The ConDem government has just extended the life of its experimental Behavioural Insights Team, otherwise known as The Nudge Unit. The objective of the nudgers is to shape and change public behaviour into better habits. The idea sprang from the American business psychology book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness” which describes its mantra as “Libertarian Paternalism”. The book is said to be required reading for the Conservative front-bench, ever since Steve Hilton directed such things, before his departure for California.
Apart from this being a blatant oxymoron, the biggest crime committed here in the name of an allegedly Conservative run administration is that it is any of the government’s god damn business to influence the behaviour of individual citizens to serve its own ends. Far from being libertarian anything, even the idea that this is what government is there for is strongly statist. The UK has too many nanny-statists assaulting individual liberties from the Left without this sort of nonsense creeping up on us from within the Conservative Party itself. Paternalism should be left to charities and philanthropic individuals and corporations but not to the state.
The book from which this sprang rightly and helpfully explains how nudges can help to shape consumer behaviour. This is great advice for corporations, but unbelievably inappropriate advice for the state. The “choice architecture” proclaimed by the Chicago writers could not point to a clearer nudge for citizens – to tell the government to mind its own business and leave its citizens in peace to make their own choices, that’s what I call choice architecture!
