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Sure, that is "the argument" I have mentioned to be made for this idea. The question that remains is who gets to construct the "default" choice. And technocrats thought that they can use some simple psychological tricks to "nudge" people to their preferred option. And this is where the "pretense" comes into play. If you agree to something devastating just by impulse of clicking the bright green button as opposed to hidden white button, you can pretend that the target made the choice. Like "nudging" natives to write X on some paper in exchange for some beads in order to save their immortal souls of course - as all learned people know. What a novel, Nobel prize winning idea we have here. Until you are proven otherwise by getting a bullet in your head by some outraged individual at the most extreme.
Of course the idea is that the enlightened elite will "nudge" the plebs toward the policies and options that will make them happy. And then everybody will sing kumbaya together with plebs praising their overlords for their wise leadership and the lords humbly accepting the praise and sending 10% of their excess income to buy malaria nets for Africa as an indulgence for some nagging feeling of something being wrong there.
And again, I am not saying that there is nothing like some arbitrary choices. You can have just some multipliers of chicken wings in your order at one natural extreme, or maybe there is an option to opt into three choices that have to be designed in some way. However the Nudge theory in its core is about ability to shape population by some decisionmaker to specifically design the choice to get what he wants. Which is of limited possibility. To use another "neoliberal" theories, we are talking about Public Choice Theory and Principal Agent Problem
And I am sure that there are some rationalists who have beaten that all to death, but this is not what is meant when you randomly read about "nudging" in New York Times in the context of a new "nudging" anti-racist department of social justice, or maybe alternatively by Daily Wire regarding some new DeSantis proposal of life affirming care program for prospective mothers.
This is an utterly wild leap of logic. Is there any actual connection here? Tricking or coercing natives into signing treaties they didn't understand (or had a different conception of) is absolutely nothing like the economic idea of nudging people by having a 401k plan be opt-out.
It is “like it” because you are “tricking” people to select the option designer prefers speciffically assuming they they do not know any better. The only difference between “nudging” and “tricking” lies in supposed “good” or “bad” result for the subject - of course as is viewed by the “nudger”. Who himself can engage in certain level of self-deception, using euphemism for tricking people being the very first step.
Even to use your example of pension plan, one of the moves Orban did in his quest to nationalize private pension plans was declaring that unless savers specifically opt into the plan again, the default option will be read as agreement with nationalization of their savings and promise of state pension. Was he nudging or tricking people?
They are not remotely the same.
The whole point of a nudge is to be small, and for there to be a legitimate choice. If you actually care about your 401k or organ donation, you absolutely can decide. By revealed preference, most people either don't care, or don't know anything about it. The alternative is plainly there, most people just don't bother. A treaty for large amounts of land, probably with each side operating under a different legal framework (not that anyone in history bothered to keep treaties), by people who would take the land by force anyway, is just not even remotely comparable. If you can't see there's a difference between nudges and "lie through your teeth and murder anyone who disagrees" then I don't know what to tell you.
Orban nationalized billions and made decision for the whole population when it comes to significant portion of their income and their wellbeing in the old age. Is this serious enough to be considered just a "nudge"? Of course the nudge itself was "small": just opt-in again, it will take you only a few seconds of your life. And if you cannot be bothered reading the fine print then we just made the "choice" easy for you by default.
I can see the difference, that is the point of the analogy that it is by definition not the same thing. My main point is that nudges use psychological tricks, they take advantage of natural laziness of people who "cannot be bothered" to make the choice for them often in matters of great importance. In that sense the choice was made for them by the designer of that option. Also it has to be said that "could not be bothered" is again just another euphemism to help with self-deception. "You see, all the people are bright and free but they have so much to do in their lives. What about we the experts help them by preselecting the correct choice for them as the default. Of course if people invested energy studying the topic, they would surely have made that choice themselves. We are just helping and increasing utility for everyone." Now that is pretense, but it is not rare for many of the expert nudgers to show their elitist upbringing by privately outright admitting that they believe people are stupid and somebody has to make the correct choice for all those dimwits.
Natives could not have been "bothered" to read the fine print or to ask for the meaning of it all. So instead of explaining all the choices and consequences clearly and honestly, the Dutch just "nudged" natives to sell their lands for a few trinkets. Who knows, maybe the Dutch thought that they are going to build a thriving trading post where natives can exchange goods and learn about the God to save their immortal souls and in general make them more civilized. They were doing natives a favor, Dutch may have them considered as too savage to be able to make their own choices. And if the Dutch profited from all that as well, this is only one more argument for applying the nudge. And as for "murders" and all that, maybe it was not the original intention of the nudge. Dutch could have not known that natives are so prone to European diseases or that they are so stiff about their tribal honor culture. It was just series of honest mistakes which sadly sometimes happen even to the very best of nudgers. Who knows, maybe all of it could have been possibly corrected by a few more well placed nudges.
...what on Earth? You seem to have some sort of axe to grind and are torturing analogy to attack "technocrats" by comparing them to Christopher Columbus or whatever Dutch explorer "bought" Manhattan. You don't actually have an argument about nudges, you just assert that it's the same thing as some other bad thing.
No, my main thesis is the nudging is just euphemism for tricking. I do not have any axe to grind against anybody. I used an analogy, it could have been anything else like for instance EULA "agreements" or something like that.
Additionally, the ecosystem of nudging also creates perverse incentives that diminishes the role of education. I could have used an example of End User License Agreements that are purposefully written in order for the public to not understand their choice by relying on impulse choice of the consumer to get to the thing they want just one click away. There is no TL;DR at the beginning of EULA in red and exclamation marks that describes what things are they giving up in exchange for the trinket. They just see one green "I agree" button and the reward behind it. And this is seen as some enlightened cutting of the proverbial Gordian Knot - no need to educate the public or explain anything. We just decide what they need.
So yes, for me the nudge really is just another synonym for deception.
I think you're using "nudge" very differently from how economists use it. An EULA is not a nudge. Making a 401k or organ donation from opt-in to opt-out is a nudge. You create analogies that are different from the thing you are referring to, and then use those analogies to justify describing the original (very different) thing.
I am using it exactly as economists want it to. The only difference is that economists love to use examples of "good" nudging. Even in your examples the 401k and organ donations are supposed to be universally accepted as a good things and as long as the nudges are used in this good direction they get quality of the nudge. Except when some religious family finds out that they cannot bury their loved one whole because she was used as a source of organs automatically creating feeling of being tricked and used. Yeah, she should have opted out from the scheme, and fuck her religion anyway - we utilitiarian nudgers know what is best for humanity and it still counts as a nudge as opposed to trick, she and her family should have known better.
Also nudging is not only about opt-in/opt-out schemes, this is just the default type of the nudge. There are other nudges like creating a psychological anchor or changing the salience of certain options and many other tricks. I purposefully used examples of what community here would probably see as a "bad" nudge but that is to show the point. I could have used your organ donation example: to make it as a default option reflects certain ethos of technocratic "nudgning" class and they impose it on the rest of the population. My argument is that they are tricks and that "nudging" is just euphemism, paradoxically by anchoring the very existence of nudges as organ donation or 401k is in and of itself dishonest description that is supposed to psychologically predispose you to agree with the premise. They do not show negative examples of nudges, they make only the positive ones as salient. Go figure.
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