Book Review: Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

Suppose that you were in charge of a school district and you were given the responsibility of making the students healthier.  Thus, you have a few options:

1. Take away all of the candy and soda from the vending machines.
2. Serve the desserts in the lunch line first instead of last.
3. Make the students eat in the cafeteria instead of an off-campus period during lunch hour.
4. Close the vending machines down during the lunch hour.
5. Make a separate dessert line from the regular lunch line.

Now with these options, let’s say these have been the respective responses:

1. From option 1, the students complain and no one is happy.
2. From option 2, kids eat the dessert first, which went against your plan.
3. From option 3, some students complain, but it may force others to prepare a lunch at home, which might upset some already busy parents and the already stressed students.
4. From option 4, the students may complain because those are the peak hours of getting food.  Plus, the school might lose some money because no one is buying food from these vending machines.
5. From option 5, there may be some inconvenience, but surprisingly, the kids get healthier.

Now this isn’t just some thought experiment.  You really do these five options in five different schools and collect the data and you discover that option 5 is the most practical choice without losing a huge benefit.  Thus, you “nudged” the kids into eating healthy.  But why the word “nudge”?  The authors claim that they are for a new term that goes with nudging: libertarian paternalism.  We often think that just maximizing choices is the best option.  However, the more choices one has, it just makes things more confusing and it could make things worse.  Thus, there should be a choice architecture where you’re nudged toward a certain route.

Notice that you’re not forcing the kids to not eat dessert in option 5.  The students can still eat dessert if they wish.  There is no separate cost, it still comes with the meal.  But perhaps the students don’t want to get into a second line for some reason.  And this makes the students healthier.  Thus, the choice is still open (hence the libertarian portion), but you have nudged them into not getting that dessert (hence the paternalism portion).  Basically, this is what the book is about.  It’s about building up a choice apparatus to nudge the people around you into the optimal choice even though there are other choices around.  You can think of it like putting candy at the cash register instead of fresh fruit.  By putting candy there, you have a choice of getting that candy or not, but the store is nudging you into getting that candy.

Now that we’ve got the concept: let’s apply this to finances, schools, health, and marriages.

Finances

When it comes to saving money for retirement, stocks, school loans, social security, etc. there are many options on what to do.  Unfortunately, most people just pick the default option (which is basically don’t do anything).  The authors recommend that the default option should be something else.  For example, when it comes to 401(k) plans, you have to fill out a form just to get that started.  But what if you automatically get the plan, and if you don’t want the plan, all you have to do is put a check mark next to the question “Check here if you don’t the company retirement plan” or something like that on your application form?  It gives advice on employers and businesses to nudge people to a certain choice.  It doesn’t really apply to me because I work in the public sector, but surely this advice would be beneficial to governmental jobs and the government should use this.

With stocks, never invest all of your paycheck into the company that you work for.  Enron is an example of that going wrong.  Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket in other words.  However, you should put the same amount of eggs into different baskets.

Health

At this point, I think you’re getting the idea: if you give people too many choices, they have no idea how to begin because there’s no guide on what to choose.  Thus, you must give them some nudges and design a choice architecture to make them have good choices.

The authors begin with Medicare.  President Bush proposed Plan D which literally gave seniors over 100 plans.  That’s a lot!  Even the experts in these fields were confused on the differing plans.  Thus, many seniors didn’t sign up and they got the default plan, which was basically one assigned at random.  The authors propose that the default shouldn’t be chosen at random, but an intellectual assessment so that the plan works best for each person.  They give other ideas too but I won’t go into details here.

With organ donations, they get into some controversy here.  The default has always been thus: You’re not an organ donor unless you specify that you want to be one.  The authors suggest to change the default: You are an organ donor unless you specify that you don’t want to be one.  They’ve done studies and organ donations increased about 80%.  This would save lives.

In terms of environmental concerns, they think the cap-and-trade is good in principle, but it goes against the idea of libertarian principles.  Thus, the bring up the whole idea of taxes.  For taxes, it’s an incentive to not do a certain activity.  They suggest to put a tax on gas.  This will create an incentive consumers not to use gas that much or else buy a hybrid.  At the same time, this will create an incentive to automobile makers to make more fuel-efficient cars.

