Passage A:

Proponents of "nudge" regulation argue that default rules — such as automatically enrolling employees in retirement plans unless they opt out — respect individual autonomy while correcting for predictable cognitive biases like inertia and present bias. Because the default can be reversed at negligible cost, no one is coerced; those with genuine preferences against enrollment remain free to exit. Critics who equate defaults with manipulation ignore that some default must exist in any institutional design — there is no neutral baseline from which to depart. Given that a default is unavoidable, selecting the one most likely to serve people's own long-term interests, as revealed by their behavior when barriers are removed, is simply prudent design rather than paternalism.

Passage B:

The rhetoric of "choice architecture" obscures a more troubling reality: opt-out defaults exploit the very biases they claim merely to accommodate. If inertia is powerful enough to justify the default's design, it is also powerful enough to prevent meaningful reconsideration once the default is set. Framing the arrangement as costless to reverse ignores the psychological asymmetry between passive retention and active departure — the same asymmetry the policy is designed to harness. A policy that deliberately engineers outcomes by exploiting a known cognitive weakness is manipulative even if it is also, on balance, beneficial; efficacy does not launder the method by which it is achieved.