The author indicates at the beginning that the word "nudge" is any contextual influence, irrespective of the choice made. In fact, the "choice architecture" itself could be a "nudge" in this sense.
> To say that behavioral economics is obsessed with ...
That's not what he's saying. It's more like: in defense of some theory, researchers publish findings with an effect that could (according to the literature) be attributed to a gazillion other causes, but they never bother to address that. The interpretation of the data is thus (extremely) limited, or dishonest, and that's disregarding other aspects (such as generalization). They just present the result as support for their own theory. Hence there's a myriad of theories, all of which are almost completely false.
> now he's an expert?
To me, the author pretty much seems to be an expert. "Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University." Perhaps not an expert in behavioral economics per se, but an grave methodological error in one discipline is also one in any other discipline.
> To say that behavioral economics is obsessed with ...
That's not what he's saying. It's more like: in defense of some theory, researchers publish findings with an effect that could (according to the literature) be attributed to a gazillion other causes, but they never bother to address that. The interpretation of the data is thus (extremely) limited, or dishonest, and that's disregarding other aspects (such as generalization). They just present the result as support for their own theory. Hence there's a myriad of theories, all of which are almost completely false.
> now he's an expert?
To me, the author pretty much seems to be an expert. "Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University." Perhaps not an expert in behavioral economics per se, but an grave methodological error in one discipline is also one in any other discipline.