Cass Sunstein

The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters
by Eric J. Johnson
Published 12 Oct 2021

“Technology’s 10 Most Mortifying Moments.” Computerworld, October 17, 2007. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2539067/technology-s-10-most-mortifying-moments.html?page=2. Heath, Chip, Richard P. Larrick, and George Wu. “Goals as Reference Points.” Cognitive Psychology 38 (1999): 79–109. Hedlin, Simon, and Cass R. Sunstein. “Does Active Choosing Promote Green Energy Use: Experimental Evidence.” Ecology Law Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2016). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2624359. Helman, Ruth, Craig Copeland, and Jack VanDerhei. “The 2015 Retirement Confidence Survey: Having a Retirement Savings Plan a Key Factor in Americans’ Retirement Confidence.”

…

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 35 (August 14, 2018). doi:10.1073/pnas.1810986115. Kahneman, Daniel, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard H. Thaler. “Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem.” Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 6 (December 1990): 1325–48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2937761. Kaiser, Micha, Manuela Bernauer, Cass R. Sunstein, and Lucia A. Reisch. “The Power of Green Defaults: The Impact of Regional Variation of Opt-Out Tariffs on Green Energy Demand in Germany.” Ecological Economics 174 (August 1, 2020): 106685. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106685. Kam, Dara. “No, Donald Trump’s Name Will Not Appear Automatically at the Top of Your Ballot.”

…

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 19 (December 1999): 171–97. Reber, Rolf, Pascal Wurtz, and Thomas D. Zimmermann. “Exploring ‘Fringe’ Consciousness: The Subjective Experience of Perceptual Fluency and Its Objective Bases.” Consciousness and Cognition 13, no. 1 (March 2004): 47–60. doi:10.1016/s1053-8100(03)00049-7. Reisch, Lucia A., and Cass R. Sunstein. “Do Europeans Like Nudges?” Judgment and Decision Making 11, no. 4 (July 4, 2016): 310–25. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2739118. “Retirement Benefits.” Social Security Administration. Accessed 2020. https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/learn.html. Reyes, Marcela, María Luisa Garmendia, Sonia Olivares, Claudio Aqueveque, Isabel Zacarías, and Camila Corvalán.

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration
by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Published 16 Feb 2023

Half a century ago, Albert O. Hirschman was a renowned economist at Columbia University when he wrote an essay that has been influential ever since.5 In recent years, the journalist Malcolm Gladwell wrote glowingly about it in The New Yorker, as did Harvard professor and former White House official Cass R. Sunstein in The New York Review of Books.6 In 2015, the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington, DC, think tank, reissued the book in which Hirschman’s text first appeared as a Brookings Classic, with a new foreword and afterword, to celebrate Hirschman’s thinking and the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication.7 Hirschman argued that planning is a bad idea.

…

Wheelwright (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1979), 315; Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Heather MacDonald, “The Role of Motivated Reasoning in Optimistic Time Predictions,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23, no. 3 (March 1997): 238–47; Roger Buehler, Dale Wesley Griffin, and Michael Ross, “Exploring the ‘Planning Fallacy’: Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion Times,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, no. 3 (September 1994): 366–81; Bent Flyvbjerg and Cass R. Sunstein, “The Principle of the Malevolent Hiding Hand; or, The Planning Fallacy Writ Large,” Social Research 83, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 979–1004. 18. Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 19. Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Johanna Peetz, “The Planning Fallacy: Cognitive, Motivational, and Social Origins,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 43 (2010): 1–62. 20.

…

Restoration Home, season 3, episode 8, BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039glq7. 5. Albert O. Hirschman, “The Principle of the Hiding Hand,” The Public Interest, no. 6 (Winter 1967), 10–23. 6. Malcolm Gladwell, “The Gift of Doubt: Albert O. Hirschman and the Power of Failure,” The New Yorker, June 17, 2013; Cass R. Sunstein, “An Original Thinker of Our Time,” The New York Review of Books, May 23, 2013, 14–17. 7. Albert O. Hirschman, Development Projects Observed, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2015). 8. Michele Alacevich, “Visualizing Uncertainties; or, How Albert Hirschman and the World Bank Disagreed on Project Appraisal and What This Says About the End of ‘High Development Theory,’” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 36, no. 2 (June 2014): 157. 9.

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law
by Timothy Sandefur
Published 16 Aug 2010

Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board, 527 U.S. 666, 701 (1999) (Breyer, Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg, JJ., dissenting). Cass Sunstein, “Lochner’s Legacy,” Columbia Law Review 87 (1987): 873–919; Laurence Tribe, “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics,” Harvard Law Review 103 (1989): 1–39; and Laurence Tribe, Constitutional Law, 2nd ed. (Mineola, NY: Foundation Press, 1988), p. 578. 136. Cass R. Sunstein, “Free Speech Now,” University of Chicago Law Review 59 (1992): 268. 137. Cass R. Sunstein, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 30: “[A] major problem with the pre–New Deal framework was that it treated the existing distribution of resources and opportunities as prepolitical and presocial . . . when in fact it was not. . . .

…

To affirm this is to hold that the prohibition to the States is of no avail, or has no application where the invasion of private rights is effected under the forms of State legislation.”). 54. See also Kermit Roosevelt III, The Myth of Judicial Activism: Making Sense of Supreme Court Decisions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 120; and Cass R. Sunstein, “Naked Preferences and the Constitution,” Columbia Law Review 84 (1984): 1692. 55. Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 516 (1884). 56. Ibid. at 535–36 (quoting Daniel Webster’s Dartmouth College argument). 57. Ibid. 58. Twining v. State of New Jersey, 211 U.S. 78 (1908). 59. Ibid. at 100. 60. Ibid. at 101. 61.

