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The New Interface of Governance
The New Interface of Governance
Frontier / by Nancy Scola
"If we can just tweak the way we make choices, we can make smarter ones. A look at Obama’s plans to put the science of human nature to work.
For those of us familiar with the strange land that is Washington, DC,
it’s tempting to snicker a bit at the sudden star turn of the field of
behavioral economics in our nation’s capital. Books like Cass Sunstein
and Richard Thaler’s Nudge, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, and George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits
are being passed around like samizdat. Human beings, the thinking goes,
bear little more than a passing resemblance to the “economic man” of
classic econ textbooks. We’re messy creatures, not altogether skilled
at maximizing value, or efficiency, or all those other things our
self-interest is supposed to drive us to attain..."
Read the article from Seed.
Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.