Nudges

Going Private

A new book argues that businesses and individuals can take the lead in reducing emissions.

Beyond Politics: The Private Governance Response to Climate Change, by Michael Vandenbergh and Jonathan Gilligan, is an ambitious effort to demonstrate the promise of non-governmental efforts to reduce emissions. They argue it is a mistake to pin all our hopes to one climate strategy like a national cap-and-trade system. For this reason, they argue that …

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UK report: behavioral change takes more than a nudge

Cross-posted at CPRBlog. No one seems to like the idea of regulation these days. Nudges, alternatives that try to get people to voluntarily alter their behavior by changing the context in which they make decisions, have been widely touted as a better approach. Cass Sunstein, Obama’s “regulatory czar” in the Office of Management and Budget, …

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Nudging State Parks

The Sacramento Bee comes through with another essential backgrounder on Proposition 21.  Among the takeaway points: *The parks have a $1 billion maintenance backlog; *Nationwide experts consider the California system to be the nation’s most endangered; *Among those 10 states with the nation’s biggest systems, only California and Massachusetts lack a dedicated funding source. The …

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Nudging Smart Growth

There are lots of problems with Sunstein and Thaler’s book Nudge, but its central premise has potentially powerful applications to a host of problems.  Sunstein and Thaler posit that in many policy areas, “choice architects” can  help people make better choices without impairing their actual ability to make that choice — a philosophy that they call …

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