Cass Sunstein

An article by Cass Susntein: What is the role of chance in human life? If a book tops the bestseller list, if a new product takes over the market, or if people suddenly want to stem immigration, might it all be some kind of accident? Over a decade ago, a celebrated paper by sociologists Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts tried to answer such questions. They asked: When a song turns out to be a spectacular success, is it because it’s really great, or is it just because the right number of people, at an early stage, were seen to like it?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: One of the unloveliest ideas in economics goes by the name “value of a statistical life” — VSL for short. In the U.S. government, the current value of a human life is about $10 million. That means that if a highway safety regulation would save 10 lives, it is worth $100 million — a figure that must be weighed against the regulation’s cost.  Because the government’s decisions often depend on the outcome of cost-benefit analysis, the VSL is important. It helps determine whether and when people will be protected from dirty air, dangerous workplaces, unsafe drinking water and unhealthy food. A lot of people rebel against the idea of assigning a monetary value to a human life. In a provocative new book, the New York Times editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum associates that idea with an assortment of others that he abhors, and through which economists have (in his view) contributed to rise of intolerable inequality.

An article by Samantha Power:  Flying back to the United States from Asia on Air Force One in late November 2012, President Barack Obama was in high spirits. He had recently been reelected, and had just concluded a widely celebrated visit to Myanmar (also known as Burma)—the first ever  by a sitting U.S. president. The trip had almost fallen apart at the last minute, when it became clear that the military government was balking at reforms that were supposed to have been in place by the time Obama arrived. A few days before he departed Washington for Asia, the president dispatched me to Myanmar with instructions to lock down our desired terms before he landed, and over three bruising days of negotiations, I did so. The final agreement included a large release of political prisoners, a commitment to allow access for humanitarian workers to war-torn ethnic areas, and permission for critics of the Burmese dictatorship to return from exile or, if living in Myanmar, to travel outside the country. During the 20-hour journey back to Washington, Obama summoned me to his personal cabin on Air Force One and asked me what job I hoped for in his second term. My husband, Cass Sunstein, had just left the White House after three and a half years as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He was now commuting between our home in Washington and a small rental apartment near Harvard Law School, where he had resumed teaching. I did not want to leave government, but after serving as Obama’s multilateral-affairs and human-rights adviser on the National Security Council since January 2009, I was ready to try something new.

An article by Cass Sunstein:  Here is a puzzle about some of the Donald Trump administration’s most prominent deregulatory efforts: The very companies that are supposed to benefit from those efforts do not welcome them. In some cases, they strenuously oppose them. How can that be? There are several answers.

An article by Cass Sunstein:  Can a new regulation be something to celebrate? If it stands to save lives, absolutely. Here’s one that does: the Food and Drug Administration’s new proposalrequiring warnings, including graphic images, on cigarette packages and in cigarette advertisements. The regulation, now out for a 60-day comment period, also appears to fix the problems that hobbled previous attempts to mandate graphic cigarette warnings.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Can a new regulation be something to celebrate? If it stands to save lives, absolutely. Here’s one that does: the Food and Drug Administration’s new proposalrequiring warnings, including graphic images, on cigarette packages and in cigarette advertisements. The regulation, now out for a 60-day comment period, also appears to fix the problems that hobbled previous attempts to mandate graphic cigarette warnings. It’s been 10 years since Congress first directed the FDA to require graphic warnings, and that job was supposed to be done by mid-2011. The FDA duly aimed to meet the deadline, proposing labels that were indeed graphic. (As administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the time, I helped oversee that process.) But the tobacco companies convinced a federal court that, by compelling speech, the FDA’s regulation violated their First Amendment rights.  

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  President Trump apparently learned a kind of code from one of his mentors, Roy Cohn: Always hit back. Never apologize. A rough and occasionally vicious lawyer, Cohn was chief counsel for Joe McCarthy. He practiced what he preached. Was Cohn right? There is a lot of evidence that he was. But existing evidence is preliminary, and it does not involve presidents, let alone Trump. If a president, particularly this president, does something offensive or horrifying, is he better off if he says that he is sorry? And if not, why not? With the help of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I recently investigated these questions. I asked about 400 demographically diverse Americans how they would react if Trump apologized for his recent tweet suggesting that four Democratic congresswomen of color should “go back” to the countries from which they “originally came.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  “I told you so.” That is what some progressives are saying about bipartisan policies that Democratic presidents carried over from their Republican predecessors and that the Trump administration is sometimes putting in a less-than-wonderful light. A case in point: cost-benefit analysis.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  At the Democratic debate this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren won loud applause, and helped define the Democratic presidential race, when she exclaimed, “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.” It was a powerful moment. But it fits with a strategy, now prominent on the left, of characterizing reform-minded pragmatism as a form of cowardice, a capitulation to the right, a demonstration of spinelessness, a Republican talking point or a failure of nerve or character, rather than what it usually is: a matter of principle.

Books by Cass Sunstein, Mihir Desai, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Richard Fallon.

