Hi there, I'm Ed Butler.

Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

Today, the rise and rise of Nudge theory,

the economic idea that's aimed at prompting all of us

towards making smarter choices in our lives.

The spread of Nudge has actually been quite phenomenal, to be honest.

If you look at the public policies, it's hard to find an example

of something that's

spread as quickly and as deeply as Nudge. Nudge has been revised for the post-pandemic age,

and we're hearing why from one of its authors. We're not going to fine-tune humans, right?

Humans are pretty amazing creatures, not perfect, but we can just make life a little easier

for them.

That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC.

We were nudged to write a new version.

We had a paperback contract that had expired, and there were a lot of anachronisms in there.

So we essentially just rewrote the book the way we would have written it if we were starting over,

and here it is.

That's Professor Richard Thaler, economist, psychological thinker and Nobel laureate.

At 75 years of age, he's not putting his feet up, he's back on the road again,

promoting his big, groundbreaking idea, the nudge, named after the book that he and fellow

academic Cass Sunstein wrote back in 2008. Nudging or nudge theory, it challenges the old orthodoxy of economics,

that rational people will make rational decisions in their own self-interest. Instead, he reckons that

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