…

Madison was more likely to believe that the state existed 318 Notes for Pages 114–117 to protect individual rights or natural rights than that such rights existed to serve the just interests of the state.” Balkin, “Populism and Progressivism as Constitutional Categories,” Yale Law Journal 104 (1995): 1956. Balkin was actually discussing Cass R. Sunstein, who abuses Madison’s name in the same way as Bork. I owe this reference to Eugene Volokh. 132. James Madison, “Charters,” in Madison: Writings, ed. Jack Rakove (New York: Library of America, 1999) p. 502. 133. Robert H. Bork, Coercing Virtue (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 2003), pp. 11–12. 134.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 6 Nov 2012

Prediction markets are real-money exchanges where people can bet on events with binary and temporally defined outcomes; hence the price reflects the probability of the event occurring. See Kenneth J. Arrow, Robert Forsythe, Michael Gorham, Robert Hahn, Robin Hansen, John O. Ledyard, Saul Levmore, Robert Litan, Paul Milgrom, Forrest D. Nelson, George R. Neumann, Marco Ottaviani, Thomas C. Schelling, Robert J. Shiller, Vernon L. Smith, Erik Snowberg, Cass R. Sunstein, Paul C. Tetlock, Philip E. Tetlock, Hal R. Varian, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitzewitz, “The Promise of Prediction Markets,” Science 320 (May 16, 2008):877–878; Bo Cowgill, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitzewitz, “Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google,” working paper, 2008. 4.

…

Eguiluz and Martin G. Zimmerman, “Transmission of Information and Herd Behavior: An Application to Financial Markets,” Physical Review Letters 85, no. 26 (2000): 5659–5662. 28. Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982); and Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 45–46. 29. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, 73–75. 30. Saul Hansell, “Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm,” New York Times, January 3, 2007. Chapter 4—Situational Awareness: How Accordion Music Boosts Sales of Burgundy 1.

…

Naomi Mandel and Eric J. Johnson, “When Web Pages Influence Choice: Effects of Visual Primes on Experts and Novices,” Journal of Consumer Research 29, no. 2 (2002): 235–245. 16. Eric J. Johnson and Daniel Goldstein, “Do Defaults Save Lives?” Science 302 (November 21, 2003): 1338–1339. 17. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Daniel G. Goldstein, Eric J. Johnson, Andreas Herrmann, and Mark Heitmann, “Nudge Your Customers Toward Better Choices,” Harvard Business Review, December 2008, 99–105; and Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (New York: Harper, 2008), 1–6. 18.

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 6 Mar 2018

See, for instance, Jeffrey Toobin, “The Great Election Grab,” New Yorker, December 8, 2003; and Elizabeth Kolbert, “How Redistricting Turned America from Blue to Red,” New Yorker, June 27, 2016. 21. Cass R. Sunstein, Echo Chambers: Bush v. Gore, Impeachment, and Beyond (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Digital Books Plus, 2001); Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially chaps. 2–3; R. Kelly Garrett, “Echo Chambers Online? Politically Motivated Selective Exposure among Internet News Users,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14 (2009): 265–85. 22. Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein, “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,” Stanford Law Review 51 (1999): 683–768. 23.

…

Table of Contents Cover Title Page Contents Introduction The Dictator’s Handbook, US Edition by Eric A. Posner Constitutional Rot by Jack M. Balkin Could Fascism Come to America? by Tyler Cowen Lessons from the American Founding by Cass R. Sunstein Beyond Elections: Foreign Interference with American Democracy by Samantha Power Paradoxes of the Deep State by Jack Goldsmith How We Lost Constitutional Democracy by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq On “It Can’t Happen Here” by Noah Feldman Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness, But an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies by Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt States of Emergency by Bruce Ackerman Another Road to Serfdom: Cascading Intolerance by Timur Kuran The Resistible Rise of Louis Bonaparte by Jon Elster Could Mass Detentions Without Process Happen Here?

…

Stone Acknowledgments Contributor Biographies Notes Index About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Contents Cover Title Page Introduction The Dictator’s Handbook, US Edition by Eric A. Posner Constitutional Rot by Jack M. Balkin Could Fascism Come to America? by Tyler Cowen Lessons from the American Founding by Cass R. Sunstein Beyond Elections: Foreign Interference with American Democracy by Samantha Power Paradoxes of the Deep State by Jack Goldsmith How We Lost Constitutional Democracy by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq On “It Can’t Happen Here” by Noah Feldman Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness, But an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies by Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt States of Emergency by Bruce Ackerman Another Road to Serfdom: Cascading Intolerance by Timur Kuran The Resistible Rise of Louis Bonaparte by Jon Elster Could Mass Detentions Without Process Happen Here?

Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
Published 24 Oct 2011

“wags the rational dog”: Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Institutionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814–34. “‘Risk’ does not exist”: Paul Slovic, The Perception of Risk (Sterling, VA: EarthScan, 2000). availability cascade: Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein, “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,” Stanford Law Review 51 (1999): 683–768. CERCLA, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, passed in 1980. nothing in between: Paul Slovic, who testified for the apple growers in the Alar case, has a rather different view: “The scare was triggered by the CBS 60 Minutes broadcast that said 4, 000 children will die of cancer (no probabilities there) along with frightening pictures of bald children in a cancer ward—and many more incorrect statements.

…

the frivolous claim: Chris Guthrie, “Framing Frivolous Litigation: A Psychological Theory,” University of Chicago Law Review 67 (2000): 163–216. 30: Rare Events wish to avoid it: George F. Loewenstein, Elke U. Weber, Christopher K. Hsee, and Ned Welch, “Risk as Feelings,” Psychological Bulletin 127 (2001): 267–86. vividness in decision making: Ibid. Cass R. Sunstein, “Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002): 61–107. See notes to chapter 13: Damasio, Descartes’ Error. Slovic, Finucane, Peters, and MacGregor, “The {r, n>: C. A Affect Heuristic.” Amos’s student: Craig R. Fox, “Strength of Evidence, Judged Probability, and Choice Under Uncertainty,” Cognitive Psychology 38 (1999): 167–89.

