Baarnsley's Michael Dugher has a very good post up at Labour Uncut about nudge theory.  The nudge, based on work in behavioural economics, has been a bit of a Cameron flirtation over the past year or so, and it's most recently popped up in Andrew Lansley's health white paper. 

Summing it up, Dugher writes:

The idea is that people can be enticed, instead of being coerced, into making better decisions.  It is, of course, total nonsense.

I'm definitely with him on the need, sometimes, for state intervention.  But the main thing I don't get about all of this nudging carry-on, is how it's supposed to work alongside current government plans. 

Let me explain.

The nudge, to use the term from the Thaler and Sunstein book which started it all, is based around "choice architecture".  This is quite a precise art of tinkering about with things to encourage people to make more 'rational' (economics apparently finally having discovered that people aren't) choices.  (Note that this buys entirely into the language of choice.)

A quick pop over to the nudge blog gives a few examples: smaller wheelie bins so that people put less rubbish in them; cellphones that beep at you to take them off the charger; opt-out health check-ups.  This stuff is on a minute scale, but it has to be: most of the choices a person has to make during an average week aren't huge.

And this is where I don't get it.  Choice architecture necessitates choice architects.  Plural: tinkering with minute choices is not broad brush-stroke stuff for one bloke in a Whitehall office.  So, who are these people going to be?  And, with the public sector and local government budgets being slashed, who is going to be paying them? 

It's all well and fine to say "we're going to nudge people", but unless parliamentarians and their spies support staff are going to be personally redesigning wheelie bins and laying down speed bumps the "we" who is going to be doing the nudging seems non-existent (as Kath & Kim would say) "at this late stoige". 

So what do you think to the nudge, then?

Seatbelts on, please.  This is going to be a biggie. 

There has been quite a lot of comment about the student protest.  I tend to agree with this suggestion from The Spectator that the violence is likely to help rather than hinder the Coalition's cause. 

There has also been a lot of political moaning about the European Court's judgment that British prisoners must have the right to vote.  I'm with Kate Green: so they should. 

Off course the other big news has been IDS and his work-for-the-dole scheme.  Well, it isn't quite.  The idea, apparently, is to pack long-term (12 months+) unemployed off on a month's community service.  Excellent comment from Jackie Ashley (who took a Guardian comments bashing for it).  More discussion on the carrot and the stick from ToryDiary.  (Though must we have the spurious 'supporting families' bits ... says this daughter-of-multiply-reconstituted-families.)

Ross McKibbin in the LRB has a must-read on the current political/economic situation.  Add this to a very interesting perspective over on the Inequalities blog on 'why the welfare state doesn't matter any more'. Elsewhere, Sunny Hundal writes on why the left shouldn't oppose all cuts and Jonathan Todd argues that Labour must consider (and articulate) multiple futures, not just certain post-cut doom.  

Oldham post-Woolas (you done good, Harriet) is shaping up to be one to watch.  ToryDiary look at whether it should be given to the Lib Dems ... or if the Tories should put up a good fight.  Regardless, we might see here the North's first real political comment on how the Coalition is going. 

Amidst all of this political talk, Kerim Friedman's look at Bourdieu and the role of the public intellectual hits the spot nicely. 

Over at the CofE, the final reccommendations from the Faith and the Future of the Countryside conference have been released.  It has been a bit of a speaking out week for the Church with ++Rowan expressing grave concerns about welfare reforms.  (Although that Telegraph link dramatically hypes up 'church in crisis' over the flying bishops!)

Michael Young (author of 1957's Family and Kinship in East London) remembered.  His life and work calls, Paul Richards argues, for a Good, not a Big, society. 

I reckon the 70s are fast becoming the new 60s as the darling decade of scholarly research.  Andrew O'Hagan writes on the 70s style. 

Whew!  Can I have the weekend now? 

