This week’s New York Times/CBS poll, which showed Americans more pessimistic about their country’s prospects than they have been in decades, yielded a puzzling figure. In the midst of a spreading credit crisis, barely a quarter of Americans (28 per cent) blame the banks that made bad loans and even fewer (14 per cent) blame borrowers. A big plurality (40 per cent) blame government. It is hard to know how to read this sentiment. Maybe regulatory activism has come back into vogue. Maybe Americans are clinging to their view that there is no social predicament so dire that government intervention will not make it worse.

Freedom is held to go hand-in-hand with efficiency in the business world, but few Americans think this about government. In government matters people tend to believe that efficiency exacts a price in freedom. In an ambitious attempt to break this impasse, the economist Richard Thaler and the law professor Cass Sunstein, both of the University of Chicago and both informal advisers to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, have just published a book, Nudge (Yale University Press, $26/£18). They argue that “choice architecture” – like the architecture of a well-designed public space – can coax (or herd) people in desirable directions at little or no cost to their autonomy and freedom.