…

Thaler, “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 39 (1980): 36–90. taboo tradeoff: Philip E. Tetlock et al., “The Psychology of the Unthinkable: Taboo Trade-Offs, Forbidden Base Rates, and Heretical Counterfactuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (2000): 853–70. where the precautionary principle: Cass R. Sunstein, The Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). “psychological immune system”: Daniel T. Gilbert et al., “Looking Forward to Looking Backward: The Misprediction of Regret,” Psychological Science 15 (2004): 346–50. 33: Reversals in the man’s regular store: Dale T.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts
Published 1 Sep 2014

Kent Gibbons, “Advanced Advertising: Obama Campaign Showed Valueof Targeting Viewers,” MultichannelNews, Nov. 13, 2012, http://www.multichannel.com/mcnbc-events/advanced-advertising-obama-campaign-showed-value-targeting-viewers/140262. 9. C. Duhigg, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” New York Times Magazine, Feb. 16, 2012. 10. Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0: Revenge of the Blogs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 5. 11. Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 95. 12. Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), cited in Bishop p. 67. 13. Interview with author. 14. Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 332. 15.

…

Walter Mischel, the researcher behind the famous “marshmallow study” from the 1970s, has developed effective strategies to train impatient children to be patient—an important success, given that impatient children have a high likelihood of growing up to be impatient adults.14 There are other potentially fruitful ventures, such as what Richard Thaler (of the two-self model) and coauthor Cass Sunstein call “choice architecture.” The term refers to carefully designed technologies, infrastructure, and other pieces of the built environment that subtly “nudge” us to act with more patience and long-term thought. An example: smartphone apps that automatically track our daily expenses and warn us when we’re exceeding our budget.

…

For even the most civic-minded citizen, diversity takes effort, involves risk, and requires compromise—precisely the sort of inefficiencies our consumer culture and self-centered ideologies now demean. Yet these discomfiting inefficiencies are essential to the process of balancing personal interest and social interest. They are fundamental to democracy and to community, two institutions that are inefficient by definition. As Cass Sunstein (the University of Chicago legal scholar we met in chapter 3) argues,* a functioning democratic culture requires the messiness and awkward potentialities of “unplanned encounters” where citizens are “exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance [and to] topics and points of view that [they] have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating.”10 But as we’ve seen, unplanned encounters, unexpected ideas, and irritating people are precisely the things we feel increasingly entitled to filter out of our customized lives and experiences.

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing
Published 6 May 2008

Serge Moscovici and Marisa Zavalloni, "The Group as a Polarizer of Attitudes," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1, no. 2 (1969): 125–35. 22. David G. Myers, Social Psychology (New York. McGraw-Hill Educational, 2004), pp. 308–24. 23. Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 166–78; Cass R. Sunstein and David A. Schkade, "Judging by Where You Sit," New York Times, June 11, 2003, p. A31. 24. Myers, Social Psychology, pp. 313–16. 25. Robert Baron, interview with author, 2004. See also R. Baron, S. I. Hoppe, C. F. Kao, B. Brunsman, B. Linneweh, and D.

…

Prentice (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), pp. 216, 230 10. Diana C. Mutz, Hearing the Other Side. Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 11. Ibid., p. 31. 12. Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin, Deliberation Day (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 13. David Schkade, Cass R. Sunstein, and Reid Hastie, "What Happened on Deliberation Day?" (AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies Working Paper 06–19, July 2006), http://aei-brookings.org/admin/authorpdfs/redirectsafely.php?fname=../pdffiles/phpb7.pdf. 14. Ibid., p. 2. 15. See also Eddie Gibbs and Ryan K. Bolger, Emerging Churches.

…

Technology Review, July 1994, pp. 42–51. ———. Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Schachter, Stanley. "Deviation, Rejection, and Communication." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 46 (1951). Schkade, David, Cass R. Sunstein, and Reid Hastie. "What Happened on Deliberation Day?" AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies Working Paper 06–19, July 2006. http://aei-brookings.org/admin/authorpdfs/redirect-safely, php?fname =../pdffiles/phpb7.pdf. Schmitt, Mark. "The Legend of the Powell Memo." American Prospect, April 27, 2005. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
by Richard H. Thaler
Published 10 May 2015

Available at: http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2010/01/07-retire ment-savings-john. Johnson, Eric J., and Daniel G. Goldstein. 2004. “Defaults and Donation Decisions.” Transplantation 78, no. 12: 1713–6. Johnson, Steven. 2010. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. New York: Riverhead. Jolls, Christine, Cass R. Sunstein, and Richard Thaler. 1998. “A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics.” Stanford Law Review 50, no. 5: 1471–550. Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Macmillan. ———, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard H. Thaler. 1986. “Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics.” Journal of Business 59, no. 4, part 2: S285–300. ———. 1991.

…

“The Value of Saving a Life: Evidence from the Labor Market.” In Nestor E. Terleckyj, ed., Household Production and Consumption, 265–302. New York: National Bureau for Economic Research. ———, and Hersh M. Shefrin. 1981. “An Economic Theory of Self-Control.” Journal of Political Economy 89, no. 2: 392–406. ———, and Cass R. Sunstein. 2003. “Libertarian Paternalism.” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 93, no. 2: 175–9. ———. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, and Alan Schwartz. 1997. “The Effect of Myopia and Loss Aversion on Risk Taking: An Experimental Test.”

