Who is cass sunstein

Below is a summary of Sunstein's education and career: [1]. The following table contains a selection of works by professor Sunstein about the administrative state and related issues.

Any links in the table below feature Ballotpedia summaries of that scholarly work. Ballotpedia features , encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers. Click here to contact our editorial staff, and click here to report an error. Click here to contact us for media inquiries, and please donate here to support our continued expansion. Share this page Follow Ballotpedia. What's on your ballot? Jump to: navigation , search. Epstein Federalist No.

Sign in Email. Forgot password? Proceed as Guest Continue. Home Contributors Cass Sunstein. Past Events Commentary. Jun 12 Friday p. The current policy prescribes standards that focus on fuel economy alone, as opposed to lifetime consumption, and treats vehicle categories differentially, meaning that it imposes unnecessarily high costs and does not deliver guaranteed GHG savings.

On the basis of a commitment to cost-benefit analysis, which has defined U. We show that these reforms would reduce fuel consumption and GHG emissions in transportation with greater certainty and do so at a far lower cost per ton of GHG emissions avoided. We also show that the the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation could implement such an approach within their existing statutory authority.

Sunstein, Has Liberalism Ruined Everything? Theory There is good reason for skepticism about these claims. Liberalism is not a person, and it is not an agent in history. Claims about the supposedly adverse social effects of liberalism are best taken not as causal claims at all, but as normative objections that should be defended on their merits. Public opinion is shaped in significant part by online content, spread via social media and curated algorithmically.

The current online ecosystem has been designed predominantly to capture user attention rather than to promote deliberate cognition and autonomous choice; information overload, finely tuned personalization and distorted social cues, in turn, pave the way for manipulation and the spread of false information. How can transparency and autonomy be promoted instead, thus fostering the positive potential of the web?

Effective web governance informed by behavioural research is critically needed to empower individuals online. We identify technologically available yet largely untapped cues that can be harnessed to indicate the epistemic quality of online content, the factors underlying algorithmic decisions and the degree of consensus in online debates.

We then map out two classes of behavioural interventions—nudging and boosting— that enlist these cues to redesign online environments for informed and autonomous choice. Immense amounts of information are now accessible to people, including information that bears on their past, present and future. An important research challenge is to determine how people decide to seek or avoid information.

Here we propose a framework of information-seeking that aims to integrate the diverse motives that drive information-seeking and its avoidance. The suggestion is that people assess these influences and integrate them into a calculation of the value of information that leads to information-seeking or avoidance. The theory offers a framework for characterizing and quantifying individual differences in information-seeking, which we hypothesize may also be diagnostic of mental health.

We consider biases that can lead to both insufficient and excessive information-seeking. We also discuss how the framework can help government agencies to assess the welfare effects of mandatory information disclosure. Sunstein, How Special is Democracy? Letters Previous research has, however, suggested that such institutions can also have a direct, positive effect on cooperative and efficient behavior.

In a laboratory experiment, we test this suggestion by comparing the effect of recommendations on how to play that are generated through a group vote to expert-generated recommendations, on play in a minimum effort game.

We find no difference between the two: both expert recommendations and democratically generated recommendations increase the efficiency of choices. In addition, we find that merely considering potential recommendations, and knowing that others have done so as well, can help enhance efficient coordination.

Many Americans fear the power of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats — the deep state. The administrative state may be a Leviathan, but it can be a principled one. Gosset, Optimal Sludge? Online Public officials often impose eligibility requirements that have two effects: 1 they screen out ineligible people and 2 they screen out eligible people.

In these circumstances, there is a pervasive normative issue: what is the optimal tradeoff between 1 and 2? It is plausible to think that a great deal depends on numbers. If, for example, the number of ineligible people who are screened out is very large, and if the number of eligible people who are screened out is very small, then there would seem little ground for objection. We identify competing, plausible positions on the normative question, which we label consequentialist and legalist.

We also offer the results of a pilot study, which shows that the overwhelming majority of respondents would favor changes that allow ineligible people to receive benefits, if that is the price of ensuring that eligible people do so as well — unless the number of ineligible recipients is very high. The survey results suggest that most people reject the legalist position and embrace a form of consequentialism. With respect to the election of the U. President, the U. Constitution is vague and full of silences and gaps.

