Newspaper Reader: Jeremy Waldron’ superb commentary and replies to The New York Review of October 9, 2014 & October 23, 2014 issues are worth the reader attention and contemplation!
Mar 15, 2026
By Corey Robin on 03.14.26
One of the more delightful innovations of the Obama era was the requirement that every full-time employee—or taxpayer, I don’t know—has to provide proof of “health insurance offering and coverage”, when filing their taxes. It’s called a 1095-C form. The employer provides it to you, the employee, and we file it with your taxes.
The 1095-C form is yet one more way that Americans show to the world our pitch-perfect sense of how to waste time while pretending to do something good. Instead of having the government provide everyone with healthcare or health insurance, our leaders and experts come up with some sort of nudge that somehow or another is supposed to get us somehow closer to some group of people having some sort of access to some sort of coverage for some sort of healthcare—all the while doing nothing but forcing people to fill out more forms.
That’s the baseline of our country’s distinctive combination of sadism and tomfoolery.
But now comes along that bit of extra, which is so expressive of our moment. Where CUNY used to provide us with the 1095-C form—we’d get in the mail and file it with our taxes—some genius somewhere in the institution decided that it would be smarter and more efficient and save money and time for everyone to subcontract the providing of this one form to a private company.
Wait, it gets better.
Back in early February, all of us got a very strange and fishy-looking email from someone claiming to be an employee at CUNY, an email out of nowhere, from no apparent office at CUNY, saying that we had to register at some company or some website called bencorpaca, where we would provide company codes, social security numbers, passwords, the whole nine yards.
Obviously most people thought the email was one of the ten thousand phishing scams that we get every day at CUNY, despite our having ten thousand spam filters and twenty thousand passwords requiring thirty thousand verification codes and other security processes.
So the next day, after getting this initial suspicious-looking email, we get a follow-up email from the institution saying, “Many people have inquired regarding the legitimacy of the email received from the University Benefits Office this afternoon with the subject ‘ACA 1095C Tax Information.’ This email is legitimate and was validated with the sender at CUNY.”
In other words, click on the link you were sent, register with this new company, just so you can get one form—one fucking piece of paper, called a 1095-C, which was mandated by the Obama administration in order to, sort of, nudge people to, sort of, well you know the rest of the drill.
So today I go through this whole process. I click on the link. I enter the company code provided to me. I enter the last four digits of my social. And my email address. A new link is sent to me—so that I can sign up for the service that CUNY has subcontracted out to someone, in order to save time and money, in order to create efficiencies and synergies of scale—to sign up for the new service, come up with a new password, click this, waive that, sign this, so that, lo and behold, I can be told this: “No forms available. You will receive notification when your Form is available.”
It’s March 14. I wanted to finish filing my taxes this weekend. But now I wait. Because of :
Internet. Email. Links. Portals. Forms. Passwords. Obamacare. Efficiency. Nudges. Savings. Improvement. Progress. Better. Bullshit
Editor: some of us have memories that reach back to 2014!
It’s All for Your Own Good
‘Why Nudge?’ by Cass Sunstein
In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein considered the choices made by ordinary people about their retirement.
Many employees have the opportunity to enroll in a 401(k) plan, in which their contributions will be sheltered from taxes and to which their employer will also contribute. But a considerable number of people do not choose to enroll in a 401(k) plan and of those who do, many select levels of contribution that are far below what would be most advantageous to them. Why? Probably because of inertia. It is easier not to make a decision than go to the trouble of calculating an optimal contribution.
Employers sometimes try to educate people to make better choices, offering them retirement-planning seminars, for example. But the lessons of these seminars are soon forgotten: “Employees often leave educational seminars excited about saving more but then fail to follow through on their plans.” And so Sunstein and Thaler suggested a different strategy. Instead of teaching people to overcome their inertia, we might take advantage of their inertia to solve the problem. Suppose we arrange things so that enrollment at some appropriate level of contribution is the default position—the position that obtains if the employee does nothing. Something has to be the default position; why not make it the position that accrues most to the employee’s benefit, “using inertia to increase savings rather than prevent savings”?
…
Nudges: Good and Bad
Cass R. Sunstein, reply by Jeremy Waldron
On freedom of choice, autonomy, and dignity
In response to:
It’s All for Your Own Good from the October 9, 2014 issue
To the Editors:
I am most grateful to Jeremy Waldron for his generous and clear-headed review of my books Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism and Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas [NYR, October 9]. Waldron worries that nudging poses a risk to autonomy and dignity, but it is important to see that nudges are meant to promote both of those values. Disclosure of relevant information (about the terms of a school loan or a mortgage, for example) is hardly a threat to human dignity. When people are asked what they would like to choose, their autonomy is enhanced, not undermined. (Active choosing is a prime nudge.) A GPS certainly nudges, but it does not compromise what Waldron favors, which is “a steadfast commitment to self-respect.” Waldron is right to worry about the risk of manipulation, but the whole idea of nudging is designed to preserve freedom of choice, and in that sense both autonomy and dignity.
Cass R. Sunstein
Robert Walmsley University Professor
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Jeremy Waldron replies:
I appreciate this clarification. Many nudges simply involve an improvement of the decision-making environment and of the information available to choosers. Professor Sunstein is right that there can be no objection to that. But in his book, the term “nudge” also comprises attempts to manipulate people behind their backs, using their own defective decision-making to privilege outcomes that we think they ought to value. I think both of us should be concerned about that and about a world in which that more sinister sense of nudging becomes a widespread instrument of public policy.
October 23, 2014
Editor: Jeremy Waldron’s short but telling reply provides a telling commentary on the manipulation practised by decision making elites, to reduce it to the essentials, that are valued by those very elites. Corey Robin riffs on self-serving complaint via ‘Bullshit’!
Newspaper Reader.
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