…

“Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice” (Thaler), 46–47, 53–54, 104 transaction costs, 261, 262–63, 265, 266 endowment effect as, 266 transaction utility, 59–63, 66, 118 transparency, 337 Treasury Department, U.S., 311, 314–15, 343 Treisman, Anne, 36, 185 Tversky, Amos, 21, 22–23, 24, 29, 103n, 104, 105n, 125, 157, 162, 176, 201, 221, 261, 353, 357 and “as if” critique of behavioral economics, 46 in behavioral economics debate, 159–60 in Behavioral Economics Roundtable, 181 on changes in wealth, 30–31 equity premium puzzle studied by, 197–98 on extreme forecasts with flimsy data, 218, 219, 223 hypothetical choices defended by, 38, 82 illness and death of, xiii–xv, 187 on importance of stories, xiv–xv, 10 and “invisible handwave” argument, 51 lack of incentives in experiments of, 47–48 and “learning” critique of behavioral economics, 49 on long-shot odds, 80–81 Thaler’s first meeting with, 36–37 unambiguous questions studied by, 295–96 Wanner given advice by, 177 Tversky, Barbara, 36 Tversky, Oren, xiv–xv Tversky, Tal, xv Twain, Mark, 355 “two-pocket” mental accounting, 81–82 two-system view of mind, 103, 109 Uber, 136–38, 200n Ultimatum Game, 140–41, 142, 160, 182, 261, 301 revised version of, 266–67 unemployment rate, 47 United Kingdom, 10, 11, 330–45 tax revenue in, 334–35 university endowment, 197–98 urinals, 326 USA Today, 328 utility, 28–29, 28 acquisition, 59–63, 66 transaction, 59–63, 66, 118 utility functions, 161 value function, 30–32, 31, 34, 58–59, 85 value managers, value investing, 214–15, 220–21, 222, 227–28 “Value of a Life, The” (Thaler), 12, 14–15 value of a life, 12–15, 21, 35 “Value of Saving a Life, The” (Thaler and Rosen), 15, 42 van den Assem, Martijn, 296, 300, 301 van Dolder, Dennie, 300, 301 variability of stock prices, 230–33, 231, 367 Varian, Hal, 170 Viñoly, Rafael, 270, 276 Vishny, Robert, on limits of arbitrage, 249 von Neumann, John, 29 wages, sticky, 131–32 Waldmann, Robert, 240 Wall Street Journal, 121–22, 135, 232 Walmart, 62n, 63 Wanner, Eric, 177–78, 181, 184 as founding funder of behavioral economics, 184 Washington Redskins, 279, 288–90 Washington Wizards, 19 Wason problem, 171–72 “Watching Scotty Die” (song), 177 wealth: fungibility of, 98, 193n levels of vs. changes in, 30–31 mental accounting of, 76–79 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 7, 87 Weber-Fechner Law, 32–33 Weil, Roman, 70 well-defined preferences, 48–49 What Works Network, 341 White, Jesse, 328–29 White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST), 344 Williams, Ricky, 279, 280, 282–83 willow tree, and Coase theorem, 268 willpower, 87–99, 258, 363 effort required by, 108 Wilson, Russell, 290 windfalls, 311 wine, 17, 34, 46, 68–71, 72–73, 257 winner’s curse, in NFL draft, 280, 295 Winner’s Curse, The (Thaler), 175 World Cup, 326 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 270 Yahoo, 248n Yao Ming, 271n Zamir, Eyal, 269 Zeckhauser, Richard, 13–14, 178 in behavioral economics debate, 159 Zingales, Luigi, 274 ALSO BY RICHARD H. THALER Quasi-Rational Economics The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Cass R. Sunstein) Copyright © 2015 by Richard H. Thaler All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Published 3 Sep 2011

An old joke describes a camper who awoke to see his friend frantically putting on his running shoes as an angry bear approached their campsite. “Why bother?” he asked. “Don’t you know there’s no way you’ll be able to outrun that bear?” “I don’t have to outrun him,” the friend responded, “I just need to outrun you.” 5. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. 6. See, for example, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. NOTES TO PAGES 24–31 219 7. See, for example, Richard Rorty, “The Brain as Hardware, Culture as Software,” Inquiry 47(3), 2004: 219–235. 8.

…

See, for example, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Ethics and Economics of Private Property,” chapter 2 in Enrico Colombatto, ed., The Elgar Companion to the Economics of Property Rights, Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2004. But if granting such rights is efficient, defending them is of course consistent with Coase’s framework. 13. See, for example, Steven Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. 14. My erudite Cornell colleague Robert Hockett reminds me that before coming to the United States, Coase had been a colleague of the British economist and überconsequentialist Nicholas Kaldor, a celebrated champion of cost-benefit analysis. 15.

…

But such offers are rarely proposed, and when they are, they are almost invariably rejected. Subjects who reject one-sided offers seldom voice regret about having done so. From the beginning, most of the work in behavioral economics has focused on departures from rational choice with regret—those caused by cognitive errors. My former Cornell colleague Dick Thaler collaborated with Cass Sunstein to write Nudge, a marvelous 2008 book summarizing the myriad ways in which such errors lead people astray and how policy makers might restructure environments to facilitate better choices. I enthusiastically endorse almost all the proposals they advocate in that book. From the beginning, however, I’ve believed that much bigger losses result from departures from rational choice without regret.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

See for example Morozov, Net Delusion; and Evgeny Morozov, “Whither Internet Control?” in Liberation Technology, ed. Diamond and Plattner. 17. See Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Elanor Colleoni, Alessandro Rozza, and Adam Arvidsson, “Echo Chamber or Public Sphere? Predicting Political Orientation and Measuring Political Homophily in Twitter Using Big Data,” Journal of Communication 64, no. 2 (2014): 317–332; and Walter Quattrociocchi, Antonio Scala, and Cass R. Sunstein, “Echo Chambers on Facebook,” June 13, 2016, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2795110. 18. See Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 2 (2017): 211–236.