When the vote is close, and when people disagree about who won, the Constitution does not sort out the respective roles of the states, the Electoral College, Congress, and the Vice President. The Electoral Count Act of is the closest thing to a roadmap for handling controversies after election day, and on many issues, it offers helpful guidance. At the same time, it is not at all clear that it is constitutional, or that it is binding, and in the face of a claim of serious mistakes and fraud, it contains silence and ambiguity.

Taken together, the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act answer numerous questions, but they also leave important ones unanswered, including the role of the House and Senate amidst allegations of fraud and the proper role of the Vice President.

This brief primer identifies the main answers and the principal open questions. Brewer, Saad B. Omer, Martha Scherzer, Sunita Sah et al. Governments around the world have implemented measures to manage the transmission of coronavirus disease COVID While the majority of these measures are proving effective, they have a high social and economic cost, and response strategies are being adjusted.

The World Health Organization WHO recommends that communities should have a voice, be informed and engaged, and participate in this transition phase. The transition phase should also be informed by real-time data according to which governmental responses should be updated.

Textualists insist that judges should follow the ordinary meaning of a legal text, and sometimes texts have an ordinary meaning that judges can follow. But sometimes texts have no such thing, in the sense that they are reasonably susceptible to two or more interpretations. Some textualists fall victim to something like the duck-rabbit illusion.

They genuinely see a duck; they insist that a duck is the only thing that reasonable people can see. Their perception is automatic, even though it might have been primed, or a product of preconceptions.

But reasonable people might well see a rabbit. Various approaches are possible to determine whether we have a duck or a rabbit; most of them do not turn on the text at all. The present paper focuses on green defaults as demand-side policies supporting the uptake of renewable energy in Germany.

It sets out to gain a better understanding of whether and for whom green electricity defaults work. The present study is one of the first to use a large-scale data set to investigate this question.

We combine micro-level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel GSOEP covering private households including a wealth of individual information with macro-level information such as population density of a region and proportion of energy suppliers in a given region that use a green opt-out tariff within their basic supply.

We show that in Germany, green defaults, automatically enrolling customers in renewable energy sources, tend to stick, especially but not only among those who are concerned about the problem of climate change. This finding, based on real-world rather than experimental evidence, attests to the power of automatic enrollment in addressing environmental problems in Germany and potentially beyond, including climate change, and also adds to the growing literature on the substantial effects of shifting from opt-in to opt-out strategies.

Sunstein, Valuing Environmental Labels , 28 N. Federal regulators have often required environmental labels, which may be designed to help consumers to save money or to reduce externalities. Under prevailing executive orders, regulators are required to project the benefits and costs of such labels, and also to show that the benefits justify the costs. These projections can be extremely challenging, partly because of the difficulty of knowing how consumers will respond to labels, partly because of the challenging of converting behavioral changes into monetary equivalents.

The benefits of environmental labels should include 1 the monetary value of the reduced externalities and 2 the monetary benefit to consumers, measured by willingness to pay. It may be difficult for regulators to know 1 , and even if they can figure out 2 , willingness to pay may not capture the welfare benefit to consumers, at least if consumers are not adequately informed or if they suffer from some kind of behavioral bias.

In principle, agencies should include, as part of 2 , the moral convictions of people who care about environmental goods, at least if those convictions are backed by willingness to pay. In the face of the evident epistemic difficulties, sometimes the best that agencies can do is to engage in breakeven analysis, by which they explore what the benefits would have to be in order to justify the costs. Technical as they might seem, these claims raise fundamental questions about valuation of environmental goods and the possible disconnect between willingness to pay and welfare.

Pol'y Disclosure mandates are pervasive. Though designed to inform consumers, such mandates may lead consumers to draw false inferences — for example, that a product is harmful when it is not. When deciding to require disclosure of an ingredient in or characteristic of a product, regulators may be motivated by evidence that the ingredient or characteristic is harmful to consumers.

But they may also be motivated by a belief that consumers have a right to know what they are buying or by interest-group pressure. If consumers think that the disclosure is motivated by evidence of harm, when in fact it is motivated by a belief in a right-to-know or by interest-group pressure, then they will be inefficiently deterred from purchasing the product. We analyze this general concern about disclosure mandates.

