Powers nudge

Samatha Powers will be nominated to replace Susan Rice as Ambassador to the United Nations. Her most recent claim to fame is being what she called a “humanitarian hawk” and she used this to convince Obama to go to war in Libya. The concept is that many innocent people would be killed if we did not intervene. The same thing could be said of events in Syria but we are staying out of that fight. More important is Powers husband a man by the name of Cass Sunstein. He represents the thinking of many liberals in that he believes that people cannot take care of themselves and need the help of both private and public entities to guide them through life. One of his more recent books explores this idea through a plan called, “nudge”. He believes that people left to themselves will make bad choices and need to be nudged in the right direction. Sunstein co-authored Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008) with economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago. Nudge discusses how public and private organizations can help people make better choices in their daily lives. Thaler and Sunstein argue that People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself. It reminds me of that old saying, don’t worry I’m from the government and I’m here to help. I always thought of that as a joke but he thinks it’s real. Now I am worried.