They also suggest to create a Toxic Release Inventory which means that companies must report to the government what hazardous chemicals they are using.  This is released online.  With this, each company gets a grade but you still choose in buying those products.  For example, there are grades with meat: Grade A choice cut steak, or Grade A.  The former is better, but you can still choose to buy the latter if you want.  The same should be done with companies that produce pollution: give them grades.  With cars, the authors suggest putting a sticker on each car to show how economic the mpg that vehicle is.  Thus, you can see clearly how fuel efficient the car is, but you can still choose to buy a Hummer if you want.  There were other creative nudges as well that you should check out.

Freedom

We start off with education.  The authors are for vouchers, but with a revised stipulation.  They suggest that the parents puts their children on a list of the schools of their choice.  With this, it requires them to research the many schools around their area.  Also, the law could possibly be changed so that one cannot graduate from high school unless one submits an application to a college, even a community college.  An experiment was done in Texas.  The enrollment (and not just the application process) of a community college went up 45% in one year.  That’s pretty impressive.

With health care, they have a simple, yet interesting rule that I’m still thinking about: you should have the option to waive your right to sue.  The reason why health care is so expensive is because most of the premiums are going toward malpractice suits.  But if you waive your right to sue, then your insurance will be much cheaper.  Now this doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing deal.  If you’re going to get a major operation, you’d probably want to pay the full premium.  If you going to just get your cheek swabbed, you’d probably want to waive your right to sue.  Thus, insurance would be much cheaper.

When it comes to marriage, it should be privatized.  Thus, if you want to get married, you must follow the rules of the religion or institution.  If you want the legal benefits, then you must go to the courthouse and get that figured out.  It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or not.  Thus, marriage can be private, and the legal benefits are public.  On a side note, I have to say that this is a good solution.  Think about this: how would you feel about the government getting involved in your baptism, your temple recommend, your Catechism, or your Bar Mitzvah?  You don’t like it huh?  So why do you like the government getting involved in something as personal and private as a marriage?  That doesn’t make any sense.  Therefore, the government should get out of marriages altogether.  They shouldn’t be in the business of handing out marriage licenses.  Only private institutions should do that.

In the end, the authors conclude with some objections and their replies to them.  I thought the objections were very weak.

If anyone knows me, I can’t stand economics.  So if I like a book about economics, that’s really saying something.  This book was great.  It really trains your thinking into “we must change the default position for the better” perspective.  Overall, it won’t affect me.  However, I believe everyone in government and business should read this.  More than that, it should be required reading in political science, business, and economics classes in college.  I can’t recommend this enough.  It’s a great, and fast read.  Plus the authors provide some humorous anecdotes as well.  Hopefully, this will take on instead of holding onto the tired ideologies of liberalism or conservativism.

You can check out their website here and possibly offer some nudges of your own to the authors.  Their blog also offers updated nudges on how to improve society.  Behavioral economics is awesome!

UPDATE: In their paperback expanded edition, they add another chapter of nudges that could be implemented are have already been implemented.  I’ll add some that really captured my eye:

• Limos for drunks.  Drunk driving is a problem.  That’s why a city in Michigan has a company where the drunk can rent a limo for $20.  It’s fairly cheaper than a taxi (sometimes) and it makes you look classy.  They tried this and drunk driving went down 34%.
• Showing calories in Chain Restaurants.  New York made it a law where chain restaurants had to show how much calories their food items were on the menu.  Thus, you can still choose to eat the food, but you’re nudged into not eating it.
• Recycling.  A company in CA has made people in a certain neighborhood aware of their recycling habits.  When you receive the bill, it shows how much you’re recycling compared to everyone else in the neighborhood.  It turns out that the reason you recycle is because everyone else does too.
• Putting a sticker in a urinal.  Men usually don’t aim when they pee and so they make many messes, which causes more clean up, which means more usage of hazardous chemicals, etc.  By putting a sticker inside the urinal, the men have something to aim at and it makes the clean-up much easier.  They’ve tried this in a lot of countries and the results are amazing: the cleanup is less in ALL of those countries.

What can I say?  Nudging is awesome.  It has seriously influenced my way of thinking.