To impeach or not to impeach. That has been the question vexing congressional Democrats since they took control of the House of Representatives last November. The push to begin proceedings became more urgent in April after then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller detailed several instances in which President Trump potentially obstructed justice, and over 90 House Democrats have now publicly expressed support for impeachment. The number is likely to increase this week as Mueller testifies about his findings before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees. But as “Impeach!” has become a mainstream rallying cry for Trump’s opposition, the intention of the constitutional provision that allows Congress to remove the president from office has been largely misconstrued, says Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor, constitutional scholar, and Obama administration veteran. Sunstein’s 2017 book Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide has taken on new relevance since the release of the Mueller report — so much so that an updated version was released last month to break down how the special counsel’s findings factor into the debate over whether to impeach President Trump.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Throughout his testimony in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, and despite multiple efforts to divert him, former special counsel Robert Mueller was focused on just the two issues that were the topics of his official report: Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential campaign and possible obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump. Both Republicans and Democrats disliked it, and found it weak, when Mueller answered their lengthy questions by referring to that report. “I rely on the language of the report,” he sometimes said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: George Orwell’s “1984” is the greatest fictional account of authoritarian leadership — the most astute, the most precise, the most attuned to human psychology. One of its defining chapters explores the Two Minutes Hate, which helps establish and maintain Big Brother’s regime. As Orwell describes it, the Hate begins with a flash of a face on a large screen. It is Emmanuel Goldstein, “the Enemy of the People.” His is “a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable,” and also unmistakably foreign. It produces fear and disgust.

An article by Cass Sunstein:  Suppose that in the coming decades, Americans have a moral awakening with respect to the consumption of meat. Suppose they conclude that eating meat is a grievous moral wrong, above all because it promotes cruelty to animals, but also because it contributes to environmental problems, including climate change. That could happen. Many observers think that with the rise of plant-based meat alternatives such as the Impossible Burger, people will eventually be shocked and outraged that their parents and grandparents used to raise animals for food, allow them to suffer, and then eat them — without the slightest moral compunction. If so, political candidates would undoubtedly be called to account for their onetime eating habits.

Life is complicated. And many D2C brands — and increasingly, more traditional companies trying to keep up with digital natives — succeed because they help eliminate the pain points or friction that behavioral economists simply call sludge. (Remember how tedious e-shopping was before one-click ordering? Or when you had to buy the whole CD?) But Cass Sunstein, now the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, says Americans are still buried under billions of hours of time-wasting annoyances.  Sunstein, a former White House paperwork reduction reformer, recommends companies conduct regular sludge audits to make sure they’re eliminating as many pain points — and as much friction — as possible.  Still, such a task isn’t easy. He tells D2C FYI why simplifying is so complicated

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  Since the April release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, debate has escalated among Democrats in the House of Representatives over the question of impeachment. A lot of the discussion has focused on political questions. Which party would benefit? Is it a serious problem that impeachment proceedings would be, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has suggested, “divisive”? Is impeachment a criminal or a “political” proceeding? It certainly isn’t a criminal proceeding, and it has an inescapable political component. But under the Constitution, impeachment is fundamentally a question of law, not politics. If, after assessing the facts, the House concludes that a president — Democratic or Republican — has clearly committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” then impeachment isn’t optional. In that event, the House has a duty to act, regardless of any potential political fallout.

An article by Cass Sunstein: The Supreme Court term that ended this week had a large number of high-profile cases. But many of its decisions involved the relatively technical field of administrative law, which sets out legal restrictions on the power of federal agencies. It has profound effects on people’s lives, and it is often the subject of intense judicial debates. The court’s most far-reaching ruling settled a long-disputed question: If an agency issues an ambiguous regulation – involving clean air, food safety or civil rights – who gets to sort out the ambiguity? The agency or a court?

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and co-founder of Facebook Inc., endorsed federal privacy legislation and greater regulation of political advertising, even as he cast governments as too slow to address many of the internet’s thorniest problems. In an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said the company was racing to solve problems such as misinformation and how best to police online content. He expressed hope that governments would ultimately build a framework for tackling those matters....Speaking with Cass Sunstein, a Harvard professor and an occasional Facebook consultant, Mr. Zuckerberg expressed frustration both with calls to break up the company and with the U.S. government’s handling of Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election.

On stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mark Zuckerberg addressed a range of topics that have put the company in the center of a political firestorm, from election security to content moderation and monopolistic power. In conversation with Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, Zuckerberg said he wants to create more external standards so that private companies are not making morally complex decisions by themselves.

Mark Zuckerberg can't think of a single reason to break up Facebook, even as lawmakers call to dismantle or regulate major US tech platforms. In a conversation Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Zuckerberg said being big is actually a benefit in the fight to prevent the spread of misinformation and deal with election interference. "The question that I think we have to grapple with is that breaking up these companies wouldn't make any of those problems better," Zuckerberg said in a conversation with Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein. "The amount that we're investing in safety and security is greater than the whole revenue of our company was earlier this decade when we went public, so it just would not have been possible to do the things we're doing at a smaller scale."