Cass Sunstein

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. President Donald Trump’s “Executive Order on Reducing Poverty in America” has produced the expected political reactions. Because it focuses on saving taxpayer money and strengthening work requirements for federal programs, many conservatives are celebrating it, while many progressives have attacked it as punitive and dehumanizing. As it turns out, it’s a lot more interesting and subtle than either side has seen – and potentially more constructive.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Americans think of July Fourth as Independence Day – the anniversary of their nation’s birth, signaled by the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But if you really want to celebrate the country’s birthday, you might do that today. It’s Patriots’ Day. In a time of national tumult and division, let’s all raise a toast, and shed some tears. Recognized in just four states, Patriots’ Day commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord, where the American Revolution began on April 19, 1775. Every American should know the tale.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. According to numerous reports, President Donald Trump is giving serious thought to firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, special counsel Robert Mueller or both. His lawyers should be telling him something pointed and specific: If the dismissal is aimed at shutting down Mueller’s investigation, it would probably be an impeachable offense. In any administration, the president’s lawyers quickly learn that one of their most important jobs is to say “no” to their boss – and to tell him things he does not want to hear.

As Americans increasingly turn to social media as their primary source for news and information, the dangers posed by the phenomenon of “fake news” are growing...In a recent study described in the journal Science, lead authors Matthew Baum, the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications, David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University and an associate of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and more than a dozen co-authors argue that a multidisciplinary effort is needed to understand better how the internet spreads content and how readers process the news and information they consume. Such broad-based efforts are necessary, the authors said, “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.”...In addition to Baum and Lazer, the paper was co-authored by Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, and Jonathan L. Zittrain.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Should coffee come with a cancer warning? As a matter of policy, the answer seems obvious: Of course not. As a matter of law, it’s much more complicated, at least in California. A tentative judicial ruling in Los Angeles County last week suggests that when people go to the local coffee place, their morning ritual is going to be accompanied by a jolt of fear. It could potentially turn into a fiasco, I think, and it tells us something important about how well-intentioned laws can go badly wrong.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. For the first time since the 1940s, Americans have been asking: Can it happen here? The question, which has been debated in the U.S. for months, is meant to draw attention to the potential fragility of democratic self-government -- and to emphasize that in some periods, democracies are especially likely to turn in authoritarian directions. It would be fair to pose that question in any case in light of China’s continued rise, Russia’s resurgent aggression, and the disturbing developments in Turkey, Poland, Hungary and the Philippines. To his most severe critics, some of the words and deeds of President Donald Trump make it seem as if democratic principles might not be entirely secure in the U.S. itself.

An interview with Cass Sunstein. Home is a place where you can be entirely yourself — unshaven, feet up, unworried, slow heartbeat. I live in Concord, Massachusetts, where the American Revolution started. My house, which was built in 1763, played a role — munitions were held here on that fateful day, April 19, 1775, when a British Army force marched on the town to capture the hidden cache of arms. The house feels as if it has a bright, free, determined, revolutionary spirit.

An interview with Cass Sunstein. On The Gist, before Donald Trump’s headline-hogging presidency, things like bridge collapses made news for more than a few days. In the interview, Cass Sunstein’s new book asks if the U.S. is fundamentally immune to authoritarianism, or whether president Trump has proved the opposite. His new book—Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America—puts the question to more than a dozen leading writers.

When Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein found out on March 14 that he was this year’s recipient of the Holberg Prize, he said he was both surprised and gratified. “It felt like squash had been made an Olympic sport, and I had been informed that I made the team,” Sunstein said. “Meaning, very surprising and slightly surreal—and a great honor.” The Holberg Prize is a Norwegian award given annually to a researcher who has made great contributions to the arts and humanities, the social sciences, law, or theology. Sunstein is a researcher in behavioral science and political theory, and his work explores the intersection of the two fields...Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe, who taught Sunstein, wrote in an email that Sunstein “is a national treasure.” “His breadth and depth of insight across disciplines is unparalleled, as is his productivity. That he credits me as his mentor is humbling but enormously gratifying,” he wrote.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The horrendous actions by Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling company, and Aleksander Kogan, a Russian-American researcher, raise serious questions about privacy, social media, democracy and fraud. Amidst the justified furor, one temptation should be firmly resisted: for public and private institutions to lock their data down, blocking researchers and developers from providing the many benefits that it promises – for health, safety, and democracy itself.

In The New York Times Book Review, Andrew Sullivan reviews “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” by Cass R. Sunstein, and “Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America,” edited by Sunstein. Sullivan writes: It’s really hard to impeach a president. The founders included the provision, from the very start, as the weakest, “break the glass in case of emergency” mechanism for reining in an out-of-control executive. He was already subject to a four-year term, so he would remain answerable to the people, and to two other branches of government, which could box him in constitutionally.

Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein has been named this year’s winner of the Holberg Prize, one of the largest international awards given to an outstanding researcher in the arts and humanities, the social sciences, law, or theology. Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, is being given the prize for his wide-ranging, original, prolific, and influential research...“The main goal has been to deepen the foundations of democratic theory for the modern era, and to understand in practical terms how democracies might succeed in helping to make people’s lives better — and longer.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Did you hear? Taylor Swift is doing a new album, consisting of her favorite Katy Perry songs — and despite their lengthy feud, Perry herself will be performing on the album! OK, that’s not true. But a new study finds that by every measure, false rumors are more likely to spread than true ones. For those who believe in the marketplace of ideas and democratic self-government, that’s a big problem, raising an obvious question: What, if anything, are we going to do about it?

Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor known for bringing behavioral science to bear on public policy (not to mention for writing a best-seller about “Star Wars”), has won Norway’s Holberg Prize, which is awarded annually to a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts, humanities, the social sciences, law or theology...In a statement, Mr. Sunstein summed up his work as addressing “how to promote enduring constitutional ideals — freedom, dignity, equality, self-government, the rule of law — under contemporary circumstances, which include large bureaucracies that sometimes promote, and sometimes threaten, those ideals.”

An article by David M. J. Lazer, Matthew A. Baum, Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, and Jonathan L. Zittrain. The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age. Concern over the problem is global. However, much remains unknown regarding the vulnerabilities of individuals, institutions, and society to manipulations by malicious actors. A new system of safeguards is needed.

This week, more than a dozen high-profile social scientists and legal scholars charged their profession to help fix democracy by studying the crisis of fake news. Their call to action, published in Science, was notable for listing all that researchers still do not know about the phenomenon. How common is fake news, how does it work, and what can online platforms do to defang it? “There are surprisingly few scientific answers to these basic questions,” the authors write...The authors of the Science essay—who include Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor and former Obama administration official, and Duncan Watts, a social scientist at Microsoft Research—argue that avoiding the term distorts the issue. Fake news refers to a distinct phenomenon with a specific name, they say, and we should just use that name (fake news) to talk about that problem (fake news)...In an email, [Laurence] Tribe responded: “I do my best to avoid retweeting or relying in any way on dubiously sourced material and assume that, with experience, I’m coming closer to my own ideal. But no source is infallible, and anyone who pretends to reach that goal is guilty of self-deception or worse.”

...Nudges — tiny changes that have surprisingly large effects on how we act — offer policymakers a way to gently push us toward doing the right thing: Automatically sign up drivers as organ donors, or enroll employees in the company retirement plan, unless they opt out. Put the fruit at eye level and hide the cake and candy somewhere inconspicuous. These nudges work because real-world humans don't make decisions like coldly rational Mr. Spocks, but like flawed, idiosyncratic Captain Kirks. Nudges are essentially ways to harness our less-than-rational behaviors to help ourselves, or those around us...The idea first came to public view a decade ago through the best-selling book Nudge, by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein...“The biggest change is the sheer explosion of initiatives, from private and public sectors alike,” says Sunstein, of Harvard University.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. President Donald Trump has shown little or no respect for the independence of the nation’s institutions. That lack of respect is what distinguishes him from his recent predecessors, both Republican and Democratic, and above all it is what demonstrates an authoritarian disposition. Reasonable people can differ about the Trump administration’s policies on taxes, regulation, abortion and government spending. For those who strongly support those policies, some of Trump’s less appealing personal characteristics, including a lack of grace, might seem relatively unimportant, a matter of detail.

...To some, our phones and apps are little more than a distraction; to others, they're nothing short of an existential threat. But the vast majority of critics—and more and more companies—agree: People could use help deciding where to place their attention, to ensure that their time with technology is—to borrow an increasingly fashionable phrase—time well spent. And make no mistake: We users do need help. And that help can take a form that's subtle and effective...But our susceptibilities also make us receptive to something Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein calls libertarian paternalism, a term he coined with Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler to describe "nudges" by which institutions help people make better choices (as judged by themselves), while preserving their freedom to make those choices at as low a cost as possible...The question for tech giants, Sunstein says, is not whether they should engage in libertarian paternalism, but the ends to which they do so. "For companies like Facebook and Apple, there is a pressing need for a lot more thought on the goals of choice architecture," he says.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Very quietly, the Trump administration recently issued a draft of its annual report on the costs and benefits of federal regulations. It’s a responsible and highly professional document — and a corrective to the noisiest claims, from both the White House and its critics, on the whole topic of regulation. The report is required by the Regulatory Right-to-Know Act, enacted in 2000. Since that time, Republican and Democratic administrations have cataloged the costs and benefits of federal regulations.