ABSTRACT
The book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (Thaler and Sunstein 2008; henceforth T&S) has received much critical and wider attention. According to Google Scholar, it has been cited 1,760 times (June 2012); even Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner 2005) achieves only 943 citations, despite being a couple of years longer on the market. It has been reviewed countless times, including in daily newspapers such as the New York Times, the Guardian and the German Handelsblatt, as well as magazines such as the New Yorker and Newsweek. The Economist named it a “Best Book of the Year” in 2008. Richard Thaler, the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, is the founder of an asset management firm, Fuller & Thaler Asset Management, that enables investors to exploit numerous cognitive biases. Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar who taught for 27 years at the University of Chicago Law School, is now Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and has exerted a notable influence in the Obama administration. The latter has brought him a recognition of being “seventh-ranked Global Tinker” in Foreign Policy magazine. If you want to do philosophy of economics in a practically relevant and influential way, write a book like Nudge.
