The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

Getting people to save money through administrative nudges such as the opt-out 401(k) plan is best seen not as a remedy for our failure to be rational as individuals, but as an attempt to compensate for the dismantling of those cultural jigs we once relied on to act (and think and feel) in ways that support thrift. The norms that cultural jigs express and reinforce tend to be reiterated, fractal-like, along different axes of social life; they are robust in that way. Together they make up a more or less coherent form of ethical life, for example Protestant republicanism. By contrast, administrative nudges are a thin attempt to get us to act as if we were virtuous, without any reference to character traits like self-control.