…

H. Guetzkow, 177–190 (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Press, 1951); Susan T. Ennett and Karl E. Bauman, “The Contribution of Influence and Selection to Adolescent Peer Group Homogeneity: The Case of Adolescent Cigarette Smoking,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1994): 653–663; and Cass R. Sunstein, David Schkade, Lisa M. Ellman, and Andres Sawicki, Are Judges Political? An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007); Herbert Hyman, Political Socialization (New York: Free Press, 1959). 113. Ezra Klein, “The Most Depressing Graphic for Members of Congress,” Washington Post, January 14, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/01/14/the-most-depressing-graphic-for-members-of-congress/?

…

Regarding the Elders of Zion, see Stephen Eric Bronner, A Rumor about the Jews: Antisemitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Esther Webman, ed., The Global Impact of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”: A Century-Old Myth (New York: Routledge, 2012). 11. For illuminating analyses of the causes of conspiracy theories, see Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 2 (2009): 202–227; and Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). For the loss of trust in government, see Chapter 3 as well as “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2017,” Pew Research Center, May 3, 2017, http://www.people-press.org/2017/05/03/public-trust-in-government-1958-2017/. 12.

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World
by Erwann Michel-Kerjan and Paul Slovic
Published 5 Jan 2010

Professor Slovic is a past president of the Society for Risk Analysis and, in 1991, received its Distinguished Contribution Award. In 1993, he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association. In 1995, he received the Outstanding Contribution to Science Award from the Oregon Academy of Science. Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard Law School Cass Sunstein is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the most cited law professor on any faculty in the United States. He currently serves as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OMB) at the White House. Professor Sunstein graduated in 1975 from Harvard College and in 1978 from Harvard Law School, both magna cum laude.

…

Kleindorfer, Paul, Howard Kunreuther, and Paul J.H. Schoemaker (1993). Decision Sciences: An Integrative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russo, J. Edward, and Paul J.H. Schoemaker (2002). Winning Decisions: Getting It Right the First Time. New York: Doubleday. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein (2007). Nudge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 7 Constructed Preference and the Quest for Rationality DAVID H. KRANTZ WHAT CHOICES ARE WISE? This question has been discussed for millennia. Many proposed answers share a common theme, eloquently expressed by Plato in The Protagoras:What measure is there of the relations of pleasure to pain other than excess and defect, which means that they become greater and smaller, and more and fewer, and differ in degree?

…

“The Role of Feasibility and Desirability Considerations in Near and Distant Future Decisions: A Test of Temporal Construal Theory.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75: 5-18. Onay, S., and A. Onculer (2007). “Intertemporal Choice Under Timing Risk: An Experimental Approach.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 5, no. 34: 2. 14 Dreadful Possibilities, Neglected Probabilities CASS R. SUNSTEIN AND RICHARD ZECKHAUSER Dreadful possibilities stimulate strong emotional responses, such as fear and anxiety.1 Fortunately, most high-consequence negative events have tiny probabilities, because life is no longer nasty, brutish, and short. But when emotions take charge, probabilities get neglected.

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century
by Ronald Bailey
Published 20 Jul 2015

Nature 400: 398 (July 29, 1999), cited in Gary Marchant et al., Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST), Impact of the Precautionary Principle on Feeding Current and Future Generations. Issue Paper 52. CAST, Ames, Iowa, 2013. “The precautionary principle”: Cass R. Sunstein, “Throwing Precaution to the Wind: Why the ‘Safe’ Choice Can Be Dangerous.” Boston Globe, July 13, 2008. five different common cognitive biases: Cass R. Sunstein, “The Laws of Fear.” University of Chicago Law and Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 128 (June 2001). Available at SSRN: ssrn.com/abstract=274190 or dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.274190. German government decided: Michael Bastasch, “CO2 Emissions Have Increased Since 2011 Despite Germany’s $140 Billion Green Energy Plan.”

…

Boston University law professor George Annas, a prominent bioethicist who favors the precautionary principle, clearly understands that it is not a value-neutral concept. He has observed, “The truth of the matter is that whoever has the burden of proof loses.” Harvard law professor and former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration Cass Sunstein agrees: “If the burden of proof is on the proponent of the activity or processes in question the Precautionary Principle would seem to impose a burden of proof that cannot be met.” Why can’t it be met? “The problem is that one cannot prove a negative,” notes Mercatus Center analyst Adam Thierer.

…

One particularly troublesome issue is that some activities that promote human health might “raise threats of harm to the environment,” and some activities that might be thought of as promoting the environment might “raise threats of harm to human health.” “The precautionary principle, for all its rhetorical appeal, is deeply incoherent,” argues Cass Sunstein. “It is of course true that we should take precautions against some speculative dangers. But there are always risks on both sides of a decision; inaction can bring danger, but so can action. Precautions, in other words, themselves create risks—and hence the principle bans what it simultaneously requires.”

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 12 Nov 2019

Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India,” American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 5, no. 2 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1257/mic.5.2.33. 59 Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Cass R. Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 60 “Little Consensus on Global Warming: Partisanship Drives Opinion,” Pew Research Center, 2006, http://www.people-press.org/2006/07/12/little-consensus-on-global-warming/. 61 R. Cass Sunstein, “On Mandatory Labeling, with Special Reference to Genetically Modified Foods,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 165, no. 5 (2017): 1043–95. 62 Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M.

…

—Thomas Piketty, professor, Paris School of Economics, and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century “A magnificent achievement, and the perfect book for our time. Banerjee and Duflo brilliantly illuminate the largest issues of the day, including immigration, trade, climate change, and inequality. If you read one policy book this year—heck, this decade—read this one.” —Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University, and author of How Change Happens “Banerjee and Duflo have shown brilliantly how the best recent research in economics can be used to tackle the most pressing social issues: unequal economic growth, climate change, lack of trust in public action.

