He also "investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some agents in the economy are sometimes human".

To some people this may sound a statement of the bleeding obvious. Young people would be behaving rationally if the money they spend on iPhones was put into a pension fund instead, but most are not going to do anything so far-sighted without very heavy prompting. According to Professor Thaler, we would all invest in the stock market if we were rational, but we do not. Smoking, overeating and taking no exercise are other examples of irrational behaviour.

Nudge theory is an attempt to resolve a classic Conservative dilemma: since they believe in the small state and low taxation, should the Conservatives just leave us to our bad habits, and accept the undesirable social consequences that will follow, or use the levers of state to try to improve our behaviour?

There is a powerful libertarian wing within the party whose general prejudice is to allow people to do as they please provided they do not break the law. There are also paternalists who believe that the fortunate in society have a duty to protect the less fortunate from the consequences of their own folly. Libertarianism and paternalism are assumed to be necessarily in conflict.

In 2008, Professor Thaler and Cass Sunstein wrote a book called Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness in which they claimed that there is a middle way that enables the state to be both paternalist and libertarian. Instead of ordering people around or leaving them to behave in self-defeating ways, the state can nudge them into behaving sensibly.

But it gets even worse. One part of the series of tasks being imposed is an online ‘My strengths test’, consisting of a series of 48 multiple-choice answers to questions about your personality.

I can reveal that this ‘test’ is a completely bogus scam designed to manipulate unemployed people into performing a completely random, week-long exercise of incorporating supposed ‘characteristics’ into their daily behaviour.

How do I know this? Because the ‘test’ is fake – it allocates you a ‘personality’ even if you don’t answer the questions.
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A quick search of the root directory of the site reveals that, even though this site is called ‘Behaviour Library’, there are no other tests on the site. The title of the site is selected to give the impression that there is a scientific basis for the test and that it is conducted by some kind of specialist organisation competent to conduct psychometric testing – but there is not even any information to identify who devised the questions.