nudgers believe that most people will never develop an actuarial sense. They rather aim to ‘work with the grain of human cognition’, as one contributor to MINDSPACE (a joint UK Cabinet Office and Institute for Government publication regarding behavioural insights for public policy) related to Jones, Pykett, and Whitehead (2013, 169).

On the whole, nudgers have not seriously entertained how rising populist sentiment affects their preferred approach to public policy, and with it, the broader enterprise of managing risk via expert determinations of rational choices. Sunstein’s quip that ‘experts are generally right, and ordinary people are generally wrong’ (2002, 55) feels particularly ill-suited for this moment. As witnessed in controversies regarding climate change and Covid-19, public trust in scientific expertise has waned alongside trust in the democratic institutions more broadly (Brown 2017; Hobsbawm 2007). Yet, with few exceptions (Stirling 2023), little attention has been paid to the ways in which the democratic legitimation crisis presents obstacles to the technocratic management of risk.

Scholars from a variety of fields and perspectives have questioned the premise that experts are capable of determining what represents a rational or appropriate choice for the public at large. Libertarian critics have underscored ‘the political objection’ that ‘politicians were not elected to judge risks collectively for the people as a whole’ (Gordon, Seldon, and Brady 2002, 161–2). Paternalism of even a libertarian sort assumes that a special class of scientists, bureaucrats, and policy experts have superior insight into what makes millions of strangers ‘better off’. Mols et al. argue that ‘nudging is an inherently elitist choice-limiting technique, used to achieve what those in positions of authority (politicians, policy makers and experts) consider positive public good outcomes’ (2015, 87). Brennen (Brennan 2016) contends that expert determinations undermine consumer preferences that may seem irrational – such as using incandescent light bulbs or driving a fuel inefficient sportscar – but that provide benefits to the individual (more flattering lighting, speed).

Taking stock of many of these critiques, Liscow and Markovits have called for democratising behavioural economics on the basis that ‘economists do not reflect, resemble, or represent the populations that economic policy governs (2022, 1219)’. As they point out, empirical research has shown economists to be more self-interested, more corrupt, and less charitable than ordinary people, and far more attracted to efficiency as a value. In the United States, economists also remain predominately male and white and earn salaries that rank in the top 10% of the income distribution. The result is that the paternalism inherent in nudging ‘is often grounded in economists’ own preferences and moral beliefs, which reflect both the professional deformations that shape opinion among highly educated and highly paid elites in general and economists in particular and the peculiar demographic identities that economists bring to their training and professional lives’ (1226).

Liscow and Markovits (2022) even dispute the value of nudgers’ hallmark success story: the increased use of private retirement savings plans. Unlike highly paid economists, many lower- and middle-class people do not have excess savings to invest in private retirement funds – which are less advantageous for them because their lower marginal tax rates – and rather rely on Social Security (1263). Viewed against the decades-long conservative and libertarian effort to privatise Social Security – a proposal which has proved consistently unpopular with the vast majority of Americans – the idea of pushing people towards private retirement funds looks less like the most rational choice and more like an attempt to implement a particular, market-based logic of financial security. As remedy, Liscow and Markovits propose a democratised form of behavioural economics based upon extensive conversations between experts and ordinary people, thereby that putting the latter ‘in the driver’s seat by empowering them to take command of their own choices’ (1228). This is a welcome development, but does not directly address the widespread and growing distrust of scientific expertise and elite institutions in western democracies.

In his sociological work on risk, Anthony Giddens considered the issue of trust vis-à-vis the varied expert systems – staffed by doctors, scientists, lawyers, and regulators – that are an integral part of modern life. ‘For Giddens, a sense of trust in processes, people and things is a crucial factor in maintaining a sense of ontological security in the modern world: the absence of trust results in existential angst or dread’ (Loyal 2003, 116). The varied ways in which citizens of democratic countries responded to COVID-19 offers a fruitful case study of the entanglements that exist among risk, expertise, and trust. For instance, many governments initially tried to encourage widespread vaccination via nudges including messaging, incentives, and creative scheduling tools. In the United States, these tools proved insufficient and soon even Richard Thaler was arguing in the pages of the New York Times that more aggressive steps were required. ‘Those who remain unvaccinated yet would benefit from shots largely range from skeptics to those who are strongly opposed to vaccinations’, he wrote in an op-ed recommending mandates and digital vaccine cards (Thaler 2021). Indeed, Jacobson et al. (2022) found that nudges did not meaningfully increase COVID-19 vaccination rates among the vaccine hesitant in the United States. Similar findings were reported in Russia (Roshchina, Rozhkova, and Roshchin 2023) and Israel and the United Kingdom (Kantorowicz-Reznichenko, Kantorowicz, and Wells 2022).

Notably, according to the OECD, public trust in government in these countries is well below 50% – ranging from 31% in the United States to 45.7% in Russia. It is suggestive to compare these countries – all of which eventually embraced vaccine mandates of some sort – with those like Denmark and Norway that enjoy much greater public trust in government (63.5 and 63.6%, respectively) and achieved very high vaccination rates through voluntary uptake. While more research is required to support a clear correlation between political legitimacy and voluntary vaccination, early evidence indicates ‘trust in authorities’ was one of the prime drivers of vaccination in both Sweden and Italy (Raffetti, Mondino, and Di Baldassarre 2022). These findings should encourage scholars to consider more carefully how – far from being insulated from politics – the ability to nudge people towards ‘optimal’ choices is wholly intertwined with political realities and their social ramifications.

