Richard Thaler

This is my example of sludge.

If you make things harder, I call that sludge.

Kind of a fun word for stuff that's the opposite of fun.

Name, please.

Richard Thaler.

I'm a professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

It's a book about how to make life better through what we call choice architecture.

which means arranging the environment in which we make decisions to make it easier to navigate.

A nudge in that context is what exactly?

Nudge makes things easy, right?

It's the WD-40 of life.

But sludge is the opposite.

Sludge literally is gunk.

I certainly think I did.

Apparently, there are others who have also made that claim, but they haven't written a book that rhymes with it.

Let's start with a category that I'll call inadvertent and or incompetent sludge.

It comes because somebody didn't think about it.

My favorite example of that is due to a guy called Don Norman.

There are doors that have handles that are called pulls.

From that name, you know just what they look like, right?