Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.
1For much of the twentieth century, the consumer of economic theory was a model of composure: an agent who knew what it wanted, weighed costs against benefits and chose accordingly. Behavioural economics unsettled this figure by cataloguing the ways in which real people depart from it, and not at random. People cling to whatever option is presented as the default, feel losses more keenly than equivalent gains, and postpone unpleasant tasks they sincerely intend to complete. The policy response to these findings has come to be called nudging: altering the way a choice is presented so as to steer behaviour, without forbidding any option or changing its price.
2The appeal of the nudge was political as much as intellectual. It was cheap, it left every option open to anyone who cared to take it, and it could be defended from the left as a way of helping people and from the right as a way of avoiding regulation. Its showcase was the pension scheme. When employers switched from asking workers to opt in to enrolling them automatically unless they opted out, participation rose dramatically, often from around half of eligible workers to nearly all of them. Few interventions in social policy can claim an effect so large for a cost so small.
3Yet the showcase conceals a complication. Researchers who followed auto-enrolled workers over several years found that many of them stayed at the default contribution rate, which had typically been set low so as not to alarm anyone into opting out. Some of these workers, had they been made to choose actively, would have chosen to save more. The default had drawn people into saving while quietly anchoring how much they saved. The intervention was judged on the margin it was designed to move, participation, and that margin moved; the adjacent margin, the size of contributions, received far less attention.
4A deeper worry concerns what nudges do to the people they steer. A nudge treats a bias as a fixed feature of the terrain, to be built around rather than addressed. If inertia is why people fail to save, then harnessing inertia gets them saving, but it leaves them no better at deciding for themselves the next time a consequential choice arrives without a helpful default. Defenders of nudging reply that the alternative, building people's capacity to decide, has a dismal record: courses in financial literacy tend to produce small effects that fade within months. The point is fair, but it proves less than it appears to. The failure of one kind of education shows that lectures in classrooms are poor at changing behaviour in kitchens and offices; it does not show that deliberation is beyond improvement.
5None of this amounts to a case for abandoning nudges. It is a case for widening the terms on which they are judged. A nudge should be assessed not only by whether it moves the behaviour it targets but by what it does to neighbouring choices and to the chooser's ability to manage without it. Measured solely by its headline figure, almost any intervention can be made to look like a triumph.