Top Highlights

• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, an economist and a law scholar from the University of Chicago, recommend a number of interventions to do just this.38 An important idea is that of default option: The government (or a well-meaning NGO) should make the option that it thinks is the best ...
• Our real advantage comes from the many things that we take as given. We live in houses where clean water gets piped in—we do not need to remember to add Chlorin to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own—we do not actually know how.
• A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two basic tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills, and identifying talent.
• The enterprises of the poor often seem more a way to buy a job when a more conventional employment opportunity is not available than a reflection of a particular entrepreneurial urge.
• The risk of corruption and neglect is thus endemic in any government, but it is likely to be more severe in three circumstances: First, in cases when the government is trying to get people to do things whose value they don’t appreciate, such as wearing a helmet on a motorcycle, or immunizing a child. Second, when what people are getting is worth a ...