THE UNDIGNIFIED NUDGE. If anyone needs to be nudged toward the path of proper behavior, it’s the bureaucrats and Clerisy who want to nudge us.

Let’s think about the dramatis personae of Sunstein’s account. There are, first of all, people, ordinary individuals with their heuristics, their intuitions, and their rules of thumb, with their laziness, their impulses, and their myopia. They have choices to make for themselves and their loved ones, and they make some of them well and many of them badly.

Then there are those whom Sunstein refers to as “we.” We know this, we know that, and we know better about the way ordinary people make their choices. We are the law professors and the behavioral economists who (a) understand human choosing and its foibles much better than members of the first group and (b) are in a position to design and manipulate the architecture of the choices that face ordinary folk. In other words, the members of this second group are endowed with a happy combination of power and expertise.

Of course regulators are people too. And like the rest of us, they are fallible. In the original Nudge, Sunstein engagingly confessed to many of the decisional foibles that Thaler exposed. Worse, though, is the fact that regulators are apt to make mistakes in their regulatory behavior: “For every bias identified for individuals, there is an accompanying bias in the public sphere.” Sometimes governments blunder because they feel compelled to defer to the irrationalities of ordinary people. But we all know they are perfectly capable of screwing things up on their own, whether it’s the invasion of Iraq or the rollout of Obamacare.

The difference is that when individuals make bad decisions in their own lives, they bear the cost. When members of the “nudging class” make bad decisions, they generally step through the revolving door to an even cushier job.

UPDATE: From the comments: “Sunstein et al. are concerned that the common man is not investing enough in his 401K. They attribute this to inertia, since they are unable to think of another reason why people would not make good investments against future needs. I suggest an alternate explanation: The common man is not investing in his 401K because he lacks confidence that Sunstein et al. can keep the world from blowing up before he retires, or that they can keep their hands off his retirement finds if the world does not blow up.”