This is a review of a book called On Freedom by Cass Sunstein. It's pretty short actually which is appreciated. It's a tiny green book with pretty small print, and you can fly through it in an hour or two. It is a thoughtful book in some respects, but I also think it suffers from some large problems for a wide audience due to the length.

The first comment I'll make is that it helps a great deal to be sort of intimately familiar with his work beforehand. I think he does some job of explaining his ideas, and his thought process, and how he got there. It seems like structurally it would be very hard to follow, and almost overwhelming, if you weren't already acquainted with his work. The best introduction to the topic is Nudge, which is a book he wrote with Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler. It lays out a groundwork to these ideas.

On Freedom takes a direct approach towards some of the philosophical questions that you could raise with this idea of nudging people, in some ways without them knowing it, and really sort of provides a moral backing. So why he thinks nudging people is acceptable, and sort of what principles and guidelines he thinks are good guiding factors for how to nudge people. And I'll be honest here, I found this not terribly persuasive. I think nudging is probably beneficial, but I thought the arguments as they are laid out in the book were pretty nuanced and lack a bit of tying together. An additional 50 pages of length to explain some of the ideas better and to put a bit more structure around the argument would have be appreciated.

I think overall it's a good book, and it's a worthwhile read. If you've read everything else up to this point about kind of this area, then it is definitely a worth grabbing a copy. Philosophy is going to become more important with respect to interventions upon people where the government might be influencing their choices. Some of the techniques that are discussed are widely in use and are becoming more so with the challenges of the world. Thoughts along these lines about the morality with such choices deserve more attention. I don't quite think this book delivers a complete and comprehensive answer, but it's a great start.