…

We earlier observed that people might rationally choose to suppress their own opinions and join the herd, but of course not being exposed to any opinions outside the herd only makes things worse. We end up with multiple closed groups with contrasting opinions and very little capacity for communicating respectfully with each other. Cass Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard and a member of the Obama administration, describes these as “echo chambers,” where like-minded people whip themselves into a frenzy by listening only to each other.59 One result of this is extreme polarization on what should be more or less objective facts; for example, 41 percent of Americans believe human activity causes global warming, but the same number either say warming is due to a natural cycle (21 percent) or say there is no warming at all (20 percent).

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

_r=1 &pagewanted=all. 235 “help it find a larger audience”: Author interview with confidential source. 237 Google is just a company: “Transcript: Stephen Colbert Interviews Google’s Eric Schmidt on The Colbert Report,” Search Engine Land, Sept. 22, 2010, accessed Dec. 20, 2010, http://searchengineland.com/googles-schmidt-colbert-report-51433. 237 expose their audiences to both sides: Cass R. Sunstein, Republic .com (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 240 “we shouldn’t have to accept”: Caitlin Petre phone interview with Marc Rotenberg, Nov. 5, 2010. 241 and 70 percent do: “Mistakes Do Happen: Credit Report Errors Mean Consumers Lose,” US PIRG, accessed Feb. 8, 2010, http://www.uspirg.org/home/reports/report-archives/financial-privacy–security/financial-privacy-security/mistakes-do-happen-credit-report-errors-mean-consumers-lose.

…

I was also struck by the degree to which personalization is already upon us—not only on Facebook and Google, but on almost every major site on the Web. “I don’t think the genie goes back in the bottle,” Danny Sullivan told me. Though concerns about personalized media have been raised for a decade—legal scholar Cass Sunstein wrote a smart and provocative book on the topic in 2000—the theory is now rapidly becoming practice: Personalization is already much more a part of our daily experience than many of us realize. We can now begin to see how the filter bubble is actually working, where it’s falling short, and what that means for our daily lives and our society.

…

Even if there are ways of addressing these issues that don’t hurt the bottom line—which there may well be—doing so simply isn’t always going to be a top-level priority. As a result, after we’ve each done our part to pop the filter bubble, and after companies have done what they’re willing to do, there’s probably a need for government oversight to ensure that we control our online tools and not the other way around. In his book Republic.com, Cass Sunstein suggested a kind of “fairness doctrine” for the Internet, in which information aggregators have to expose their audiences to both sides. Though he later changed his mind, the proposal suggests one direction for regulation: Just require curators to behave in a public-oriented way, exposing their readers to diverse lines of argument.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking
by Matthew Syed
Published 9 Sep 2019

Cappella, Friend and Foe by Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, The Blunders of Our Governments by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, Der Spiegel, Inside 9/11, Infotopia by Cass R. Sunstein, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, What Works by Iris Bohnet, Give and Take by Adam Grant, Principles by Ray Dalio, The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama, The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, Wiser by Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie, The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, Creative Conspiracy by Leigh Thompson, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony by Kevin N.

…

With problem solving, policymaking and the like, where debate and discussion are often critical to hear and test different perspectives, we cannot avoid meetings – which is precisely why we need to understand their defects. By compounding each other’s errors, rather than correcting them, teams can become increasingly confident about objectively terrible judgements. As Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie, two experts on group decision-making, put it: ‘Much of the time, groups blunder not in spite of group deliberation, but because of it. After deliberation, companies, labour unions, and religious organisations often make disastrous decisions. The same point holds for governments.’26 It is a curious irony.

…

VI The defining error in the contemporary analysis of the post-truth age has been the conflation of information bubbles and echo chambers. The former seeks to explain people’s extremist beliefs via distorted exposure. The idea is that when people are denied access to diverse views and evidence, they are more likely to cleave to extremist beliefs and ideologies. As the legal scholar Cass Sunstein argued in a highly influential essay: Although millions of people are using the Internet to expand their horizons, many people are doing the opposite, creating a Daily Me that is specifically tailored to their own interests and prejudices . . . It is important to realize that a well-functioning democracy – a republic – depends not just on freedom from censorship, but also on . . . unsought, unanticipated, and even unwanted exposures to diverse topics, people, and ideas.

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Nov 2019

A similar conclusion is drawn by Jonathan Haidt. See The Righteous Mind. See also Why Do They Vote That Way (New York: Vintage Books 2018) (drawn in part from The Righteous Mind). This dynamic at the macro level is reinforced at the micro level as well. Cass R. Sunstein, “The Law of Group Polarization,” Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2002): 175–95. For a detailed review of evidence, see Cass R. Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 161–68. 90.Ben Gilbert, “There’s a Simple Reason Your New Smart TV Was So Affordable: It’s Collecting and Selling Your Data,” Business Insider, January 12, 2019, available at link #120. 91.Sean Burch, “‘Senator, We Run Ads’: Hatch Mocked for Basic Facebook Question to Zuckerberg,” SFGate, April 10, 2018, available at link #121; “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Hearing on Data Privacy and Protection,” C-SPAN, April 10, 2018, available at link #122. 92.My thinking in this respect was inspired by a brilliant article by Jonathan Zittrain, published just at the height of the copyright wars.

…

For the most comprehensive and theorized recent account, see Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019). 60.Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001), 7. 61.Compare Cass R. Sunstein, “The First Amendment in Cyberspace,” Yale Law Journal 104 (1995): 1757–1804, available at link #99, with Eugene Volokh, “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do,” Yale Law Journal 104 (1995): 1805–50, available at link #100. Rick Hasen gives a contemporary view of Volokh’s “remarkably prescient article” in “Cheap Speech and What It Has Done (to American Democracy),” First Amendment Law Review 16 (2017–18): 200. 62.Nick Visser, “CBS Chief Les Moonves Says Trump’s ‘Damn Good’ for Business,” Huffington Post, March 1, 2016, available at link #101. 63.Gregory J.

