They take on nudge and Thaler in the new If Books Could Kill. Have not listened yet but this is the first one they are massively intellectually outmatched. Thaler is an intellectual giant.
Should be interesting.
I have neither read this book nor heard of Thaler, but as soon as they uttered the phrase “libertarian paternalism” I made a giant jerkoff motion.
He won the Nobel prize for partly inventing behavioural economics. He is not a lightweight.
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Can confirm that winning the Nobel in Economics is no walk in the park. The application alone is like 5 pages long.
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That may be, but most of the criticism (so far; it sounds like this will be a two-part episode) seems to be that they apply nudge theory in places where it doesn’t belong (i.e. the climate change section), or generally misclassify all small interventions as nudges.
This is something I find more and more often, where people are brilliant in one field and think their brilliance automatically translates to other fields. Most times, it doesn’t.
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This is the part where we all mock Thaler cause the smartass Internet personality we like told us to?
Anyway, I won’t have a chance to listen till tonight. Hope it’s good and fair minded.
Edit: Not directed at you true North!
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I genuinely hate if books could kill.
This entire episode is prefaced on the fact the hosts don’t understand what a nudge is and they think if a social science correlation is not 1 it is totally meaningless.
Imagine having the ego to think, with zero actual training, you can do a show that takes down several of the largest social science fields, in a nice short one hour half of which is just bad jokes.
One guy doesn’t even read the book. In this one he literally says “I don’t want to constantly dig into what a nudge is” but is happy to say it’s all crap.
The climate change discussion is just straight up awful in this episode. It totally misunderstands how the entire regulatory system works.
Van Latham (whoever the fuck that is) absolutely ruined the Iron Man Rewatchables to the point I turned it off. That guy is truly awful.
He hosts a bunch of podcasts on the Ringer, mostly their MCU/DCU stuff along with some political commentary. Used to work at TMZ where he’s probably best known for confronting Ye about supporting Trump
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The basics of behavioral science and nudges revolutionized my industry (retirement savings) for the better. Pre-2005 or so it was gospel that the Best Way to arrange a retirement plan was to allow people to make Personal Choices about how much they should save and what investments that could pick. Everyone pretended that the median worker would be able to figure out the value of saving and the power of long term investing, and then watched for decades as people didn’t bother to enroll in their plans, didn’t maximize the employer matches when the did get around to enrolling, then proceeded to invest in money market funds or invest in the market and sell all their stocks after a crash only to buy back after the market had gone back up. Basically, employees did all the stupid shit that retail investors have been doing forever. The “nudge” heuristic finally gave employers the comfort to start making entirely sensible choices for employees like auto-enrolling them in plans, auto-increasing their contributions, and defaulting them to reasonable target date funds based on their expected retirement age. This stuff is obvious in hindsight, and you can laugh at the language Libertarian Paternalism, but this shift in approach has unquestionably improved the retirement outlook of literally millions of Americans and Canadians. All because the idea of a nudge that the employee can reverse, but probably won’t bother reversing, was popularized by Thaler et al. These podcast guys are just doing standard adolescent reactionary contrarianism.
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Well said.
The book over reaches sometimes but instead of saying that they use it to disregard the whole idea. They even say idiotic shit like “at best these nudges have shown to have a 5% benefit” as if that’s not massive on a population level.
Mostly I dislike the show because the two host just are not serous thinkers. Their goal is dumb quips not actual analysis. They look great targeting pure crap like Rich Dad but when targeting something like behavioural economics they are so overmatched it’s embarrassing.
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I’m not sure I even listened to the same podcast as you guys; the hosts spent a good 15-20 basically agreeing with the underlying idea that choice architecture is a real thing that can work for things like retirement planning. The criticism is that the “Nudge” concept is being loosely applied to things like anti-littering campaigns and proposed as a solution to problems like climate change where it clearly can’t work.
As for the authors, if you’re a self-described libertarian economist in the 21st century, you’re either a mark or in on the scam.
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Haven’t listened to this ep yet, but just about ~every other episode the bolded critique is getting it backwards, right? The vast majority of the pod is debunking books which themselves purport to take down entire fields of social science, using academic orthodoxy itself to rebut cute viral ideas that just aren’t cut out for the world of serious social science but that sell well in airports. (Or, in this case, books that take a serious academic idea and cheapen it by applying it without rigor to a bunch of shit it doesn’t actually apply to?–am I warm??)
Maybe they bit off more than they can chew with this one, and this ep might suck, whatever, but again it just feels like you’re listening to a different podcast than everyone else–after all, you said right up top that you hate the pod, not that you hated the episode.
I just started it and had to pause it 3 minutes in because Michael literally says, and I went back so I could quote it verbatim,
“This episode is going to be a little bit different in that we’re going to spend the first, like, third to one half talking about what’s good about this idea. At the core of this, I think, is, like, a true insight”
Ultimately I hate the snippy comedy tone I guess. Bad comedy is not a good mix with academic analysis. It just debases the whole enterprise and makes me question why I should take anything they say seriously.
They spend 10 minutes of the first ep which is 70 minutes long and there is a whole part two coming.
I listened to a couple eps of If Books Could Kill, but it wasn’t for me
Right but no one needs to listen to them talk about how great the idea is. The entire point is to look at how the ideas in these books can be harmful, whether it’s harmful on its face or harmful when misapplied or over-used. I don’t think their approach to this is consistent with your description here, because it certainly doesn’t seem like they’re disregarding the whole idea.
Have you listened to the end?
They do disregard the whole idea by the end mocking the “tiny effects”.