In closing, we might build off Stirling (2023) to suggest that several decades of technocratic rule or ‘new public management’ has left advanced democracies less able to manage the varied risks they face. The crisis of democratic legitimacy and erosion of trust in science and experts not only undermines the efficacy of strategies like nudging, but also disrupts the ability of states to manage risks through more aggressive regulatory means. In the United States, these dynamics made Covid-related public health measures difficult to implement and are presently driving the rejection of policies that are essential to mitigating the climate crisis. Moreover, beyond health and environmental risks, a technocratic, experts-know-best discourse also fuels political risk in the form of mounting authoritarian populism (Schneider 2021). In this context, nudging represents an inadequate and perhaps even counterproductive approach to risk management within developed democracies.

5. Conclusion: toward a re-politicization of risk

Through an analysis of the assumptions and strategies that underlie nudging, I have shown how this popular approach to managing health, safety, and environmental risks advances an anti-social and anti-democratic logic of security. Not only are individualist interventions poorly suited for addressing risks that are systemic in nature, but the reliance on public acquiescence to expert judgement represents an acute liability amid rising populism. It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider how citizens, scholars, and states might create more democratic approaches to risk management, but I contend that any such attempts must reject a concept of risk as objective, universal, or apolitical. Scholars and policy professionals alike must rather reveal the fissures that run through the risk society and highlight the ways they can be addressed via democratic political processes and institutions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Other notable works in this direction include Louise Amoore, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability (Amoore 2013); Bernard Harcourt, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (Harcourt 2007); David Moss, When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (Moss 2002); Mikkel Rasmussen, The Risk society at War: Terror, Technology and Strategy in the Twenty-First Century (Rasmussen 2009); and Rhys Jones, Jessica Pykett, and Mark Whitehead, ‘Psychological governance and behaviour change’ (Jones, Pykett, and Whitehead 2013).

2. See, for instance: Eli Bertsou and Daniele Caramani (eds.) The Technocratic Challenge to Democracy (Caramani 2020); Miguel Angel Centeno, ‘The new Leviathan: The dynamics and limits of technocracy’ (Centeno 1993); Anders Esmark, The New Technocracy (Livermore and Revesz 2020); Frank Fischer, ‘Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise’ (Fischer 1990); Jürgen Habermas, The Lure of Technocracy (Habermas 2015); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964); and Jean Meynaud, Technocracy (Meynaud 1969).

3. Among the many compelling studies of technocracy in action, see: Brown (2019), In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West; Graham (1996), The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union; Mitchell (2002), Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity; Sánchez-Cuenca, Bertsou, and Caramani (2020) ‘Neoliberal Technocracy’; Scott (1998) Seeing Like a State: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed; and Silva (2009), In the Name of Reason: Technocrats and Politics in Chile”.

4. ‘There is no such thing as society’, Thatcher stated in an interview that stressed the doctrine of personal responsibility. ‘There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first’. See: Douglas Keay, ‘Interview with Margaret Thatcher’. Woman’s Own, Sep 23, 1987.

5. The Executive Order specifies that agencies should concern themselves with four major tasks: 1) help individuals, families, and businesses streamline key processes; 2) ‘improve how information is provided to consumers, borrowers, program beneficiaries, and other individuals’; 3) interrogate the choice architecture of public programs; and 4) explore non-financial incentives that make it easier for individuals to save for retirement, complete their education, or other such goals.

6. As Thomas C. Leonard has perceptively noted, for all their claims to have abandoned homo oeconomicus, nudge theory ‘now proposes, in the name of paternalism, to enshrine the very same fellow as the image of what people should want to be. Or, more precisely, what paternalists want people to be’ (Leonard 2008, 257).

7. John Kay and Mervyn King have contested this portrait of human beings’ supposed irrationality – i.e. of ‘failing’ to live up to the largely fantastical traits of homo oeconomicus: If we do not act in accordance with axiomatic rationality and maximise our subjective expected utility, it is not because we are stupid but because we are smart … Human intelligence is effective at understanding complex problems within an imperfectly defined context, and at finding courses of action which are good enough to get us through the remains of the day and the rest of our lives. The idea that our intelligence is defective because we are inferior to computers in solving certain kinds of routine mathematical puzzles fails to recognise that few real problems have the character of mathematical puzzles (Kay and King 2020, 400).

8. While not precisely a nudge, the premise that teaching delayed gratification could influence social outcomes offers another instance of failing to account for the social and economic dimensions of risk, chief among the poverty. “‘It’s very hard to find psychological effects that are not explained by the socioeconomic status of families’, says Pamela Davis-Kean, a developmental psychologist at the University of Michigan. See (Resnick 2018).:

9. On the US regulatory state and its deconstruction, see: Gifford (1983), ‘The New Deal Regulatory Model: A History of Criticisms and Refinements’; McCraw (1986), Prophets of Regulation; and Barton (2020), Upending the New Deal Regulatory Regime: Democratic Party Position Change on Financial Regulation.

10. Data indicate that the United States presently spends over $4000 more annually per capita on healthcare than other high-income countries (OECD 2023) yet experiences poor health outcomes across a wide range of categories: life expectancy, infant and maternal death, avoidable death, suicide, assault death, and frequency of multiple chronic conditions among adults (Gunja, Gumas, and Williams II Gunja, Gumas, and Williams 2023). One study found that nearly 45,000 annual deaths were attributable to lack of health insurance (Wilper et al. 2009); even after the Affordable Care Act expanded medical coverage, two-thirds of US bankruptcies still result from medical debt (Himmelstein et al. 2019).