{"id":2142,"date":"2017-01-28T05:09:49","date_gmt":"2017-01-28T10:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/?p=2142"},"modified":"2017-01-28T05:09:49","modified_gmt":"2017-01-28T10:09:49","slug":"the-good-nudge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/2017\/01\/28\/the-good-nudge\/","title":{"rendered":"The Good Nudge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Another Obama program that may or may not survive in the new Administration.<\/p>\n<p>A recent (January 23, 2017) issue of The New Yorker contains an article (&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2017\/01\/23\/can-behavioral-science-help-in-flint\" target=\"_blank\">Good Behavior<\/a>&#8220;) that describes the final days of an Obama initiative to use behavioral science in the service of improving government performance.<\/p>\n<p>The article focuses on the Flint water crisis, and mentions several other projects that have used this approach.<\/p>\n<p>The story is a hopeful one, in the sense that there are possibilities for doing good with the proper application of what is called &#8220;choice architecture.&#8221; There is also a warning here, that such an approach is value-neutral, so can be used in a negative way, as well. Trump, Hitler, and Stalin are all cited as people who have used &#8220;the behavioral arts&#8221; to influence public opinion.<\/p>\n<p>George Lakoff has lectured and written on this subject for many years, pointing out many of the same themes that are mentioned in this article.<\/p>\n<p>Language matters; it reveals our values and it helps shape them, for better or for worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another Obama program that may or may not survive in the new Administration. A recent (January 23, 2017) issue of The New Yorker contains an article (&#8220;Good Behavior&#8220;) that describes the final days of an Obama initiative to use behavioral science in the service of improving government performance. The article focuses on the Flint water &hellip; <\/p>\n<p><a class=\"more-link btn\" href=\"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/2017\/01\/28\/the-good-nudge\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2142"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2158,"href":"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142\/revisions\/2158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mfw.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}