Cass Sunstein

An op-ed by Stephen Mihm: How safe is Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s job? After President Donald Trump threatened to fire him several weeks ago, Powell upped the ante by declaring that he would refuse to resign if Trump tried to get rid of him, effectively drawing a line in the sand. ... The court also drew a hard and fast distinction between executive officers under the direct control of the president (e.g. cabinet heads) and the officers of independent agencies. And yet, as the Bloomberg Opinion columnist Cass Sunstein and his fellow legal scholar Lawrence Lessig observed in a 1994 law review article, the court “has not said what ‘good cause’ means. The Court has also failed to define “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office … There is no controlling judicial decision on how ‘independent’ the independent agencies and officers can legitimately claim to be.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Suppose that in the next few weeks, a federal agency wanted to issue a new regulation that would cost the American people $5 billion in 2019. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the agency would be required to submit its regulation to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, seeking its approval. OIRA, as the regulatory office is known, would be highly skeptical.  By any calculation, $5 billion is a huge amount. In fact, it would exceed the reported annual cost of all federal regulations approved by OIRA in some recent years.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: The Oscars were first presented in 1929. The Behavioral Economics Oscars, known throughout Hollywood as the Becons, did not appear until 2012. But as the iPhone is to the rotary phone, and as Lady Gaga is to Dean Martin, so are the Becons to the Oscars. After months of careful deliberation, the top-secret committee has finalized its choices. Here are the Becons for 2018.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Most lists of the year’s best books reflect the personal tastes of those who produce them. This list is different. It’s entirely objective. What unites these six books is that nothing is rote or by-the-numbers about them. Each of them crackles with a kind of demonic energy.

Literally meaning “economic man,” the origins of the term Homo economicusare somewhat obscure—early references can be traced to the Oxford economist C. S. Devas in 1883—but his characteristics have become all too familiar. .... These insights led to the founding of a new field, behavioral economics, which became a household name 10 years ago, after Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler published the best-selling book Nudge and showed how this new understanding of human behavior could have major policy consequences. Last year, Thaler won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and promised to spend the $1.1 million in prize money “as irrationally as possible.”

President Donald Trump’s executive actions aimed at slowing the pace of new regulation and eliminating existing ones (the first part was easier) continued in 2018. ...In effect, this amounted to “an impressive form of self-abnegation” of power, as noted by former Obama OIRA Director Cass Sunstein, since Trump’s own agencies can no longer rely on post-DOJ-memo guidance in court. While some left-of-center observers were dismissive, claiming that it “merely restated well-understood and otherwise uncontroversial black letter law,” the concern has been a longstanding one on an official basis in the eyes of the ACUS, going back decades before its 2017 report. A beneficial effect of the DOJ move is that it could induce other agencies to lean toward notice-and-comment rulemaking instead of exploiting the guidance loophole. Former OIRA Director Sunstein maintained that guidance can be “exceedingly helpful,” but deemed the Associate AG announcement a “welcome move” against guidance inadvertently behaving as a “regulatory cudgel.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Suppose that within the next few months, it becomes clear that President Donald Trump has committed impeachable offenses. Does the House of Representatives have discretion to decide whether to impeach him? Or does the Constitution require it to do so? The simplest answer, and the best, is that the Constitution requires the House to do so.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. After a tragedy, it is common for people to send “thoughts and prayers.” Skeptics argue that it’s much better to do something more tangible – to send money, to volunteer, or to press for reforms that will reduce future tragedies. In the context of gun control, the idea of thoughts and prayers has become a parody of ineffectual and even pathetic responses to horrific events. Some people decry thoughts and prayers as doing nothing – except to make bystanders feel better about themselves.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Student loans are imposing crushing burdens on millions of young Americans. According to one account, about one-quarter of the borrowers who began repaying their loans in 2005, 2007 or 2009 have since defaulted on them. That number greatly understates the economic hardship, not to mention the daily anxiety, produced by the pressures of repayment. What if there was an easy way to respond to the student debt crisis? A response that did not involve heavy-handed regulatory interventions?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie.” Those words, attributed to George Washington at the age of 6, appeared in the fifth edition of Mason Locke Weems’s “The Life of Washington,” published in 1806. In case you’ve forgotten the details of the story: Young George cut down a cherry tree, and when confronted by his father, he confessed, “I did cut it with my hatchet.” Even as a kid, the nation’s first president knew that lying was wrong. He told the truth. It doesn’t matter that the story was a myth. What matters is that it resonated: Lying was taboo.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Can the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives agree on anything? Here is a candidate: reduce paperwork mandates from the U.S. government. Before you laugh, please consider a number: 9.78 billion. That is the number of annual hours of paperwork burdens that the government imposes on its citizens.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. If President Donald Trump carries through on his promise to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens, he will probably lose in court. But don’t be surprised if the ultimate ruling is narrow: To do what he wants, the president needs unambiguous authorization from Congress — and he hasn’t got it. The governing principle is called the “canon of constitutional avoidance” — for short, the Avoidance Canon. It’s a technical idea, but it has immense importance. It links individual rights with the safeguards of checks and balances. It puts the genius of the U.S. constitutional system on fine display.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Is President Donald Trump responsible, in some sense, for the mailing of bombs to Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders? Is he responsible, in some sense, for the slaughter at the Pittsburgh synagogue? If we are speaking in terms of causation, the most reasonable answer to both questions, and the safest, is: We don’t really know. More specifically, we don’t know whether these particular crimes would have occurred in the absence of Trump’s hateful and vicious rhetoric (including his enthusiasm for the despicable cry, “Lock her up!”). But it’s also safe, and plenty reasonable, to insist that across the American population, hateful and vicious rhetoric from the president of the United States is bound to increase risks of violence.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. With respect to politics, ours is an age of Manichaeism. Many people think and act as if the forces of light are assembled against the forces of darkness, and the only serious question is this: What side are you on? “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape” offers an optimistic perspective on how the U.S. might get past that question. Produced by More in Common, an international initiative seeking to reduce social divisions, the report describes seven American “tribes.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The U.S. has experienced a quiet revolution in the past 40 years. It began under Ronald Reagan but has been embraced by all of his successors, most notably Barack Obama, who doubled down on the basic idea: Before imposing new regulations, federal agencies must perform a cost-benefit analysis and demonstrate that the benefits justify the costs. In areas from highway safety to occupational health and from energy to homeland security, agencies are now required to develop a detailed, quantitative account of the likely effects of their proposals—and to offer that account to the American public.

Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein writes a lot of books, but he says his latest, The Cost-Benefit Revolution, is special. It’s the culmination of decades of writing and research Sunstein has done in administrative law, with particular attention to the way that agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Food and Drug Administration translate laws into rules and regulation. Sunstein has been a vocal advocate of having agencies quantitatively compare the benefits of those rules and regulations to their costs, junking rules that don’t pass the bar and speeding through ones that do.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. This column is really good. Actually it’s amazing. In less than 650 words, it will explain the success of President Donald Trump -- and also show how to beat him...One of the least well-known rules of thumb is called the “confidence heuristic,” which was initially explored in 1995. The central idea is simple. When people express beliefs to one another, their level of confidence usually reflects how certain they are. It tells us how much information they have. When we are listening to others, we are more likely to be persuaded by people who seem really confident.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The Environmental Protection Agency is reportedly planning to propose a significant weakening of its mercury regulation, which is designed to protect public health. The agency’s plan includes an idea that would be simultaneously stupid and cruel — and that could lead to thousands of premature deaths.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. These are not the best of times for the U.S. Supreme Court. But whether or not Judge Brett Kavanaugh is ultimately confirmed, and despite the intense heat of the moment, the court’s fundamental legitimacy need not be, and should not be, put in question. For well over two hundred years, the Supreme Court has helped commit the nation to the supremacy of law. That commitment is a precious achievement. It safeguards liberty, and it holds off authoritarianism.

In 2007, a year before Cass Sunstein published Nudge with Richard Thaler, two law professors from Vanderbilt coined a term meant to bring attention to Sunstein’s astonishingly prolific nature: the Sunstein number. Modeled after the Erdos number, which gave anyone who collaborated directly with the famously productive mathematician Paul Erdos an Erdos number of 1 and anyone who wrote with one of his co-authors a number of 2, the Vanderbilt authors found 57 scholars with a Sunstein number of 1, and 768 with a 2. Though we at the Behavioral Scientist haven’t counted again ourselves, we bet those numbers have since skyrocketed—especially since Sunstein has written 22 (!) books since Nudge. Sunstein is a potent blend of scholar and scientist—an intellectual who is perpetually testing and sharpening his own theories through the collaborative process. And that includes his theories around nudging and behavioral science in policy. This fact made him the ideal person to talk to about nudging then, now, and in the future. Plus, he just wrote another book, called The Cost-Benefit Revolution. Below is our edited email exchange.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In the U.S., voters are often drawn to candidates who seem to be the opposite of the incumbent president — the anti-Obama, the anti-Bush, the anti-Clinton. Beto O’Rourke, now running for the Senate in Texas against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz, is the anti-Trump.