Cass Sunstein

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. As the 2016 presidential election made clear, we live in the era of the echo chamber. To escape their own, progressives need to be reading the best conservative thought -- certainly Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, but also more contemporary figures such as Antonin Scalia and Robert Ellickson. The same is true for conservatives, if they hope to learn from progressives. Here are five books with which they might start.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Donald Trump promises to impose, soon after his inauguration, a new requirement on federal agencies: If they want to issue a new regulation, they have to rescind two regulations that are now on the books. The idea of “one in, two out” has rhetorical appeal, but it’s going to be extremely hard to pull off. In the abstract, of course, it sounds like a gimmick, and it’s a pretty dumb idea. As presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama have recognized, the real question is whether regulations, whether new or old, are justified. That requires a careful analysis of their costs and their benefits.

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office in January, the legal community has begun to ponder and prepare for the changes the incoming administration may make...Adrian Vermeule ’90, J.D. ’93, the Ralph S. Tyler Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, sees two possible prospects for administrative law under Trump. One involves what he called “bipartisan retrenchment.”...Four major signposts during the first 100 days will show whether the Trump administration will transform executive authority or not, said Cass Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. First, how does the Trump administration handle ostensibly independent regulatory commissions such as the Security and Exchange Commission or the Federal Reserve?...With the executive branch’s role leading the trends in America’s criminal justice system and criminal justice reform, the effect that Trump’s presidency will have in this realm, given that his positions on a number of issues are either unformed or shifting, is still unknown, said criminal law professor Andrew Crespo.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Many Republicans hope, and many Democrats fear, that Donald Trump's administration will close or shrink a variety of federal agencies and offices. Both the hope and the fear are justified -- even without a supermajority in the Senate, there's a lot Republicans can do to restrict the actions of the executive branch. Let’s start with what Trump can't do: Acting on his own, could he disband an agency or department -- say, the Department of Energy? Absolutely not. He would need Congress for that, and almost certainly 60 votes (and it’s not going to get close to that). But his administration could work to cut staff, if only by refusing to fill vacancies, and it could certainly work with Congress to reduce appropriations.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Republicans, including President-elect Donald Trump, have some eminently sensible proposals for regulatory reform. But the party is also pressing two terrible ideas, which seem to have a significant chance of being enacted in 2017. The irony is that both of them would be damaging to the Trump administration itself.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Democrats and progressives, you lost. You can fight President-elect Donald Trump, or you can join him. There will be time enough for fighting, but for now, I suggest that you join him -- at least on some of his high priority items. As it turns out, several of them are your priorities too.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The Donald Trump presidency, coupled with the new Congress, is likely to produce major changes in federal law. But for the Supreme Court, expect a surprising amount of continuity -- far more than conservatives hope and progressives fear. If, as expected, Trump is able to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, the court will look a lot like it did until Scalia died in February: four relative liberals (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor); two moderate conservatives (John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy); and three relative conservatives (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the new justice).

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Employers, like most people, tend to trust their intuitions. But when employers decide whom to hire, they trust those intuitions far more than they should.

This year, Dorothy E. Roberts ’80, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a leading scholar on legal and biosocial theory, is…

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms -- the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault. Immediately after the election, one of the most pressing questions will be how to restore them. To answer that question, let’s assume what philosophers call a “veil of ignorance.” If we didn’t know whether the president would be Democratic or Republican -- if it could turn out to be Clinton or Trump -- what are the minimal norms on which we might agree? Here are four suggestions.

