I believe it’s a reference to these initiatives:

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/10/obamas-effort-...

This article is talking about things like defaulting options to organ donor or automatically enrolling people into a 401k plan. I'm not sure changing the default option is the same as changing someone's behavior. Sounds like it's about explicitly NOT changing the behavior but rather the outcome of that behavior.

Something you may notice about these fraud cases is that they are simple things that result in _surprising_ outcomes. I don't think people are surprised that texting teens works better given that the only people that call them are parents and telemarketers. There's two fundamental lines in the article too

> government has long been behind corporate America in following up to make sure its policies actually work.

> The SBST team’s report showed that 13 of its projects worked; one didn’t; and one was hard to tell.

And if we're getting down to it, this doesn't sound like an Obama or "liberal" thing, it sounds like a _government_ thing. Can we stop taking general concepts or universal behavior and pretending that when its bad only "my enemies" do it and when good only "my allies" do it? This is just dumb, and it happens even outside the context of politics.

> And if we're getting down to it, this doesn't sound like an Obama or "liberal" thing, it sounds like a _government_ thing. Can we stop taking general concepts or universal behavior and pretending that when its bad only "my enemies" do it and when good only "my allies" do it? This is just dumb, and it happens even outside the context of politics.

I'm all for this, although it does require an agreement on epistemic principles, which seems like a tall order in the current state of our civilization. Which is why we are left with will to power.

Looking for solutions that do not involve any structural change is inherent to liberal politics in our society, since our current political economy is deeply liberal in structure (for a definition of liberal that contains both mainstream "liberals" and conservatives, closer to classical liberalism).

You can see this plainly by looking at the pattern of recuperation and dilution of any proposed structural change - making up non-structural alternatives that don't work but might and then haranguing over them for years is a common pattern in liberal democracies. See for example trying to avoid public healthcare by creating "optimized marketplaces", the entire idea of nudging in economics, the idea of self-regulation, avoiding providing free national tertiary education by instead giving progressively stringent and oddly targeted scholarships, etc...