Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Questions for Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein Amazon.com: What do you mean by nudge and why do people sometimes need to be nudged? Thaler and Sunstein: By a nudge we mean anything that influences our choices. A school cafeteria might try to nudge kids toward good diets by putting the healthiest foods at front. We think that it s time for institutions, including government, to become much more user-friendly by enlisting the science of choice to make life easier for people and by gentling nudging them in directions that will make their lives better. Amazon.com: What are some of the situations where nudges can make a difference? Thaler and Sunstein: Well, to name just a few: better investments for everyone, more savings for retirement, less obesity, more charitable giving, a cleaner planet, and an improved educational system. We could easily make people both wealthier and healthier by devising friendlier c...

No hope, just an awareness of what s being done now and what s been done in the past, is what Ronald Wright will permit in A Short History of Progress, his grim, ammoniacal Massey Lectures, the 43rd in the series. In five lucid, meticulously documented essays, Wright traces the rise and plummet of four regional civilizations--those of Sumer, Rome, Easter Island, and the Maya--and judges that most, perhaps all, of humanity is making and will continue to make mistakes equally disastrous as theirs. He gives general reasons first for not reckoning we ll pull back from the brink. Important among them is an anthropological observation. As individuals, we live long lives. We evolve more slowly than we should, given our lack of vision and our aggressive, selfish nature. We seem to lack the collective wisdom and the insight into cause and effect to realize the limits to what Wright calls the experiment of civilization. What Wright calls natural subsidies underwrite civilizations successes. The...

#interesting (2008-06-03) this was an interesting book discussing the possibility of collapse. wright makes a point that there is a tendency for something to bring itself to an end, whether this is intentional or not. there is the extinction aspect, sometimes a species or group of people just can t cope with a change and they die out, like the sabre toothed tiger, as wright discusses. sabre toothed tigers survive on big game, thats why they need those big teeth to rip into the huge animals, but those teeth get in the way if they were hunting say a rabbit, so as big game died out so ...

#Want some discussion questions? (2008-04-11) The book is great, without a doubt. We did it for our book club, and I was unable to find any discussion questions anywhere, so I thought I d provide some here that I was unable to come up with. Another thing to mention in a discussion is the www. myfootprint. orgwebsite, where you can figure out how big an ecological footprint your lifestyle takes up. Most North Americans live a life that would take 8 planet earths to sustain. Discussion Questions1. Did Wright need to start as far back as he did in human history? Did his coverage of the N...

#Short History..period (2008-02-12) Up to the last chapter, except for some silly asides,the book was interesting. It is, of course, very one sided, and it seems that the author got his ideas about Ancient Rome from Holywood movies, like the Gladiator, or Augustus. If he studied archaelogical record from 1st century BC farming in Italy, he might have been surprised, that the family farm definitely was not dead, and that the brothers Gracchi wanted to help a very specific group of farmers, not the entire population, who did not need their efforts, and neither did they need their ext...

#A fantastic, well written, researched book. (2008-01-08) Anyone even mildly interestred or concerned about the current path of humanity should read this book. Mr. Wright draws upon the rise and fall of numerous past civilizations as a comparisson to the present day world.

#Good read and approachable (2007-12-10) I picked up this book because I have a growing interest in how a society or civilization can grow and sustain itself. This book gives several really interesting examples of societies who have come before us and are no longer in existence due to the fact that they were not able to sustain themselves. This book is easy to pick up and read, you don t require more than an average reading level to be able to interact and reflect on the material. I really recommend anyone to pick this one up for a great read.