Cass Sunstein

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.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Everyone agrees that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers are forbidden from discriminating on the basis of sex. Are they also forbidden from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation? In a momentous decision earlier this week, with large implications for employers all over the country, a federal court of appeals ruled that they are. Superb opinions were delivered by both Judge Diane Wood, author of the majority opinion, and Judge Diane Sykes, author of the dissent.

An interview with Cass Sunstein. Back in 2010, Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google, had a vision for a personalized web. He said, in a Wall Street Journal interview, that one day, "technology will be so good, it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them." Of course, Schmidt was exactly right — think Netflix, Pandora, Google News. But, according to Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, that personalization, especially on social media, has also isolated us, polarized our political parties and divided our democracy.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Contrary to numerous reports, President Donald Trump’s executive order on climate change does not come even close to eliminating President Barack Obama’s legacy with respect to greenhouse-gas reductions. Most of that legacy, involving dramatic emissions cuts in the transportation sector and from household appliances, remains intact.

What would possess two Obama Administration veterans to propose that the Trump Administration—which on Tuesday revoked much of Obama's climate legacy—implement a cap and trade program to reduce auto emissions? A new cap-and-trade proposal was unveiled Monday by Cass Sunstein, now of Harvard Law School, who headed Obama's effort to streamline regulations, and Michael Greenstone, now of the University of Chicago, who served as chief architect of Obama's "social cost of carbon" policy, which enabled the government to consider the climate impacts of nearly everything it does—until Trump abandoned the policy yesterday.

Economists and regulatory experts are proposing a cap-and-trade system for vehicle greenhouse gas emissions to replace existing fuel economy standards...Michael Greenstone and Sam Ori from the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute and Cass Sunstein, former President Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and now a legal scholar at Harvard University, saw an opening...Sunstein, one of the country's leading legal scholars, argued that EPA could implement the system after 2025 without passing legislation because it is required to regulate tailpipe emissions. "The Trump administration has a policy challenge," he said. "They seem inclined to think that it's too aggressive now, but how to form a new proposal is very much in their hands...If the legal and administrative challenges can be met, they can meet their own goals, which is having something less burdensome, and energy savings goals."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Charles Schumer, the leader of the Senate minority, has said that he will ask Democrats to filibuster the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch. In response to that request, the Senate Democrats have four options. Each of them has considerable appeal, but each also runs into significant objections.

...In a new book, “#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media,” Harvard Law School’s Cass R. Sunstein argues that social media curation dramatically limits exposure to views and information that don’t align with already-established beliefs, which makes it harder and harder to find an essential component of democracy — common ground. In an email exchange, Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, talked about how America needs to restore “serendipity” online and bring back the conditions necessary for a healthy democracy in the digital era.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Robert Silvers, who died on Monday morning, was the editor of the New York Review of Books since 1963, meaning that for more than 50 years he presided over the leading literary magazine in the English language. I was privileged to work with him on numerous occasions, going back to 1992. He was not only a giant, but also the incarnation of what a democracy needs: civility, considerateness, fairness, authenticity, humility and unfailing attention to detail, which, in his hands, turned out to be a form of love.

Cass Sunstein wants you to get out of your bubble. In fact, the Harvard Law School professor says that democracy depends on it. “In a well-functioning democracy, people do not live in echo chamber or information cocoons,” Sunstein writes at the outset of his new book, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media...Social media lacks the characteristics that make cities great, Sunstein says. A Twitter feed full of people who think the same things, “might seem liberating because all that clutter is gone, but you’re putting a jail sentence on yourself,” he says.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Small businesses and startups are responsible for a big chunk of U.S. economic growth and job creation. Unfortunately, many of them are stymied by state and federal regulation. The good news is that the Regulatory Flexibility Act, originally enacted in 1980, could provide a lot of help. If the administration of President Donald Trump starts to pay attention to it, it could give that tired old law a lot more energy – and promote important economic goals.

An interview with Cass Sunstein. A well-functioning democracy depends on people interacting with a wide range of people and ideas. As the internet and social media grow ever more sophisticated and targeted, they threaten democracy by creating “echo chambers” and “information cocoons.” So says a Harvard professor of behavioral economics, who offers practical and legal solutions.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. A Republican president takes office, vowing to eliminate job-killing regulations issued by his Democratic predecessor. In his first weeks, the automobile industry publicly asks him to eliminate specific regulations that are, in its view, crushingly burdensome. He agrees. Sound familiar? It should. But we’re speaking of 1981, not 2017, and of Ronald Reagan’s decision to repeal one of the central achievements of the Jimmy Carter administration: a rule designed to reduce highway deaths and injuries by requiring “passive restraints,” such as airbags, in motor vehicles.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In one of his few statements since joining government, presidential adviser Stephen Bannon announced that one of the Trump administration’s principal goals was “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” Given the critical role of federal agencies in protecting public health and safety, that’s pretty provocative. But President Donald Trump’s latest action suggests that reform is the aim, rather than deconstruction -- and the reform might even turn out to be reasonable.

An interview with Cass Sunstein. This week, Ian Sample explores the psychology behind ‘nudging’, its usage by governments, and some of the ethical quandaries involved.