Seven Hours of Feynman Physics Lectures

All I can say it “WOW!”

Bill Gates has personally bought the rights to these lectures that you can view online.  Freaking amazing!  But then again, physics has always been my thing.

Trying to Achieve Immortality Through Genes and Memes

How does one gain immortality?  There seems to be two ways: genes and Memes.

In terms of genes, Richard Dawkins brings up some really interesting ideas about how genes work in his book The Selfish Gene.

At some point in the beginning of the primordial soup, a certain molecule was formed: a Replicator.  One of the most interesting features about this replicator is that it has the ability to create copies of itself.  Now, could there have been mistakes when there is copying?  Sure.  There are always going to be typos and such in any copying.  So in this primordial soup, there would be different variants, a population of different replicas but they call came from the same “ancestor.”  Could there have been more replicant B’s than C’s?  Sure, perhaps B is more stable than C.  Through this, perhaps replicant B would have a higher longevity, which means it would be more numerous in the population, which means it would start off on the evolutionary trend.  But time is also going to effect it too: if replicant B makes a copy once per week, while replicant C makes a copy once per hour, obviously there are going to be far more replicant C’s.  So it seems that replication at a faster rate is going to have a higher evolutionary trend too.

But there’s another factor: competition.  The primordial soup isn’t infinite space.  Eventually, all of these replicators are taking so much space, and if the building blocks are going to be used up, there’s going to be some competition to fight for these building blocks.  Over time, stability was highly prized and the more stable you are, the better you can defend yourself or compete against others.  Perhaps one knew how to break up the competing replicator (a first proto-carnivore).  Maybe others learned how to build up a defense mechanism or some sort of wall (this could have been how cells were produced).  Eventually, these replicators learned how to build some sort of container so that they could continue to exist.  These containers are called survival machines.  The first survival machine was probably nothing but a protective coat.  As competition became more powerful, these survival machines had to become more elaborate and bigger.

So where are these replicators?  They are called GENES.  And what are these big elaborate survival machines that they’ve learned to build so that they will be protected by the outside world?  THE HUMAN BODY.  So now, natural selection doesn’t just favor replicators, but replicators that are good at making survival machines and can have embryonic development.  Now we don’t even have to apply the word “living” or “alive” to these replicators.  They don’t plan out, they don’t see the future.  They just are.  They just replicate.  Over time, the replicators have made incredible survival machines: the heart, the muscles, and the eyes.  A survival machine is a great vehicle.  But it doesn’t just carry one replicator (gene) but thousands, millions even.  These genes are dependent upon one another and they all refer to one another.

But eventually, these genes can only replicate so much (mainly because the survival machines (the body) has all of its space used up).  So how can these genes replicate?  Which is the quickest?  SEX.  Sexual reproduction is the most efficient way to mixing and shuffling genes.  Your body is just a temporary vehicle for your genes.  But when you die, your genes will die too.  So there must be a way to make sure these genes survive.  It’s through sex.  These genes are so particular and so steady.  It leaps from body to body through generations without a scratch.

So the only thing that’s a part of us that’s immortal is our genes.  This is one way of gaining immortality: spreading our genes.  What are we?  We are the survival machines which carries these genes.  In other words, we are the hosts and the genes invade us so make sure that they survive.  When the host body is used up, they find another body to invade.  Inside us is a colony of genes.

Eventually over time, these survival machines learned to have a purpose.  They did things to achieve some end.  What did this purposefulness evolve into?  CONSCIOUSNESS.  We, the survival machines, have been programmed by these genes and the genes just passively sit by.  Why can’t they take charge?  Time-lag reasons.  They control protein synthesis.  It’s extremely slow.  It takes months.  Thus, these genes built a brain.  Predicting the future is also a great survival tool.  Thus, those who can imagine what will happen in the future are one jump ahead instead of the survival machines who can only live based on trial and error.  Trial and error takes time, and it could be fatal.  Simulation (imagination), on the other hand, is both safer and faster.  Perhaps, it gained something: self-awareness.  The genes are the policy-makers and the brains give those orders out.  There is one basic order that the genes (through the brain) has told us: do whatever you think best to keep us alive.  That is the goal of genes, and this is how we (in other words, our genes) can gain immortality: our children.

