Cass Sunstein

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. All over the world, private and public institutions have been adopting “nudges” -- interventions that preserve freedom of choice, but steer people in a particular direction. A GPS device nudges you. So does a reminder from your doctor, informing you that you have an appointment next Wednesday; an automatic enrollment policy from your employer, defaulting you into a 401(k) plan; and a calorie label at fast-food restaurants, telling you that a cheeseburger won’t be great for your waistline. Recent evidence demonstrates that nudges can be amazingly effective -- far more so, per dollar spent, than other tools, such as economic incentives. But a big question remains: Across different nations, do nudges have the same impact? Here’s a cautionary note.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The Trump administration has repeatedly vowed to reduce the level of federal regulation. Naomi Rao, who was confirmed this week as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, will play a central role in that effort. In her first year, Rao, who was a law professor at George Mason University, should consider reviving a creative idea pioneered in the George W. Bush administration -- one that could enlist OIRA's expertise to spur cost-saving deregulation, an administration priority, as well as to promote life-saving regulatory initiatives.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. For leaders as well as friends, spouses and colleagues, grace is a precious characteristic. Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump’s policy choices, our nation has never had a president more lacking in grace. Whether or not Abraham Lincoln was the greatest American president, he was certainly its most gracious...On the eve of victory, Lincoln avoided triumphalism or crowing. Instead he rejected malice and called for charity. He backed his firmness with both humility (“as God gives us to see the right”) and tenderness (“to care for him who shall have borne the battle”).

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Independence Day arrives this year during a period of intense political polarization, anger and distrust, potentially jeopardizing the ideals for which the American Revolution was fought. That’s a problem, but it also signals an opportunity. Nations benefit from the unifying effects of shared memories -- especially if those memories reflect a commitment to ideals. The revolution was inspired by two such ideals: self-government and human liberty.

It’s hard to find defenders of impeachment—or at least, it’s hard to find good faith, consistent defenders of impeachment...Recent debates on this topic aren’t a symptom of a newly polarized age, and they aren’t a sign of national decline, the Harvard legal scholar (and former Obama adviser) Cass Sunstein said Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. “The very word impeachment sounds kind of unfamiliar and British and dusty,” he quipped, but in fact, impeachment is a fundamental part of the American project, spanning back to the Declaration of Independence, which stands as articles of impeachment for King George.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The executive branch under President Donald Trump is not issuing a lot of new regulations, but congressional Republicans, joined by some Democrats, have been thinking seriously about regulatory reform. They've produced an intelligent, constructive, complex, imperfect bill – the Regulatory Accountability Act of 2017 – that deserves careful attention.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Amid the controversies dominating the news last week, hardly any attention was paid to the confirmation hearing for Neomi Rao, who was nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. If confirmed, Rao, a law professor at George Mason University, will play a key role in overseeing federal regulation in areas such as environmental protection, food safety, health care, occupational safety and transportation policy.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In an early executive order, President Donald Trump told government agencies that if they issue one regulation, they must take two away. Four months later, we are seeing how the “one in, two out” rule will play out in his administration. In effect, the federal government now has a regulatory moratorium (with modest exceptions), accompanied by episodic efforts to undo rules of the Obama era. The best projections are that the moratorium will continue and that the episodic undoing efforts will slow down.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In the U.S. and Europe, many people worry that if prominent politicians signal that they dislike and fear immigrants, foreigners and people of minority religions, they will unleash people’s basest impulses and fuel violence. In their view, social norms of civility, tolerance and respect are fragile. If national leaders such as President Donald Trump flout those norms, they might unravel.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. As soon as Donald Trump was elected, some of his critics argued that he should be impeached. Those arguments were reckless and irresponsible, and an insult to the many millions of Americans who voted for him. Impeachment is a singularly grave act -- a remedy of last resort. Those who think that they favor impeaching any president should ask themselves this question: If I strongly supported his policies, would I still think that there were sufficient grounds for impeachment? If that is the right question, then talk of the possibility of impeachment is beginning to look less reckless, and less irresponsible, than it did a few months ago.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Taken by itself and out of context, President Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey was hardly unreasonable. Hillary Clinton might have done the same thing. No one should doubt that Comey is an honorable man. But fairly or unfairly, he had lost the trust of the American people, largely because of his controversial choices with respect to the investigation of Clinton’s emails and Russia’s role in the presidential election. In a highly polarized period, when so many decisions are regarded suspiciously, trust is an essential commodity, especially for the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