We also offer survey evidence demonstrating that the risk of false inferences is serious and real. Our framework has implications for the ongoing debate over the labeling of food with genetically modified organisms GMOs ; it suggests that the relevant labels might prove misleading to some or many consumers, producing a potentially serious welfare loss.

Under prevailing executive orders, regulators must consider that loss and if feasible, quantify it. Sunstein, Like a Dog , L. Where do dogs come from? Where do human beings come from? Recent research suggests a single answer: domestication.

As dogs are to wolves, so is the less robust but more docile Homo sapiens to various other, now extinct human species, including Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. Homo sapiens can be seen as the dog of the various human species.

Homo sapiens survived in part because a reduction in reactive aggression made it possible for us to display significant increases in social learning and cooperation. As the information gap between experts and non-experts narrows, it is increasingly important that experts learn to give advice to non-experts in a way that is effective, and that respects their autonomy and agency.

We surveyed participants using a hypothetical medical scenario in which participants were counseled on the risks and benefits of taking antibiotics for a sore throat in circumstances in which antibiotics were inappropriate. We hypothesize that this is because it is seen by non-experts as more trustworthy and more respectful of their autonomy.

The goal of this essay is to offer a brisk progress report about behaviorally informed policy and law, while also providing some conceptual clarifications. It identifies a diverse range of initiatives, focusing largely on experience in the United States, that involve nudging and uses of behavioral science.

It also explores prominent objections, coming both from those who believe that nudges are unduly aggressive, and should be avoided, and from those who believe that they are too weak and timid, and should be replaced or supplemented with mandates and bans.

Giving ultimate authority to choosers might be taken to respect their autonomy and also promote their welfare insofar as people are uniquely situated to know whether choices make them better off.

In such cases, what people care about shifts, depending on their choice. In these situations, sometimes involving transformative experiences, the criterion does not offer a unique solution. It is possible that welfarist criteria will resolve the indeterminacy, despite serious questions about incommensurability. Considerations of autonomy are also relevant to choice-influencing interventions that promote transformative experiences.

Sunstein, Should Public Figures Apologize? Preliminary Evidence and Speculations Aug. In the modern era, the statements and actions of public figures are scrutinized with great care, and it often emerges that they have said or done things that many people consider objectionable, hurtful, offensive, or despicable.

A persistent question is whether public figures should apologize for those statements or actions. Suppose that an apology has a purely strategic motivation: helping a politician to be elected or reelected, helping an executive to keep his job, helping a nominee to be confirmed by the U. Empirical work presented here suggests that an apology might well turn out to be futile or even counterproductive. One reason is Bayesian; an apology produces updating that can be unfavorable to the apologizer by, for example, resolving doubts about whether the apologizer actually said or did the objectionable thing, and about whether what the apologizer did was actually objectionable.

But many open questions remain about the reasons why apologies by public figures fail, and about the circumstances in which they might turn out to be effective.

Sunstein Opinion, Apologies are for Losers , N. Times , July 28, , at SR8. On political questions, many people are especially likely to consult and learn from those whose political views are similar to their own, thus creating a risk of echo chambers or information cocoons.

Here, we test whether the tendency to prefer knowledge from the politically like-minded generalizes to domains that have nothing to do with politics, even when evidence indicates that person is less skilled in that domain than someone with dissimilar political views. They then decided to whom to turn for advice when solving an incentivized shape categorization task. We find that participants falsely concluded that politically like-minded others were better at categorizing shapes and thus chose to hear from them.

Participants were also more influenced by politically like-minded others, even when they had good reason not to be. Our findings have implications for political polarization and social learning in the midst of political divisions. Sunstein, Lapidation and Apology June 19, To capture that phenomenon, we might repurpose an old word: lapidation. Technically, the word is a synonym for stoning, but it sounds much less violent. It is also obscure, which makes it easier to enlist for contemporary purposes.

Lapidation plays a role in affirming, and helping to constitute, tribal identity. It typically occurs when a transgressor is taken to have violated a taboo, which helps account for the different people and events that trigger left-of-center and right-of-center lapidation.

