I really like a lot of the ideas presented in this book. I completely agree with their major points - that policies should pay close attention to the default option, and that one of the most effective ways of helping people make good decisions is complete and clearly presented disclosure. I know I complained that Ariely's book didn't take his theories far enough because he didn't talk about the implications of people's predictable irrationality, but now I'm going to complain that this book focused too much on the practical application of what behavioral economics has taught us without laying a solid theoretical or moral foundation. (Ok, so maybe I'm a little hard to please.)

In fact, I don't know if such a foundation is even necessary. This book would have worked best as a series of individual essays or empirical articles. The ideas alone are great - automatic enrollment is a clever way to get people to save for retirement by not giving them the option of succumbing to inertia, and I'm all for companies making public their carbon output. The problem with putting all these great ideas together in a book is that you have to develop an overarching theory that encompasses all your great ideas, coin it, and prove that you can generalize your theory to many other areas you may not know much about. And this is how we end up with "libertarian paternalism."

When the authors try to apply this theory to things like privatizing marriage and school choice, it comes across that they are using their nifty theory to solve complex problems, whose solutions in reality need to take into account much more than just practical considerations. Since they coined their theory with such a politically-charged term (not an oxymoron, they insist), I was expecting a more thoughtful discussion of government's responsibility to nudge people in the right direction or to let people make their own mistakes. Actually, this term kind of muddled what they were trying to say - they didn't seem to be arguing for smaller or no government (libertarians go much farther than just wanting the ability to opt out of a government's default decision, from what I gather), and paternalism just sounds scary, so they make a great effort to try to defend the parternalism part of their theory. And a lot of what they talk about actually has nothing to do with government or politics - the automatic enrollment plan has been adopted by private employers without any government mandate.

In a nutshell, this book has a lot of interesting and clever ideas that I really believe can work, but the grand theory of libertarian paternalism was not a good umbrella under which to throw all the random interesting and clever ideas the authors have.