Passage A:

Public policy has increasingly embraced the nudge: a deliberate arrangement of the choice environment that steers individuals toward welfare-enhancing decisions without foreclosing any option. Automatically enrolling employees in a retirement plan while permitting costless withdrawal is the paradigm. Defenders argue that such measures answer a genuine problem. Decades of behavioral research demonstrate that people systematically deviate from the choices they would make on reflection - they procrastinate, over-weight the present, and default to whatever requires no effort. Given that some choice environment must exist, and that any arrangement will influence behavior, the relevant question is not whether to influence but how. A policy that channels predictable irrationality toward the person's own considered ends is not an affront to autonomy but its ally. Crucially, because the nudge leaves every option formally available and imposes no material penalty, the individual who genuinely prefers a different course remains free to take it. The approach thus threads a needle that has long troubled liberal theory: it improves outcomes for the many who would otherwise err while respecting the sovereignty of the few who would not. Its proponents are careful to distinguish nudging from coercion and from the manipulation of preferences themselves; the aim is to help people achieve what they already want, not to reshape what they want. Far from being a covert paternalism, they contend, the nudge is the most autonomy-preserving instrument a policymaker committed to improving welfare could possibly select.

Passage B:

The enthusiasm for nudges rests on a distinction that will not bear the weight placed upon it. Its advocates insist that steering choice is permissible so long as no option is removed and no penalty imposed. But influence that operates precisely because its targets do not notice it is not obviously respectful of their agency. A default works by exploiting the same inattention that the behavioral literature catalogues; the citizen who is enrolled by inertia has not exercised a considered preference but has been relieved of the occasion to form one. To call this the ally of autonomy is to conflate getting people to the outcome they would endorse with having them arrive there through their own reasoning. There is a further, more practical worry. By presenting itself as a low-cost, consensus-friendly technique, the nudge may crowd out the more demanding interventions that entrenched problems require. If inadequate retirement saving reflects stagnant wages, a default enrollment addresses a symptom while leaving the disease untouched - and does so in a way that lets policymakers claim the problem has been handled. The danger is not that nudges coerce but that they substitute a cosmetic adjustment for structural reform, and that their very gentleness makes this substitution politically attractive. None of this shows that nudges are never justified. It shows that their proponents' central boast - that the technique is uniquely respectful of the individual - obscures both what nudging does to the chooser and what it displaces in the policy arena.