GMAT Verbal 35: Application, Tone and the Author's Attitude

In the early ninth century, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a scholar from Khorezm in Central Asia, worked in Baghdad at the House of Wisdom, the great centre of learning supported by the Abbasid caliphs. Two of his books changed mathematics. The first, usually known by a short form of its title, al-Jabr, presented systematic methods for solving linear and quadratic equations. Its purpose was practical: al-Khwarizmi wrote that he had confined himself to what people constantly need in matters such as inheritance, trade, land measurement and lawsuits. The word algebra comes from al-jabr, one of the operations the book describes.

The second book explained the Indian system of writing numbers with nine digits and a zero, in which the value of a digit depends on its place. The Arabic original is lost, but Latin translations made in the twelfth century circulated in Europe, where the method gradually replaced Roman numerals for calculation. Medieval Latin writers rendered the author's name as Algoritmi, and from that form came the word algorithm.

It would be easy to treat al-Khwarizmi as a lone genius. Yet his work drew on Indian, Greek and Babylonian traditions, and its influence depended on translators, copyists and merchants across several centuries. What makes his achievement remarkable is less that he invented everything in his books than that he organised existing knowledge so clearly that others could use it — and his name, transformed, still marks the step-by-step methods that every computer follows.

When a choice comes with a pre-selected option, most people keep it. Economists call this the default effect, and its size can be startling. In a study published in 2003, Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein compared consent to organ donation in European countries. In Germany, where citizens had to sign up to become donors, about 12 percent had consented; in neighbouring Austria, where citizens were donors unless they opted out, the figure was above 99 percent. The two countries are similar in culture and wealth; what differed was the form people faced.

Defaults matter in finance too. When some American employers began enrolling new workers in retirement savings plans automatically, letting them opt out if they wished, participation rose sharply compared with plans that required workers to sign up. Many workers who would never have joined on their own stayed in, often at whatever contribution rate had been pre-set.

The effect is easy to explain and hard to escape. Changing a default takes effort, a default can look like a recommendation, and keeping it feels safer than choosing. For anyone who designs forms — governments, banks, employers — the lesson is uncomfortable but clear: there is no neutral design. Every form has some default, even if it is only the option listed first, and whoever chooses it is shaping decisions, whether or not they intend to.