From our Forewarned Is Forearmed desk:

The New York Times Magazine cover story this Sunday features Cass Sunstein, director of “the White House’s little-known Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs” and a leading apostle of behavioral economics, the “libertarian paternalism” (aka nudge-ocracy) that skews public policy to push people’s choices in a particular direction.

If you’re looking for a smart, engaging exploration of the topic, this isn’t it. The Times piece earned three zzz’s from the hardworking staff.

Representative sample:

Sunstein, who is 55, has an almost childlike excitement — his e-mail messages end in long strings of exclamation points, and when other academics talk about his mind, they do so in the way people talk about the ballet, as something precious that ought to be preserved.

Even worse, there’s this:

“Hardly anyone would isolate Section 553 of the Administrative Procedure Act” — the law that governs the public notice-and-comment period for most federal rules — “as the greatest invention of modern government,” Sunstein told me in his office late last year, his eyes filled with life. “But I see it as having potential.”

Yikes.

But worst, the Times piece gets bogged down in the minutia of “the discount rate – the deprecation of money over time” regarding solutions for global warming.

Total snooze.

You can find the behavioral economics wake-up call in last month’s Weekly Standard under the byline Andrew Ferguson and the headline:

Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink

Behavioral economics—the governing theory of Obama’s nanny state.

Representative sample, regarding Sunstein’s book Nudge, coauthored with Richard Thaler:

Thaler and Sunstein know that libertarians find their philosophy too paternalistic and paternalists find it too libertarian, and that’s just fine with them. They cast libertarian paternalism as the via media, the third way, moderate and reasonable, avoiding political extremes and the snares of ideology. It’s Gergenism for the thinking man. The oxymoron, joining two incompatibles, perfectly encapsulates the promise of Obama himself: something fresh, exciting, and highly improbable.

Better:

In the grander areas of public policy, in the environment, financial reform, and health care, the administration’s hoped-for libertarian paternalism is nowhere to be found. In place of gentle pokes and prods and nudges, the administration is hoping to levy taxes and bans, impose mandates and caps, set prices and restrain trade to make people behave properly—all the command-and-control methods from the Old Kind of Democrats’ handbook. Removed from the nurturing environment of the university, soft paternalism stiffens up considerably.

Best:

One cognitive bias that the behavioralists don’t mention, though its lure seems irresistible, is the bias that makes human beings swallow uncritically the declarations of social science. The bias deters the layman from snooping around to see if the science makes sense. This is the well-established “chump effect,” a name I just made up. It accounts for the breathless reception given to the books by [Malcolm] Gladwell and the other popularizers of sociological and psychological research. “Findings reveal .  .  .” “Scientists have uncovered  .  .  .” “Research has shown that .  .  .” And we swoon.

You won’t swoon over Ferguson’s piece. But it will affect your cognitive bias.