…

What we were not imagining was that as the technology of media became more and more sensitive to us individually, it would become more and more responsive to what we individually would want. And that that responsiveness itself would be a problem. The point is not that the idea was never there. In one of the first “law of cyberspace” conferences that I attended at Yale in 1994, Professors Eugene Volokh and Cass Sunstein were already debating the consequences of “the daily me.”61 Yet none of us then had any rich or deep sense about how this crafting would evolve, or what the consequences in the end would be. For the reality is this: the world of cable television is insanely competitive. The markets are small (by comparison, historically) and the drive for ratings is fierce.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 3, 6, 10, 41. See also “The Wow Factor,” The Economist, Mar. 10, 2012, 92. 20. Yochai Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest (New York: Crown Business, 2011), 3. 21. Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 22. Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8, 9. 23. Simon Mainwaring, We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1. 24. Jeff Jarvis, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 11, 76. 25.

…

He provides the basis for this argument in Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 56. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio, 2006), 1, 3. 57. Jarvis, Public Parts, 6–7, 163–66. 58. Botsman and Rogers, What’s Mine Is Yours, 224–25. 59. Mainwaring, We First, 231. 60. Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 224. 61. Charles E. Lindblom, The Market System (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 3. 62. Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), vx. 63.

…

Nowhere has this fact been more obvious than online, where Wikipedia and open-source software have been so successful. Tux, the Linux Penguin, is beginning to nibble away at the grim view of humanity that breathed life into Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.20 These developments are so powerful, they have even brought a pronounced skeptic back toward the celebrant fold. Cass Sunstein once wrote of “information cocoons” and how the Internet would make it possible for people to avoid or ignore much of humanity, with dire implications for public life.21 With his 2006 Infotopia, Sunstein turned—heralding “the development of cumulative knowledge” online, “producing an astonishing range of new goods and activities.”

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
by Michael Nielsen
Published 2 Oct 2011

Bonney, Daniel Finka, and Steve Kellinga. eBird: A citizen-based bird observation network in the biological sciences. Biological Conservation, 142(10):2282–2292, 2009. [211] John Sulston. Heritage of humanity. Le Monde Diplomatique (English Edition), November 2002. [212] Cass R. Sunstein. Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. [213] Cass R. Sunstein. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton University Press, 2007. [214] James Surowiecki. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Doubleday, 2004. [215] Don R. Swanson. Migraine and magnesium: Eleven neglected connections. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 31(4):526–557, 1988

…

The projects we’ve discussed have overcome these and similar problems: some have succeeded with flying colors (the Polymath Project), while others just barely succeeded (World Team deliberations sometimes teetered on the edge of breakdown because of lack of civility). Similar problems also afflict offline groups, and much has been written about the problems and how to overcome them—including books such as James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, Cass Sunstein’s Infotopia, and many other books about business and organizational behavior. While these practical problems are important, they can often be solved with good process. But no matter how good the process, there remains a fundamental dividing line: whether a shared praxis is available. In fields where a shared praxis is available we can scale collective intelligence, and get major qualitative improvements in problem-solving behavior, such as designed serendipity and conversational critical mass.

…

Yochai Benkler’s insightful “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm” [12] and The Wealth of Networks [13] have strongly influenced much thinking about open source, especially in the academic community. Finally, I recommend Ned Gulley and Karim Lakhani’s fascinating account [87] of the Mathworks programming competition. Limits to collective intelligence: Informative summaries are Cass Sunstein’s Infotopia [212] and James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds [214]. Classic texts include Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841, and since reprinted many times [130], and Irving Lester Janis’s Groupthink [99]. Of course, a considerable fraction of our written culture deals, directly or indirectly, with the challenges of group problem solving.

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It)
by William Poundstone
Published 1 Jan 2010

“Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and the Status Quo Bias.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, 193–206. ———, Ilana Ritov, and David A. Schkade (1999). “Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions? An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 19, 203–35. ———, David A. Schkade, and Cass R. Sunstein (1998). “Shared Outrage and Erratic Awards: The Psychology of Punitive Damages.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 16, 49–86. ———, and Eldar Shafir. “Amos Tversky (1937–1996).” American Psychologist 53, 793–94. ———, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (1982). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.

…

. ———(1988). “Anomalies: The Ultimatum Game.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 2, 195–206. ———(1997). “Irving Fisher: Modern Behavioral Economist.” The American Economic Review 87, 439–41. ———(1999). “Mental Accounting Matters.” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 12, 183–206. ———, and Cass R. Sunstein (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press. Thompson, Andrea (2009). “Study: You Touch It, You Buy It.” LiveScience.com, Jan. 16, 2009. Thompson, Don (2008). The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art.

…

What did gain support was the relativity of prices. What people want, and how much they’re willing to pay, depends on the granular details of how you phrase the question. “It would be an overstatement to say of preferences, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, that ‘there is no there there,’ ” wrote legal scholar Cass Sunstein in this connection. “But frequently what is there is far less fixed, and far more malleable, than conventional theory predicts.” Values may not be Oakland, but they are something like the elephant in the parable of the blind men. A man who feels the trunk reports that an elephant is like a snake; a man who feels the side says an elephant is like a wall; one who feels a leg compares the elephant to a pillar.

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives
by Lisa Servon
Published 10 Jan 2017

Luke Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). 167 a strong safety net: Michael S. Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir, “Behaviorally Informed Regulation,” in No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans, edited by Michael S. Barr (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012). 169 “choice architecture”: Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). simply changing the default option: John Beshears et al., “The Importance of Default Options for Retirement Savings Outcomes: Evidence from the United States,” NBER Working Paper No. 12009 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2006).

