The Nudge Effect

When David Cameron and Nick Clegg stumbled, blinking, into power in 2010 they issued The Coalition: Our programme for government, which tried to identify the common ground that existed between their two parties. “We are both committed to turning old thinking on its head and developing new approaches to government. For years...there has been the assumption that central government can only change people’s behaviour through rules and regulations. Our government will be a much smarter one, shunning the bureaucratic levers of the past and finding intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves.”

This idea came from a book written by Richard Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago, and Cass Sunstein of the Harvard Law School. Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness was a little like Freakonomics before it: a popular, counterintuitive take on the behavioural psychology that underlies the apparently rational choices we make.

Delpy: I'm into Something Good

Prof David Delpy, looking for all the world like an ageing member of Herman's Hermits (or should the be Derek Smalls?), has been interviewed in Physics World. The EPSRC CEO robustly defended the Council's blacklisting procedure, pointing to the fact that the success rate has risen to 30% - way ahead of that of its sister Research Councils.

However, Prof Philip Moriarty, a condensed-matter physicist from Nottingham University, questions what he sees as the arbitrary nature of the blacklisting rules. He suggests that the EPSRC runs "a simple experiment" to test its assumption that grants falling in the bottom half of a ranked list are necessarily of poor quality.

"They should take the same set of proposals, send them out to different referees, and then give them to five different panels [and] look at the correlation in the ranked lists," he says. "If they are so confident that the principle underlying the blacklisting process is robust, then why not do this experiment? It would silence me and all the other critics of the scheme."

Well, don't hold your breath. I think EPSRC are quite happy with the new procedures, thank you very much, and won't be making a move any time soon to test the fairness of their underlying assumptions.