From Fox News, Maxim Lott reporting, we learn [tip of the fedora to Breitbart and Smitty]:
The federal government is hiring what it calls a “Behavioral Insights Team” that will look for ways to subtly influence people’s behavior, according to a document describing the program obtained by FoxNews.com. Critics warn there could be unintended consequences to such policies, while supporters say the team could make government and society more efficient.
While the program is still in its early stages, the document shows the White House is already working on such projects with almost a dozen federal departments and agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture.
“Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals,” reads the government document describing the program, which goes on to call for applicants to apply for positions on the team.
The document was emailed by Maya Shankar, a White House senior adviser on social and behavioral sciences, to a university professor with the request that it be distributed to people interested in joining the team. The idea is that the team would “experiment” with various techniques, with the goal of tweaking behavior so people do everything from saving more for retirement to saving more in energy costs.
The document praises subtle policies to change behavior that have already been implemented in England, which already has a “Behavioral Insights Team.” One British policy concerns how to get late tax filers to pay up.
“Sending letters to late taxpayers that indicated a social norm — i.e., that ’9 out of 10 people in Britain paid their taxes on time’ — resulted in a 15 percent increase in response rates over a three-month period, rolling out to £30 million of extra annual revenue,” the document reads.
Another policy aimed to convince people to install attic insulation to conserve energy.
“Offering an attic-clearance service (at full cost) to people led to a five-fold increase in their subsequent adoption of attic-insulation.”
Such policies — which encourage behavior subtly rather than outright require it — have come to be known as “nudges,” after an influential 2008 book titled “Nudge” by former Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein and Chicago Booth School of Business professor Richard Thaler popularized the term.
The term “nudge” has already been associated with the new program, as one professor who received Shankar’s email forwarded it to others with the note: “Anyone interested in working for the White House in a ‘nudge’ squad? The UK has one and it’s been extraordinarily successful.”
The Left must be stopped. And they must be stopped soon.
This ‘Behavioral Insights Team’, the whole concept of it, the thinking behind it, is PURE EVIL.
Does anyone think the GOP or Conservative Establishments are going to do one damn thing to stop this evil measure?
Of course not.
They are the Useful Idiots of the Left. They think they’re just playing some elaborate game. They have no Goddamn clue — or don’t want to have a clue — that the Left In America is not playing a game, but is playing for keeps in a Total War against everything we hold dear, everything that is moral, decent, honorable, and good.
So…we are alone in this fight. We are the Remnant of what once was a way of thinking and living that turned the world away from the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short life, that brought Mankind hope and freedom and liberty and God. We are all that’s left of sanity in a world gone mad, that embraces Nihilism, that revels in misery and pain and horror, that hates itself.
We are the last division, the last defense.
We are The Camp Of The Saints, the only force left between the armies of Evil and the walls of The Beloved City.
Life free or die.
NO COMPROMISE
NO QUARTER
NO RETREAT
NO SURRENDER
OUTLAWS!