Dawkins also brings forth another idea: the meme.  I’ve talked about memes in a previous blog, but I’ll give a quick recap.

There is another primordial soup: the soup of human culture.  And in this soup is another replicator.  It’s also a self-replicating bit of information.  But instead of information for life, it’s information about culture.  In other words, an idea.  We shall call it a meme.  Examples are: songs, ideas, catch-phrases, fashions, ways of making things.  Anything that can replicate itself wants to survive and proliferate.  Well, ideas do replicate.  Notice that when you hear a song, all the sudden that song is stuck in your head.  Now just as genes replicate by jumping from body to body (via sex, mainly), memes replicate by leaping from brain to brain (via imitation).  If a scientist hears or reads about a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students.  If the idea catches on, it replicates itself and it spreads from brain to brain.  You’re reading this blog, for example.  If these ideas are good ideas, you will teach these to others and this meme that I just taught you will replicate as well.

Memes, and genes, are in a sense parasites.  The genes control the body; the memes control the brain in order to spread and replicate this information.  It’s the same sense that a virus may take over a host cell.  We are merely host bodies for genes and memes.

Now genes only survive if they can take advantage of what’s going on.  Do memes do that?  Yes.  The ideas you have are all memes and through natural selection, you survive because the memes you have help you survive.  So this meme “Don’t play with guns” helps you survive.  This meme: “carrots are good” helps you survive.  This meme: “exterminate all Jews” doesn’t help you survive.

But just like genes, memes are also selfish.  Their whole function is to replicate themselves.  They are things “infecting” our minds “like viruses.”  When I hear a catchy tune, it “parasitizes” my brain and then spreads to the brains of others when I sing it.  But some genes may not good for the host: cancer.  Are there any memes that doesn’t help you survive?  “Killing Jews is good.”  Why is terrorism so popular?  That meme catches on and other people say it’s a good idea.  Indeed, memes could easily account for racism.  There are other memes that we also “believe in.”  After all, don’t we die for ideas like Truth, Democracy, and Freedom?  And just like genes, all memes compete for survival.  You have all of these different ideas and they want your attention.  Memes try to convince you that that idea is a good one.  And once you have this idea, it’s very hard to get it out of your head.

Thus, Genes: self-replicating information for proteins.  Memes: self-replicating information for carrying out behavior.  The most successful memes (like genes) are those that survive.

This is the second way of gaining immortality.  When we die, we leave something behind: genes and memes.  However, you will be forgotten by about three generations and your resemblance to your ancestors is so negligible that there won’t be any notice.  If, however, you have a good idea that would contribute to the culture: a song, an invention, discovery, a poem, it will live on long after your genes have dissolved into the common pool.  There may be no more genes from Socrates, but his memes, as well as Leonardo, Copernicus, and others are still living on.

Now that we’ve gone through the what genes and memes are, and how one can achieve immortality.  My next claim is an interesting thought process.  I don’t have any evidence for this except my own personal experience, but there may be something to this.

There are two types of people: those who want children, marriages and families (immortality through genes); and those who are creative by writing stories, producing ideas, creating art, or anything that brings forth new ideas (immortality through memes).  There are some people that don’t want children or families.  Now through the idea of evolution, the assumption is that these people are evolutionary dead-ends.  These people won’t help reproduce and so their genetic lineage will die out.  Thus, these are aberrations to survival.  But what if these people have good ideas?  These ideas take up so much energy and effort, that they don’t time to have a family or even get married.  Their creative juices are so full, that they can’t even consider getting their genetic juices boiled up.  Think about this: why do the most creative people in history not have families or children?  Plato, John Locke, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Benedict Spinoza, St. Thomas Aquinas, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, etc.  Or think of really smart people in history that were horrible family people: Bertrand Russell, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Socrates, etc.  At the same time (and I don’t mean to stereotype), homosexuals can’t reproduce naturally, but have you noticed that homosexuals are the most creative people imaginable?

So here’s the controversial part: it seems that the more you want children and a family, the less creative you are.  In a simple form, wanting children is inversely proportional to being creative.  I can’t think of anyone in history that was really successful in having a good family and also good at producing an idea that has influenced society.

