A nudge is as good as a wink to a poor man

At A Fistful of Euros, Alex Harrowell makes fun of poorly thought out social psychology and in the process manages to crystalise for me what I find wrong with “nudging”:

Similarly, fans of “nudge” tend to complain that poor people make bad decisions about money, typically by prizing cash up front above everything. To put it in econospeak, irrational discounting leads them to have extremely high liquidity preference. But liquidity is useful, and people tend to want it if they are facing a dangerously uncertain future. And typical reasons to need cash fast include things like “topping up the electricity meter”, “the kids are hungry”, “collection goons are threatening physical violence”. It’s not as if they don’t need cash on hand for very good reasons.

Nudge theory, for those not paying attention, is a theory of social conditioning currently in vogue with David Cameron’s ConDem government, vaguely leftish, cheap and supposedly offering a way to manipulate people into doing the right thing without forcing them to: libertarian paternalism. Yes, this is as condescending as it sounds and does feel vaguely uncomfortable as any theory of social control does, but Alex nailed the real wrongness there: it assumes that the people it tries to “nudge” into the right behaviour are in control of their lives and their “deviancy” is down to individual choice rather than external circumstance. It treats people as consumers choosing a lifestyle and ignores all outside forces acting on them.