#87 - Let's Have Some Resilient Fun: How British Navy Overcome Scurvy

"Let's have some resilient fun" shows some important topics in a more relaxed and joyful way. After all, humour is quoted as a desirable characteristic of resilient individuals like us!

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein introduced the concept of nudging in 2008 and revised it significantly with plenty of new examples in 2021. However, I've found the most hilarious example of a nudge in Edible Economics by the famous Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang.

But hold on—do you know what a nudge is? I only recently learned the term myself, so I guess it's worth explaining before we move to the fun part.

Every decision we make is contextual. As humans, we rarely make economically rational decisions. Instead, our choices are influenced by the environment, emotions, and how the decision itself is presented. A person who organises this decisional context is called a choice architect. A nudge is any aspect of choice architecture that predictably alters people’s behaviour without forbidding options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To qualify as a nudge, it must also be easy and cheap to avoid. For example, putting non-alcoholic beer at eye level near the counter is a nudge; banning alcohol entirely is not. The voluntary aspect is fundamental to this intervention.

So let's begin our story. Scurvy was a major enemy of sea travellers from Columbus’s transatlantic trips up to the middle of the nineteenth century. According to some estimates, over two million sailors died from scurvy during that period. The death toll was so high that shipowners routinely expected mortality rates of over fifty percent among crews on long-distance voyages.

Through trial and error, people discovered that lemons or limes reduced the harmful effects of an unhealthy diet during long sea voyages, where crews lacked access to fresh food. The British Royal Navy was the first to introduce lemon (soon replaced by lime) juice into sailors’ diets. The challenge was convincing sailors to voluntarily drink sour, unpleasant juice. Here comes the famous nudge—they mixed it with water, rum, and sugar into a drink today known as grog. Sailors voluntarily drank lime juice, and within several years, scurvy was virtually eliminated from the British Navy. The British sailors’ nickname "limeys", used by Americans, comes from this story.

Thaler and Sunstein argue that nudges can support societies by helping people effortlessly make the right choices. However, marketers often use nudges to persuade us to buy their products, which frequently aren't healthy or necessarily the best choice for us. Just picture the checkout counter in grocery stores, conveniently filled with alcohol, cigarettes, and sweets. Nudging can be a double-edged sword in the hands of choice architects whose interests differ from ours. Traditional economic models assume people always make choices in their best interest. Arguably, this is a false assumption. Sensitivity to the contexts in which we make decisions is thus a key aspect of resilience. We’re all influenced by various factors—not all as pleasant or well-intentioned as a glass of grog.

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References

Chang, H. J. (2022). Edible economics: A hungry economist explains the world. Random House.

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2021). Nudge: The final edition. Penguin.