The first line of Cass Sunstein’s latest book, The Ethics of Influence, announces: “We live in an age of psychology and behavioral economics—the behavioral sciences.” For Sunstein, a Harvard law professor and former Obama administration official, this is as momentous a statement as saying we live in an age of antibiotics, steam engines, or the Internet. But just saying that nudges are here to stay does not make it so. In fact, if their future were not in doubt, why the need for yet another book on the topic—and so soon after his Father’s Day-gift-ready book on Star Wars—arguing that they should be here to stay? Like the president he served, Sunstein is now focused on cementing his legacy.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: t’s hard to imagine a presidential election with higher stakes than the current one: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offer radically different ideas about the country's direction, and many people believe that one or the other would be catastrophic. Yet new evidence raises the possibility that we will see an unusually low voter turnout.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Bob Dylan has surpassed Walt Whitman as the defining American artist, celebrating the capacity for self-invention as the highest form of freedom. “He not busy being born is busy dying,” Dylan sang, in “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Reinventer of folk music, voice of the 1960s, blues singer, rock star, born-again Christian, champion of gospel, country singer, old-style crooner, and now winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dylan has found a million different ways to say the same thing.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In one of the most stunning rulings in recent years on separation of powers, the prestigious federal court of appeals in Washington, DC, on Tuesday struck down the law creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- at least as the independent agency that Congress designed. To cure what it saw as a constitutional defect, the court ruled that the bureau’s head must not be independent of the president, but must serve at his pleasure and be subject to his complete control. It’s an appealing idea, elaborated with an unusual level of scholarship, clarity, and even passion. But as a matter of constitutional law, it’s a bit wild. The Supreme Court shouldn't accept it -- and probably won't.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one's own. That’s not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as “the other side.” If you think that Barack Obama has been a terrific president (as I do) and that Hillary Clinton would be an excellent successor (as I also do), then you might want to consider the following books, to help you to understand why so many of your fellow citizens disagree with you:

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. “I'd like to buy a new boomerang please. Also, can you tell me how to throw the old one away?” Never mind whether you think that joke is funny. Do you think your best friend would like it? You might think you know the answer; after all, people like each other partly because they make each other laugh. At the very least, you might be confident that a mere machine, equipped with data about how other people react to jokes, couldn't do better than you in answering the question of what your best friend will find funny. If so, think again.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Why do so many Americans oppose immigration, and why has it become a central issue in the presidential campaign? A growing body of research suggests that the answer isn't economic anxiety, or concerns about public spending, or even general nationalism. It is more specific -- and more disturbing. The question of what drives anti-immigrant sentiment is put in sharp relief by an extensive report released last week by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report finds that immigration has positive effects on economic growth -- and doesn't hurt the employment or wages of native-born workers.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Last Wednesday was a historic day for behavioral science. The White House released the annual report of its Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. The U.K.’s Behavioural Insights Team released its own annual report on the same day. With the recent creation of similar teams in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Qatar, the two reports deserve careful attention. Outlining dozens of initiatives, the reports offer two general lessons about uses of behavioral science by governments. First, both teams are enlisting behavioral science not for controversial purposes, but to encourage people to benefit from public programs and to comply with the law. Second, governments are constantly testing the tools to see whether they actually work.

Cass R. Sunstein, the Harvard Law polymath who annoyed business and activists in his three-year ride as Obama's White House regulatory chief and the author of The World According to Star Wars and heavier-thinking books, is a prescient student of our digital way of talking. As I noted in my 2004 book Comcasted, while Web evangelists were still idealizing online as the place to tie our world into one big friendly village, Sunstein worried it was ghettoizing into "echo chambers" where we avoid people we disagree with, sharpen prejudices, and abandon standards of evidence. Now, the professor (whose Philadelphia ancestors make him a cousin of Comcast boss Brian Roberts) is asking the question: Do we really want to read our leaders' emails?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Last week was the 50th anniversary of “Star Trek” -- or more precisely, as my Bloomberg View colleague Stephen Carter notes, the airing of the first episode of the series. It’s not often that after a half-century, a television show sparks a national celebration (including a set of commemorative stamps from the U.S. Postal Service). What accounts for the series’ enduring appeal? The answer lies in its portrayal of experiences and societies that, by virtue of their radical differences from our own, allow us to see the most familiar things in a new light. That’s what the best science fiction does...With that point in mind, here’s an account of three iconic Star Trek episodes -- ones you’d show someone who wants to know what the fuss is about.