Oh, Go Nudge Yourself

Sorry, George Will. Nudging irritates me. When I think of nudging, I do not think of unobtrusively maximizing aggregate efficiency in a way consonant with free public choice. I think of this:

I think, I’m a man, not a number data point clustered within a statistically significant group! Nudging is only possible when you look at people — y’know, us, whoever we are — in large-n terms, standing so far back that you can see every last one of them but can no longer make out the face of any of them. Nudging is the cash value of the idea that the few ruling over the many is despotism, but the few ruling over an abstract model of the many is the path to freedom, justice, and tranquility. Nudging disposes us to think of ourselves as minimal persons — individuals whose unique characteristics and qualities are irrelevant, because when they are piled up with those of everyone else we bump into on the subway and share urinals with in the restroom, those ‘stochastics’ drop out and the truth — whatever’s equal about us — shines forth. Nudging is an apparently perfectly harmlessly virtuous way of plumping up the ideology of equality. You’re free to be stupid enough to deviate from The Plan, but why would you, with public opinion and the ever-subtler permanent PR campaign of Better Living Through Secretly Improving Your Judgment In Ways You Cannot Possibly Detect in ubiquitous swing? Behold the future, where the one vice is antisociality.

Soberminded caveat: possibly we have to adopt the Nudge in order to keep our socioeconomic order from falling apart. The ultimate in optimism is having no choice.