Currently reading Nudge.

It's about the ways that we respond to suggestion, and how those who design environments ("choice architects") have to be aware of that.

Nudge's suggestion is that we can't tell people what to do ("authoritarianism" or "big government" if you're American) nor just leave them to decide (since people left to themselves make poor decisions).  Instead Thaler and Sunstein advocate "Liberal Paternalism"

I have just finished the chapter on Temptation, which suggests we have a cold state (clear thinking, rational) and a hot state (tempestuous and aroused).  The planner in us (the cold state) tries to manage the doer (the hot state) by reducing the choices that we are exposed to.  An extreme example of this is the clocky alarm clock which reduces our temptation to over-snooze by running away to random part of the bedroom.

I've just been reading Freakonomics.

One thing that's remarkable about the book is its simplicity, that the authors do nothing more complicated than ask slightly bizarre questions of large amounts of data.

I guess they aren't scared of the numbers, they know what to do with them, to control some variables whilst focussing on others.  But it's the questions that unearth the pearls, the bizarreness, the freakiness that points to the truth.

So Levitt (the economist whose thinking is behind Freakonomics) asks "Why do teacher's cheat?", "Why do drug dealers live with their Mums?", "which are the most harmful to children - guns or swimming pools?" and "Who calls their daughter 'Madison'?"

When you fire these queries at the right block of data, you discover that teachers cheat because they are a part of a system which rewards exam success and doesn't audit properly, drug dealers live with their Mums because they are poorly paid but take that kind of job because it's the only path to success open to them, swimming pools are more harmful to children than guns and aspirational parents call their daughter Madison because they want to be like the family on the next block who have two nice cars, a swimming pool in the back garden and a daughter called Madison.