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?