This year’s economics Nobel winner invented a tool that’s both brilliant and undemocratic - Vox

A criticism of the Thaler/Sunnstein nudge theory.

"The problem — as Carnegie Mellon’s Cosma Shalizi and I have discussed elsewhere — is that government-by-nudging amounts to a kind of technocracy, which assumes that experts will know which choices are in the interests of ordinary people better than those people know themselves. This may be true under some circumstances, but it will not be true all of the time, or even most of the time, if there are no good opportunities for those ordinary people to voice their preferences.

Traditional forms of democratic policymaking rely on expertise too, but they have better correction mechanisms than nudgeocracy, since people who are sufficiently angry at a particular rule may have the incentive to complain and organize against it. Nudgeocracies, in contrast, are insulated from the feedback that would help them get things right.

This is even clearer if we call nudgeocracy by another name. Chris Hayes has written on Twitter about what he describes as the “hassleocracy” — the tendency to make something a hassle, so that fewer people will do it. Hayes was writing about the ways that Republicans make it harder for many groups to vote — mandating voter ID’s, and the like — but his description applies just as aptly to insurance companies doing everything they can to stop you from filing claims, or magazines that make it very easy to subscribe, but require you to notarize, and sign a form in triplicate, with the asservations of seven witnesses in red ink, if you want to stop the subscription from automatically self-renewing. (Thaler and Sunstein briefly discuss that example.)..."