As the news broke late this afternoon, the politicos of Washington stared into their smartphones, stunned, struggling with what to make of it. TV networks cut into their regularly scheduled programming. Chyrons promising “breaking news” actually delivered it: President Donald Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey...Cass Sunstein..."There are two ways to understand President Trump's firing of James Comey, and neither is unreasonable. The first is that in light of the multiple controversies that came to surround Comey, he was rightly fired. The FBI director needs to be widely trusted by the American people. Comey is not widely trusted. For the FBI, a fresh start is a good idea. The second is that Trump does not want an independent FBI director; he wants someone who is fully subservient to him.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. If a nation wants to increase productivity, it is natural to focus on promoting innovation, improving education and decreasing regulation. But a positive step, potentially supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, could come from an unlikely place: increasing both the availability and the size of the earned-income tax credit. True, the EITC is not normally thought to promote productivity at all. Most people see it as an antipoverty measure, designed to help the working poor. Its goal is to redistribute wealth, not to increase it. But that’s much too simple.

Harvard professor Cass Sunstein returns to discuss his new book #Republic, which looks at polarization in the digital age. While America isn’t more polarized than ever, Sunstein says it’s important to focus on how today’s problems are different and new. “You find yourself in a cocoon, even if you didn’t choose it,” says Sunstein. But he sees hope in sites that are actively trying to sell their readers on content from outside their normal media diet. “In the fullness of time, the non–echo chamber model is going to be producing a lot of revenue.” In the Spiel, we discover what it would have been like if President Trump had been commander in chief during our time of greatest national strife.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT technology specialist, celebrated the emergence of “the Daily Me” – a digital news service tailored to each reader’s specific interests. With the Daily Me, he suggested, you would no longer rely on newspapers and magazines to curate what you saw, and you could bypass the television networks. Instead, you could design a communications package just for you, with topics and perspectives chosen in advance...But let’s hold the celebration. The Daily Me is an enemy of democracy. Representative government depends on shared experiences, common knowledge and a host of unanticipated, unchosen encounters. All too often, information cocoons become echo chambers, which make mutual understanding impossible and which promote dogmatism, polarisation and the fragmentation of society.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In recent decades, psychologists and economists have produced a flood of new findings about how human beings think and act. Those findings offer compelling lessons about how to change people’s behavior. Governments have taken notice -- and so has the private sector. There are terrific opportunities here, but also real risks.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Well before Donald Trump, we had plenty of presidents who operated by instinct. Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush all prided themselves on their ability to size up people and situations — and to do so accurately and quickly. Social scientists like to distinguish between two ways of thinking: fast and slow. In their terminology, System 1 is intuitive, rapid, and emotional. By contrast, System 2 is deliberative, reflective, and intent on calculation. System 1 operates effortlessly; System 2 works hard...On the basis of his first months, it seems clear that we have never had a System 1 president like Donald Trump — which accounts for his head-spinning combination of bold moves, big ideas, warm embraces, unseemly score-keeping, bizarre rages, and sudden reversals.

Cass Sunstein, former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, suggested that Facebook experiment with an “opposing viewpoints button” in the website’s newsfeed but cautioned against the company curating content based on policy positions. “You could just click on it and you would get, for a certain amount of stuff that comes on your newsfeed, things that think differently from how you think – and it could make you very unhappy that you clicked the button because ‘why are they sending me this nonsense?’” he said during a discussion about his book, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, at the American Enterprise Institute.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein...Outbursts of campus activism can be good, potentially even great. But far too often, they turn out to be about expressing what students regard as the correct values, rather than actually improving people’s lives. Expressive protests take up a lot of time and energy, and produce an abundance of passion. But they tend to do little or nothing to address the injustices that students say they want to remedy. Efforts to shut down speakers are the worst and the most extreme form of campus expressivism. It should go without saying that at colleges and universities, free speech is indispensable, and interferences with it are deplorable.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Something good might come of the horrible incident involving United Airlines, in which a passenger was forcibly evicted to make room for airline personnel. The Department of Transportation, working with the major airlines, should substantially increase the compensation given to passengers involuntarily bumped because of overbooking. By itself, overbooking is not objectionable. Sometimes passengers miss flights because of late connections. Sometimes they just don’t show up. Most airlines occasionally overbook.