Now if my claim is true, then I would say that we should stop disparaging those who don’t want kids.  Maybe it’s those people who have good, creative ideas that still furthers society.  In that sense, immortality is obtained either way.

Book Review: Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent

Imagine that you posed as the opposite sex for a year and a half.  You’re still the same sex, but your outward appearances are changed through makeup and different clothing so that you look like the opposite sex.  Now imagine that you can infiltrate in various groups, just so that you can see how this opposite sex functions.  Norah Vincent does just that. It was an odd journey, but it was still interested.

Vincent is a woman and she dresses and acts like a male.  She makes a beard with professional makeup, she buys new clothing, and she goes to a voice actor in order to talk like a man.  She takes on a new identity named “Ned” and she goes into male dominated groups to see how the men act.  Her book is divided into various categories:

Friendship.  “Ned” decides to join a bowling league.  She sees how the men act around each other.  It’s typical: they tell dirty jokes and they make fun of how they bowl.  However, Vincent picks up a few things that I never really thought about as a man.  She shook hands with the members of the bowling league and this handshake felt warm.  It was as if to say, “you’re included in our group.”  She never felt that when a women shook her hand.  I never thought of it like that.  I just always thought of shaking hands as a form of greeting.

However, the men tell the jokes as a form of bonding.  In one story, a man’s wife has cancer and the way he deals with it is by telling jokes.  This is how men bond, Vincent thought.  When it comes to it, the men judged each other on what they did.  They really didn’t have a concern about who you are as a person.  They seemed to be practical like that.  When it came to jokes, everyone was included, including themselves.  It’s not as if they’re against these certain groups, it’s just that jokes are a way to form a bond.  Everyone is the butt of jokes.

With bowling, Vincent was surprised that the men helped her on her technique.  Even the opposing team helped her out with that.  It’s another form of bonding.  Women, it seems, are more competitive to sports then men.  When men compete, they do it for fun.  When women compete, they seriously want to beat you.

Sex. Because Ned really wasn’t a guy, the closest thing that “he” could do was watch it and hopefully gain the experience vicariously.  Thus, a strip club that included illegal (?) sex shows.  As Ned was watching the women dancing and grinding up against the men, including Ned, Vincent thought that this seemed fake.  In fact, it seemed too fake.  The women there had the exact perfect proportions in terms of their bodies and Vincent didn’t gain the attraction from it.  Now, Norah Vincent is a lesbian so she is attracted to women, but Vincent couldn’t see what the big deal was.  As Ned is looking around, he sees the men and most of them are either bored or excited.  It seems that the bored ones are so used to this that the only way to get them more excited is to up the ante.  In this case, we would assume the women lose because she has to be more objectified and do more risky activities.  But Ned notices that both sides lose.  The men who regularly went to these clubs were looking for some emotional outlet but this was the closest approximation to do so.  Yet, they fully couldn’t let themselves go.

Love. Ned decides to go on a few dates and see how the dating world was as a man.  From the bat, Ned gets rejected a lot.  Rejection sucks.  When he is able to go on a few dates, he notices that the women act to Ned differently than if it was Norah.  The women are always on the defensive.  It’s as if they have this attitude that “men are guilty until proven innocent.”  It really takes a toll on Ned that at the end of this experience, he starts to gain some misogynistic attitudes and really starts to loathe women in general.  But at the same time, we often think that men are free to do whatever they want, but women are stuck in this virgin/whore false dilemma.  Ned starts to notice that men aren’t exactly free.  Men must live up to the warrior/minstrel false dilemma from what society imposes onto them as well.  You’re either a lover or a fighter.  Along the way, Ned notices some faux pas: he listens to much, he makes too much eye contact, he writes lengthy.

Life. Ned decides to join a Catholic monastery and live with some monks.  He wants to get a feel of how the men can live with each other without women being around.  The monks have a simple life.  But the way they live out their lives seems to have this rationalistic outlook of life.  You do things a certain way in a certain order.  Their crafts are put together nicely and being emotional is something to get away from.  In fact, anything that has to do with the body is irrational.  Most join the order because they saw life with another person as unbearable.  They preferred the company of men because (a) it gets rid of loneliness, and (b) having a wife still fulfills obligations whereas having men around doesn’t.  Indeed, these men are so rational that when Ned reveals himself to actually be Norah.  Some of the men didn’t change their demeanor in a huge way.  In the previous examples, everyone else did.  Sorry I can’t say much in this section.  I actually found this section a bit boring.

