Yes, Parliament. Well ahead of their time, or rather, perhaps their time is only now coming. They foresaw an Afro-American takeover of Washington in their classic album “Chocolate City”: “They still call it the White House, but that’s just a temporary condition…”

I must confess that I doubted you. A popular musical combination called “Parliament”? A composition entitled “The clones of Dr Funkenstein”? Too good to be true, I thought. And then I checked and it is true. Mea culpa.

Senior civil servants could do with training in social research. It’s a sorry signal that the post of chief social researcher has recently been downgraded and subsumed into the Treasury. There it falls into the hands of economists who can be too determinist to tune into the subtleties of social and behavioural questions.

The real value of the new “nudge” economics is not the blindingly obvious finding that it’s easier to use inertia to get people to stay in pension schemes than to get them to volunteer to join.

More valuable is the also blindingly obvious discovery that economists’ reductionist view of humans as rational economic units is nonsense: people’s motivations are just as often not financially motivated, which explains why economists are not very good at predicting even tomorrow’s stock market movement, let alone the next crash.

… and Simon Jenkins?

When muck hits fan, economists always blame politicians. They would have some justice if they did not take credit when things go right …

The newest craze is “nudge” economics, from the Americans, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They put the subject firmly among the behavioural sciences – if not the arts. Human actions are too mysterious and unpredictable to be liable to quantification and modelling … Nudge steers, but does not order or plan …

Economics has long traded on being a science when it is not. In this it is like war. For a third of a century since the 1976 IMF crisis it has enjoyed great influence over British policy. Now it has met its Waterloo and a little humility would be in order. Once again economics must be rescued by that true master of all things, politics.

The majority of coverage at the moment seems to treat nudging as a bit of a joke. It is dismissed as “pop psychology”. That’s where it’s being anchored, and it may be hard now to promote the notion that it is important and revolutionary.

How the government can influence public behaviour is one question. But just as important, how can the public influence government policy? The government certainly don’t seem to respond to nudging. Or logical arguments based on fact. Or the lessons of history. Or principle. Or petitions. Or marches. So how do you influence the government?

According to The Westminster Hour, the government will respond if two think tanks come up with the same idea independently, as they did with child trust funds. In other words, it pretty well takes a miracle.

But no. Important people also are showing an interest. The Director General of Age Concern England has this to say in a letter to today’s Guardian:

So-called soft issues require more than soft solutions. Politicians from all parties must realise that it will require more than a “nudge” to improve the wellbeing of older people when part of the problem is institutional discrimination.

And not just important people. Normal people, too. Consider this quite remarkable comment on John Kampfner’s article – which presses several buttons all at once:

I can’t help noticing the resonances between what you describe and Obama’s campaign – or at least his primary campaign. Start off by going out on a limb, and then gradually retreat to your comfort zone as the campaign progresses. Coincidence or deliberate strategy?

We already know that the behavioural economists, with their obsession with “loss avoidance” claim to have experimental proof that negative campaigning works (heaven help us all!). We also know they are into game theory. Perhaps this idea – getting a large crowd of partially-convinced voters on the periphery and then progressively working hard to reassure your core supporters – is their idea of a strategy for defending against the expected attrition of votes due to negative campaigning?

Anyway, this time it’s the Guardian, and this is what John Kampfner has to say, in ‘Why Huggy Cameron has performed a vanishing act’, sub-titled ‘The Tories have slipped back into their political comfort zone, which is a shame for us and a lost opportunity for them’:

… Cameron Mk I was making some interesting noises about fairness, and responsible management practice. Little more has been heard since. Brown, cautious not to offend the City, has said nothing about the underlying reasons for the economic crash. Ministers responded to the collapse of Northern Rock by nationalising and bailing out the bank. No attempt has been made to use the debacle to throw open the debate about the accountability of directors, or the actions of the banking sector. Here is fertile ground for others to occupy. The only person making any noise is the Lib Dems’ irrepressible Vince Cable. The Tory leader is silent.

Cameron now hides behind his new pet theory of the “nudge”. Just a gentle prod in the direction of the boardroom and, hey presto, directors will behave responsibly. It seems that the better politics that he toyed with two years ago has gone the way of the better economic conditions. Now that life is really tough again, with people struggling to pay their bills, so the politics will return to its old bad habits.

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*

One of David Cameron’s 38 summer reading recommendations for his MPs is a book called Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. It is only the latest example of a genre of book which cleverly identifies something in the zeitgeist, contributes a ‘how to’ element to the problem, and discloses 90 per cent of its message in its title. Small Is Beautiful and Freakonomics are classic examples. After Nudge, I suggest a book called Yank: How to Spot a Trend in America, and Make Millions Worldwide.

I still think Labour holds the answers and that Tory promises of a fair society will turn to dust. Libertarian paternalism, or nudging, is a half-baked political creed pinched by Cameron from the self-help bookshelf. Even so, he has staked out a limbo between the Left’s command-and-control instinct and the Right’s wish to expunge the state from family life. That middle ground is where families, of all kinds, want to live. Labour’s fightback must start there.

The real lesson is that, while it is entirely possible to isolate the moment at which a small group turn their back on the temptations of crime, or a product bursts its way into public consciousness, it is devilishly difficult to reproduce that effect.

and

The reason why quietly nudging things in a favourable direction seems such a good idea to those in authority is that it promises a magic bullet for social problems – at the margins and on the cheap. The tragedy is while they have been busy doing many little things in the hope that some of them might make a difference, they could just as well have been rolling up their sleeves and doing something big.