Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Three of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of Nudge pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first three.

1. There is no neutral way to present a choice: whoever designs the menu, defaults, or layout is a "choice architect" who shapes behavior whether they intend to or not, so design it on purpose.
2. Set the default to the option most people would want, because inertia and status-quo bias mean most people stick with whatever is pre-selected; auto-enroll employees in retirement plans rather than asking them to opt in.
3. Use the "Save More Tomorrow" program to beat present bias: get people to commit in advance to raising their savings rate when their next pay rise arrives, so the increase never feels like a loss today.

The other 4 — and the full 10-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 9 chapters

The whole summary runs about 10 minutes, read or listened to.

1. Humans, Not Econs
2. Biases and Blunders
3. Resisting Temptation and Self-Control
4. Following the Herd
5. Choice Architecture and the NUDGES Toolkit
6. The Power of Defaults
7. Nudging Money: Saving, Investing, and Borrowing
8. Nudging Health and the Planet
9. Libertarian Paternalism and the Real Third Way