One of the problems with lapidation is that it often accomplishes little; it expresses outrage, and allows people to signal their identity, but does no more. Victims of lapidation might be tempted to apologize, but apologies can prove ineffective or even make things worse, depending on the nature of the lapidators. How do human beings make decisions when, as the evidence indicates, the assumptions of the Bayesian rationality approach in economics do not hold?

Do human beings optimize, or can they? Several decades of research have shown that people possess a toolkit of heuristics to make decisions under certainty, risk, subjective uncertainty, and true uncertainty or Knightian uncertainty. We outline recent advances in knowledge about the use of heuristics and departures from Bayesian rationality, with particular emphasis on growing formalization of those departures, which add necessary precision.

We also explore the relationship between bounded rationality and libertarian paternalism, or nudges, and show that some recent objections, founded on psychological work on the usefulness of certain heuristics, are based on serious misunderstandings.

Sunstein, Ruining Popcorn? The Welfare Effects of Information , 58 J. Some information has no welfare effects at all; people neither gain nor lose from it. Under prevailing executive orders, federal agencies must investigate the welfare effects of information by reference to cost-benefit analysis. All of these approaches run into serious objections.

With respect to 4 , people may lack the information that would permit them to make good decisions about how much to pay for more information; they may not know the welfare effects of information. Their tastes and values may shift over time, in part as a result of information. In surveys, majorities of Americans disapprove of twelve hypothetical nudges seven involving default rules, five involving education campaigns or disclosure requirements. These results provide an illuminating contrast with majority support for twenty-two nudges that were also tested, and that are much more realistic examples of the kinds of nudges that have been adopted or seriously considered in democratic nations.

In general and with some interesting exceptions , there is a strikingly broad consensus, across partisan lines, about which nudges do and do not deserve support.

The best understanding of the data is that people dislike those nudges that a promote what people see as illicit ends, or b are perceived as inconsistent with either the interests or values of most choosers.

We live in an era of tribalism, polarization, and intense social division—separating people along lines of religion, political conviction, race, ethnicity, and sometimes gender. How did this happen? In Conformity, Cass R. Sunstein argues that the key to making sense of living in this fractured world lies in understanding the idea of conformity—what it is and how it works—as well as the countervailing force of dissent. An understanding of conformity sheds new light on many issues confronting us today: the role of social media, the rise of fake news, the growth of authoritarianism, the success of Donald Trump, the functions of free speech, debates over immigration and the Supreme Court, and much more.

Lacking information of our own and seeking the good opinion of others, we often follow the crowd, but Sunstein shows that when individuals suppress their own instincts about what is true and what is right, it can lead to significant social harm.

While dissenters tend to be seen as selfish individualists, dissent is actually an important means of correcting the natural human tendency toward conformity and has enormous social benefits in reducing extremism, encouraging critical thinking, and protecting freedom itself. Sunstein explores what kinds of nudges are effective and shows why nudges sometimes give way to bans and mandates.

Why policies should be based on careful consideration of their costs and benefits rather than on intuition, popular opinion, interest groups, and anecdotes. Opinions on government policies vary widely. Some people feel passionately about the child obesity epidemic and support government regulation of sugary drinks. Others argue that people should be able to eat and drink whatever they like. Some people are alarmed about climate change and favor aggressive government intervention.

Others don't feel the need for any sort of climate regulation. It follows that government policy should not be based on public opinion, intuitions, or pressure from interest groups, but on numbers—meaning careful consideration of costs and benefits.

Will a policy save one life, or one thousand lives? Will it impose costs on consumers, and if so, will the costs be high or negligible? Will it hurt workers and small businesses, and, if so, precisely how much? He acknowledges that public officials often lack information about costs and benefits, and outlines state-of-the-art techniques for acquiring that information.

Policies should make people's lives better. Quantitative cost-benefit analysis, Sunstein argues, is the best available method for making this happen—even if, in the future, new measures of human well-being, also explored in this book, may be better still. Leading economists address the ongoing challenges to economics in theory and practice in a time of political and economic crises. More than a decade of financial crises, sovereign debt problems, political conflict, and rising xenophobia and protectionism has left the global economy unsettled and the ability of economics as a discipline to account for episodes of volatility uncertain.