Birth Of the Nudge Economy

Minutes of a momentous meeting in Napa Valley

Sendhil Mullainathan, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, The Edge Master Class, 2008.

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Over a weekend in July 2008, a group of academics and entrepreneurs got together in Napa Valley to discuss how to hack the brain. One of those present described it as “a remarkable gathering of outstanding minds. These are the people that are rewriting our global culture.”

This was not just hyperbole. The attendees included Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner (2002), and the most influential psychologist of modern times; Richard Thaler, author of ‘Nudge’ and future Nobel Prize winner (2017); Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; Elon Musk, 37, of Tesla and Space X into viable businesses; Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and Facebook; Salar Kamangar, Google’s ninth employee and a future CEO of YouTube, and Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft and a major power broker in Silicon Valley.

The book in this picture is a record of the proceedings. A rare artefact, it arrived at Ruffian Towers via a series of subterfuges - park bench, hollow tree, carrier pigeon - and a chain of shady middlemen.

It is a remarkable document of a moment in history when it seemed as if technology, when combined with a new understanding of human psychology, might solve all our problems. The discussions it records are unabashedly optimistic and confident. For a number of reasons, they read rather differently now.

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