Don't be shocked, but homosexuality and women bishops continue to be is-sues in the CofE.  The Bishop of Wakefield has been up in my own stomping ground of Calderdale and has some sensible comments on homophobia and the church.  Also, the flying bishops appear to be finally flying off. 

A small stack of interesting political bits and pieces: Shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions (sort of the anti-IDS, I guess) Douglas Alexander has been busily pointing out the obvious flaw in OsCam's welfare cuts, i.e., people can't go and get jobs if there aren't any.  On the "cut this, not that" front the always-good Simon Jenkins asks if Britain really needs the military?  And another whiff of completely unexpected Conservatism around bugger all being done about bank bonuses. 

The Heritage Crafts Association chair's report is an interesting glimpse on what they've been up to over the last few months. 

Finally, Kea plums are up for protected status through the EU. 

Ah, the Comprehensive Spending Review. 

Surely it was a Shakespearian drama of our times.  George O, costumed in hair and grin, cutting determinedly at the national budget, looking to save a buck or billion.  Nick and Vince (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?) squirming and smiling and not going to Oxford.  Grizzled Tories peering at the books and recoiling in 'orror from wot Gordon 'ad done.  And Ed, who had done none of it. 

Now I've kept my academic nose clean of politics and economics, so I'm not about to engage in any of the nitty-gritty analysis about whether this £ or that £ will do x or y to this or that group.  There are plenty of political bloggers for that.  And they have charts. 

As an anthropologist, I get to say that it's all about the people, man.  The problem is, I'm in not-so-sunny Melbourne; I'm not on the ground, scribbling frantically in my trusty notebook and taking the pulse of the nation West Yorkshire.  So other than my usual line about contemporary economic uncertainty and the possibilities for a turn to the past, I'm all out of revelations on the people front.

But I still want to talk about the CSR.  It's a big thing.  It's a big thing in that we don't actually know what the consequences down the track are going to be, and in that sense it is probably the biggest thing that the ConDem Coalition have done thus far. 

The response, in at least some quarters, has been weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Maybe some of that has been warranted; Tory wingnut pleas to dispense with the minimum wage and, y'know, post-Victorian labour laws, and left-of-left laments for the overnight obliteration of the entire North ... not particularly. 

What has been established is that the CSR disproportionately cuts at the poor.  That sucks; it really, really stinks.  But, this is a Tory government and in an era where even the leader of the Labour party is offended and distressed by the 'red' epithet, was anyone seriously entertaining thoughts that George Osborne was going to come charging out of Nottingham Forest firing arrows?  Even Friar Tuck is off signing up to the Anglican Covenant these days. 

I don't mean to suggest that this means we should say "oh well then" and be pleased we're in a semi-detached with a nice new sofa and an eco-wotsit.  Nor am I a great believer in that "real world" so often bandied about by those who have a cubicle all of their own (fancy!). 

But, the global political-economic system in which we find ourselves is not, and never has been, structured for equality.  In that it has created (or compunded) losers, the CSR is a product of that system.  It could not be anything else. 

And it is profoundly unfair. 

And it has benefited many of us. 

What are we actually willing to do about it? 

I have been reading a lot of Left Foot Forward today.  Along with my usual Guardian reading habit, this means that today's Britain Today is wearing a nice warm cardigan and a CND badge.  (I am wearing a fleece, if you must know.) 

Steve Tombs and David Whyte write on why health and safety laws matter.  (I live in hope that New Generation Labour will be keener on the debunk boogie than the tabloid bandwagon hop.)

A couple of interesting articles, one from Sarah Barber in LFF and one from the always good Jackie Ashley look at the impact of the government spending cuts on women.  

Datablog has data and (breathless voice) a chart (!) on government spending.  You can download it and do things with it (dinner and dancing, perhaps). 

Keeping on the spending and fairness front, pick of the bunch today is Ben Baumberg on 'Should we defend the middle class welfare state?' in which I (with my C grades in economics) learnt all about means testing and universalism.   

Finally - football, Liverpool, league sustainability.  Esoteric stuff.