I also don’t share the high degree of confidence you seem to in the recent mechanics of election counts. I wonder how much higher than 53% of the vote did Obama really garner, but that’s another topic I guess.

He was right then, but wrong now.

When “the current decision making environment hides many important features” from the citizen then there’s also no reason to assume that the state — or any other “expert” — can tell which choice will provide the “optimal” outcome (whatever that is) for the citizens in aggregate. Answering complex multivariate questions directly instead of trying to maximize the number of informed agents who propose, compare, and discuss, competing answers means that the chosen answer is more likely to be wrong than not-wrong. Say, didn’t your coauthor write a book about this a while back? I did read that one.

If they live up to their promises we will be able to monitor their behavior more closely than any administration in history, so if they don’t do a good job of nudging, and everything else, then we can vote them out in four years.

We’ll be monitoring their behavior closely even (especially!) if they don’t live up to their promises. There are quite a lot of people who don’t find “trust us, we know what we’re doing” any more palatable from Democrats than from Republicans (even though in fairness it is more likely to be true).

There are several other branches of government that are there to serve as checks and balances so that the executive does not have unlimited authority. I realize things have changed a bit, but it’s my understanding that’s how things still work.

If Cass Sunstein (or anyone else in the administration) turns out to be a dangerous idiot, I certainly hope there are steps we can take to hold them accountable short of voting Obama out of office four years from now. If not, I might as well go on vacation.

Namely, what are the constraints on “nudges” when it comes to policies of state? Given that virtually all products of behavioral studies of the sort you appeal to are only statistical ones — that is, ones in which it suffices that the majority of the participants are, say, happy with the outcome of the the “enhanced” choice architecture, how about those in the minority? Presumably they aren’t equally happy with that product, and, more to the point, may not at all be happy with the “choice architecture” that is designed to “nudge” them in a direction they don’t like.

You mention an example in which the use of the “choice architecture” seems benign. But, once the methodology is widely adopted, how does one prevent it from being applied in instances where it seems quite pernicious, because it can undermine the free and unconstrained rights of a minority?

Suppose, for example, that the majority of the country think that it would be best if pregnant women only had an abortion if it were used as a last resort. Suppose that they would be quite happy with a policy requiring pregnant women at least to get counseling regarding the alternatives to abortion before they freely choose to get an abortion, because behavioral science demonstrates that imposing that counseling “nudges” them more often than otherwise to adopt rather than to terminate a pregnancy. Yet, as I stipulate, they have a completely free choice at the end of the process to terminate the pregnancy.

I should think that most choice advocates might recoil at the requirement of counseling before the “free” choice of an abortion. And they would do so because they would see it as a real restriction on the freedom of that choice, even though, at the end, one does indeed have such a choice.

How, in principle, does your approach get around this problem?