Nearly a decade after Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s best-selling Nudge (2008), the academic and political rise of behavioral economics has been meteoric. Sunstein has personally embodied this ascendancy, as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (2009–12) and advisor to governments seeking to embed behavioral insights. In Choosing Not to Choose, the author has elaborated the Nudge program in important ways, and also addressed various objections to behavioral policymaking. However, he has also invited new criticisms, some of which he anticipates with a characteristically measured approach. This is part of a writing style that is both rigorous and engaging, replete with striking empirical examples and useful references.

Choosing focuses on the most well-known tool of nudging: the power of the default. Nudgers argue that it would be irresponsible not to utilize behavioral insights into how users engage with choice environments, in a way that nudges them toward choices that make them better-off (as judged by themselves). It is in this context that the default is crucial. A key behavioral economic insight concerns the fact of human inertia, but also how this can be mobilized toward useful policy ends. Given that we are so often likely to “go with the default option” (wittingly or not), then the default contains tremendous potential. Classic examples include organ donation, where switching the default requirement from “opt in” to “opt out” dramatically increases participation rates, or complex schemes such as employer pension plans, where by defaulting users onto packages beneficial to them, individuals could be made substantially better-off.

The first part of the book reemphasises the power of defaults and why—largely because of inertia—they tend to stick. But an important new contribution discusses how this stickiness can fail. This may occur when a very strong agential preference, or simple awareness of alternatives, leads agents to do otherwise. It may also be because they are aware of choice architects and distrust their motives in setting the defaults. The second section systematically engages with the ethics of choice architecture, and ideal-typical blueprints for the use of different defaults. The golden rule continues to be “Select the default rule that reflects what most people would choose if they were adequately informed”—the so-called informed chooser approach (p.73). Sunstein argues that this has the merit of bracketing off value disagreements, but he also highlights limitations, including conceptual problems with the idea of informed choice and the practical difficulties of determining what an informed chooser would choose. This section also explores “bad defaults,” where consumer inertia or loss aversion is mobilized by producers in ways that may be harmful. An example is “negative option marketing,” where consumers might accept a supposedly free product, only to be enrolled onto another paying one until they opt out (e.g., an ongoing monthly magazine subscription).

In the most agenda-setting passages of the book, Sunstein examines how encouraging “active choosing” might overcome these familiar problems with generic, impersonal defaults. In sections that will be welcomed by libertarian critics of Nudge, the author makes a compelling argument for the ways in which active choosing avoids the coercion associated with mandates and bans. But it is also superior to defaults in respecting agential diversity and autonomy, engendering responsibility and learning, and having the capacity to adapt over time. However, here the titular concern of the book comes to the fore: What about the times when agents simply do not want to choose? They may be too tired, preoccupied, disinterested, or lacking faith in their ability to choose correctly. Sunstein notes—in an intriguing twist on libertarian paternalism—that under such circumstances, to require choice is itself potentially coercive: It amounts to choice requiring paternalism. A case-by-case evaluation of decision-making costs and errors is required in order to determine if and when active choosing is appropriate. An attractive, less coercive alternative is “simplified active choosing.” Here, agents are told that while ideally they would choose for themselves, they have the option not to. But Sunstein acknowledges that even asking this question could still provoke irritation or suspicion.

This second section of the book is the most analytically sophisticated, but also feels the most impracticable. In a world overflowing with information and choice architecture, how likely is it that choice architects—let alone consumers—are going to incorporate into their daily decisions an increasingly lengthy manual of choice-making blueprints, based on developments in behavioral economics? However, the book’s final section—on personalized defaults and their growing manifestation in so-called predictive shopping—reminds us that these are not just theoretical concerns. Sunstein is largely upbeat, showing how the personalized default can overcome the limits of both generic impersonal defaults and required active choosing. In essence, big data (based on, for example, demographic information or browsing habits) can be used to tailor default settings to individuals (thus respecting diversity), while cutting out the transaction costs and paternalism associated with required active choosing. However, Sunstein acknowledges that personal defaults preclude learning and chance encounters, as well as carrying significant privacy threats. They also conjure the dystopian specter—especially in the political sphere—of “echo chambers”: personalized bubbles where our products, contacts, and ideas are perpetually self-referential and self-reinforcing, removing dialogue and learning. Sunstein concludes that given these risks, agents should always be prompted as to whether they want to be enrolled on personalized defaults or predictive shopping programs, thus reasserting active choice.

Choosing is a rigorous, accessible, and example-rich exposition of choice and how it is understood in the behavioral economic worldview. However, critics will continue to find much that is objectionable. The book lacks any curiosity as to where the category of “choice”—and behavioral economics as the self-appointed science for understanding it—sits in our particular historical, political moment. The title Choosing not to Choose is certainly going to disappoint anyone drawn to what sounds like a critique of the ubiquitous ideology of choice. On the contrary, what could reasonably be called neoliberal ideological assumptions about choosing agents—and a very particular form of hyper-consumerism—are the taken-for-granted frame behind the author’s intricate analysis of choice scenarios.

Indeed, Sunstein seems to have moved from Nudge’s call for a libertarian–paternalist “third way” toward a more unabashed celebration of market liberalism. The only two canonical thinkers invoked throughout are Mill and Hayek. There are questionable reassurances about the operations of the hidden hand, or how market corrections will prevent bad defaults from persisting. To be sure, the hapless Homer Simpson figure that Nudge presented us with as an antidote to economic orthodoxy still looms large, certainly with respect to inertia. And yet there is also in this book the reemergence of something closer to homo economicus—albeit in a relatively nuanced form. This is evident in the autonomous agent, whose raison d’être is the refinement of predominantly market-oriented, choice-making processes. Even where this agent is more purposeful than the antihero of Nudge, it is through individualistically striving to overcome the weight of “social defaults”—for which read institutions, customs, communities.

All of this reflects how of the various values that Sunstein invokes as potentially desirable—whether for consumers, policy architects, or the wider society—the one left unmentioned is social solidarity. Autonomy, yes. Welfare, certainly. But there is no sense that social bonds or collectivist action beyond free markets or technocratic interventions might be desirable, or a major factor in meaningful discussions about choice. Just as Nudge’s libertarian paternalism drew criticism from libertarians and paternalists, both traditional conservatives and social democrats will find this a problematic omission. It seems that the behavioral economic “revolution” does not take us, either intellectually or politically, quite as far from (neo)liberal economic or political orthodoxy as is sometimes believed.