Nick Clegg meets Richard Thaler: ‘All it would take to stop Brexit is a couple of dozen brave Tories’

The former deputy PM and the Nobel prize winner discuss the EU, business and Trump

Richard Thaler was awarded the Nobel prize for economics in October, for work that has "built a bridge between the economic and psychological analyses of individual decision-making". While traditional economics assumes that people are rational actors, Thaler explores the consequences of irrationality, bias and error, and proposes ways that governments, through mechanisms as simple as changing the phrasing on a form, can encourage, or "nudge", smarter decision-making. Nudge, the 2008 bestseller he wrote with Cass Sunstein, introduced the influential concept of "choice architecture", while his 2015 book Misbehaving was a personal history of behavioural economics. As the author Michael Lewis put it, he's "the economist who realised how crazy we are".

Nick Clegg, meanwhile, is adapting to life outside Westminster. He was leader of the Liberal Democrats between 2007 and 2015, deputy prime minister in David Cameron's coalition government and MP for Sheffield Hallam for 12 years, before losing his seat to Labour in the last election. He has written a memoir of his time in government and, more recently, a passionate polemic, How To Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again).

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Maybe the hope is the model of Mr Macron across the channel. A third party. Nick! Now's your time