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The city of Greensboro, N.C., has experimented with a program designed for teenage mothers. To prevent these teens from having another child, the city offered each of them $1 a day for every day they were not pregnant. It turns out that the psychological power of that small daily payment is huge. A single dollar a day was enough to push the rate of teen pregnancy down, saving all the incredible costs — human and financial — that go with teen parenting.

Cass Sunstein, President Obama's pick to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, was a vocal supporter of the program, because it was an economic policy that shaped itself around human psychology. Sunstein is just one of a number of high-level appointees now working in the Obama administration who favors this kind of approach.

All are devotees of behavioral economics — a school of economic thought greatly influenced by psychological research — which argues that the human animal is hard-wired to make errors when it comes to decision-making, and therefore people need a little "nudge" to make decisions that are in their own best interests.

And that is exactly what Obama administration officials plan to do: By taking account of human psychology, they hope to save you from yourself.

This is the story of how obscure psychological research into human decision-making first revolutionized economics and now appears poised to remake the relationship between the government and its citizens.

Google plans to launch an online store to deliver electronic books to any device with a Web browser, threatening to upset a burgeoning market for dedicated e-readers dominated by Amazon's Kindle.

The Web search giant said on Thursday it would launch Google Editions in the first half of next year, initially offering about half a million e-books in partnership with publishers with whom it already cooperates, where they have digital rights.

Readers will be able to buy e-books either from Google directly or from other online stores such as http://Amazon.com">Amazon.com or http://Barnesandnoble.com">Barnesandnoble.com. Google will host the e-books and make them searchable.

On Monday, KaChing is to add a new twist. Customers can set up brokerage accounts that automatically mirror the trades of a money manager, some of them professionals.

“The idea of an asset manager showing all his research, his holdings — it’s unheard-of,” said Mr. Carroll, now 27 and the vice president for business development at KaChing. “In the financial industry, the idea is that information is currency; they protect it with their lives.”

I heart KaChing.

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There can be little doubt that eBook and eReaders are having a breakout year. Today, Forrester Research moved its original projection of 2 million US eReader sales in 2009 up 50%. Forrester now expects that 3 million eReaders will be sold in 2009 and that 30% of these will sell during the holiday season. Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps argues that sales are growing much faster than expected because of falling prices, better retail distribution, and the media buzz that currently surrounds eBooks and eReaders. For 2010, Forrester projects eReader sales of up to 10 million.