Work. It’s all about competition, getting pussy, scoring, telling the dirtiest jokes you can think of, and racing yourself up to the top.  Ned joins a team where it’s full-out competition by selling coupon books.  Ned joins up a team and the team is doing the best they can, but they’re very cut-throat when it comes to competition.  Music is always blaring in order to encourage the employees for doing a good job.  Every person is the company isn’t your friend (although they say they are), but it comes down to a Machiavellian scheme where you take advantage of everything.  (This part really tore me up because it seemed to contradict her chapter on friends.  But then again, I guess in work, Machiavelli is your philosopher, and when it comes to true friendship, you use Aristotle.)  If no one buys the book, everyone makes it a big deal.  It’s as if you have to walk the hall of shame because you didn’t put enough effort into it where it may have been something as simple as perhaps the people OUT THERE didn’t want to buy the product.

Self. There’s a retreat for men only.  It’s a retreat where men can be real men without the social conventions stopping them from being their true selves.  Men actually want to display emotions, but not feminine emotions.  However, society has told them that they aren’t supposed to do that.  Ned decides to join this retreat.  There Ned meets people who have a different exterior than what they have on the inside.  There’s someone there who looks tough, mean, and has a body-builder physique.  But he’s very sensitive and he has emotional breakdowns all the time because society makes him conform to the idea of being a “tough man.”  The men there draw pictures of their heroes and I wasn’t exactly sure what the point of that exercise was.  But most of the complaints dealt with the men who had a hard day at work, but then they were expected to be the Mr. Fix-It man around the house.  The men get tired of having all of these responsibilities.

All in all in was an interesting read.  But I have one problem: Vincent seems to go the extremes in order to find out male culture.  I don’t know about you, but when I think of male friendship, I don’t think of a bowling league.  I simply think of my friends and I in someone’s living room just simply relaxing and discussing life.  We bullshit around but I doubt joining a league would be an adequate aspect of male bonding.  In sex, Vincent says that she went to the seediest strip club she could find.  I don’t know many males who go to the seediest strip clubs.  Again, in terms of love, life, work and the self.  I honestly don’t know many males who gets involved in a monastery, a job that’s purely on commission, and retreats to discover your manhood.  Thus, it seems that Vincent is saying this is how males are when her sample is on the fringes of what males actually do.  Some of the males I read about seems so far-fetched that I can’t recognize me or my male friends in any of them.

To her credit, she does bring up some interesting tidbits that I never thought of as a male.  Her discussion about handshakes was what I found the most fascinating out of the whole book.  I never really thought about handshakes as a way of “including” someone.  It’s perhaps worth reading once but if you had the time.  She’s states that in the end it was truly hard being a guy and she was glad to hang up Ned.  Her overall message is clear: females have it harder than males, but don’t automatically think that males have it easy.

Why do we like horror?

Well, Halloween has come and gone and so the scary stuff is pretty much at ease.  But the more I think about it, being scared makes no sense.  Think about it.  I wrote a previous blog about evolution and emotions.  I was thinking of fear.  Why do we feel fear?  Why does that make evolutionary sense?  I think the easy answer is because fear gives us a clue that we should avoid something because it’s a threat to our lives.  People avoid scary things because it could be a threat to their own existence.  For example, many people are afraid of heights.  This is because they view heights as something that could potentially end their lives.  Many people are afraid of public speaking.  This is because it not only forces one to do something, but it also forces one to be something that makes them uncomfortable.  So being scared is something to avoid.  Yet. . .

Halloween is all about being scared.  Not only to we look forward to this holiday, but we can’t wait to go see the latest Saw movie or go through some haunted house during Halloween.  This isn’t just around October, but throughout the year, we seem to love horror movies and we love being scared.  So why is that?  Evolution tells us that being scared is something we try to avoid.  Yet, we sometimes seek out horror in order to be scared.

This problem has been around since Aristotle.  I have a few suggestions but I wanted to see what everyone else thought.