The nudge is a non-coercive way to alter people’s behavior without having to persuade them of anything. That is, without the inconvenience of having to engage in democratic politics. Following the publication of Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in 2009, both the Obama White House and the government of David Cameron in the UK immediately established “behavioral insight” teams. Such units are currently operating in the European Commission, the United Nations, the WHO, and, by Thaler’s reckoning, about four hundred other entities in government and the NGO world, as well as in countless private corporations. It would be hard to overstate the degree to which this approach has been institutionalized.

https://mcrawford.substack.com/p/antihumanism?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email