…

Contemporary Economic Policy, vol. 30, no. 2 (2012): 149–61. Stempel, Jonathan. “US Agency Claims Darden Won’t Hire ‘Old White Guys’ for Dining Chain.” Reuters, February 12, 2015. Sweetland Edwards, Haley. “The Middle Class Is Doing Worse Than You Think.” Time, April 8, 2015. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Theodos, Brett, Margaret Simms, Mark Treskon, Christina Plerhoples Stacy, Rachel Brash, Dina Emam, Rebecca Daniels, and Juan Collazos. “An Evaluation of the Impacts and Implementation Approaches of Financial Coaching Programs.”

…

The situation she found herself in—choosing between taking out payday loans or losing her job—overrode her knowledge; as she told me, “I know it’s bad.” The upside of this finding is that the effect of context on decision making is predictable. We can find ways to protect people at vulnerable moments. The way choices are presented—what the economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call “choice architecture”—is also critical to making a good decision. Employee enrollment in retirement plans provides a good illustration. When a worker is lucky enough to get a job that includes a retirement plan, she must usually make several decisions—whether to participate, how much to contribute, how to allocate contributions across different investments.

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy
by Tyler Cowen
Published 25 May 2010

Powers and Janet Poland, Asperger Syndrome and Your Child: A Parent’s Guide (New York: Collins Living, 2003), chapter 2. To the best of my knowledge, the phrase “infovores” originates with USC professor Irving Biederman. For a good presentation of framing effects, see for instance Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). For the Steve Hofstetter quotation, see “Thinking Man: Steve Hofstetter is Your Friend,” November 14, 2005, www.collegehumor.com/article:1632255. On “Facebook-like” services for the very young, see Camille Sweeney, “Twittering from the Cradle,” The New York Times, September 11, 2008.

…

By allying with “similars” in this way, we reframe and strengthen our preexisting identities and thus we become more like our true selves. Even very unusual people can find peers through web search, chat groups, and virtual realities. These newly found similarities make it more fun to be yourself and the resulting affiliations are reinforced socially. Cass Sunstein has argued that the web polarizes people politically for reasons like the above. We’ll see, but I think the final effect will be a more tolerant and cosmopolitan one. (Keep in mind we’ve had the web for a while now and our recently elected president Barack Obama succeeded by running on a non-ideological platform; while partisanship will certainly return I doubt if the web is the problem.)

…

Whereas the Stoics sought to understand the psychology of the Roman Empire, exile, and the slave whip, and Smith studied the pin factory, I am looking at Facebook, Google, and the iPod. The later and more general movement of “behavioral economics” has brought psychology very directly into economics. In addition to all the formal research, behavioral economics is represented by such popular books as Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge, and Ori and Rom Brafman’s Sway. In the most general terms, behavioral economics suggests that human decision-making is often far from rational. For instance maybe we overestimate our prospects of success when we start a new business or maybe we are very bad at evaluating risks with very small probabilities.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
Published 27 May 2009

Supp. 135, 139—40 (S.D.N.Y. 1991) (discussing the nature of CompuServe’s involvement in running the forums). 18. See ADVANCES IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS (Colin F. Camerer, George Loewenstein & Matthew Rabin eds., 2003); Christine Jolls, Cass R. Sunstein & Richard Thaler, A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics, 50 STAN. L. REV. 1471 (1998); Daniel Kahne-man & Amos Tversky, Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk, 47 ECONO-METRICA 263 (1979). 19. See Cass R. Sunstein, INFOTOPIA 80 (2006). 20. Tim Wu, Wireless Carterfone, 1 INT’L. J. COMM. 389, 404—15 (2007), available at http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/152/96. 21. See id. at 419. 22.

…

REV. 1175, 1176 (1989) (discussing how rules are more consistent with democracy than standards); Frederick Schauer, Rules and the Rule of Law, 14 HARV. J.L. & PUB. POL’Y 645, 650—51, 658 (1991) (discussing legal realist arguments regarding the distinction between rules and standards); Pierre J. Schlag, Rules and Standards, 33 UCLAL. REV. 379 (1985) (discussing whether there is a coherent distinction between rules and standards); Cass R. Sunstein, Problems with Rules, 83 CAL. L. REV. 953, 963—64 (1995). 5. See, e.g., LAWRENCE KOHLBERG, FROM IS TO OUGHT: HOW TO COMMIT THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY AND GET AWAY WITH IT IN THE STUDY OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT (1971); Lawrence Kohlberg, Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach, in MORAL DEVELOPMENT AND BEHAVIOR: THEORY, RESEARCH AND SOCIAL ISSUES (T.

…

.”); MICHAEL WALZER, THICK AND THIN 27 (1984) (arguing that meaning is made with reference to particular social contexts that are “shared across a society, among a group of people with a common life”); see generally DANIEL BELL, COMMUNITARIANISM AND ITS CRITICS (1993); ROBERT NISBET, THE QUEST FOR COMMUNITY (1953); Cass R Sunstein, Beyond the Republican Revival, 97 YALE L.J. 1539 (1988); Robert J. Condlin, Bargaining with a Hugger: The Weakness and Limitations of a Communitarian Conception of Legal Dispute Bargaining, Or Why We Can t All Just Get Along (Berkeley Press Legal Series, Working Paper No. 1194), available at http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 29 Mar 2015

This is perhaps obvious, once stated. But it puts limits, which would seem to be fatal, on the explanatory power of evolutionary psychology—that is, on the attempt to explain human behavior as the product of adaptive pressures we faced on the savannahs in the Pleistocene epoch. 5. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 6. And, who knows, maybe this is to be preferred. The Protestant is a somewhat cramped human type. One might prefer to spend the evening with someone nudged into saving money (enough so he can pay for the meal), but who doesn’t have the deeply internalized ethic of thrift, which easily shades into miserliness. 7.

…

We give undue weight to the most recent events when trying to grasp a larger pattern and predict the future. In general, we are terrible at estimating probabilities. We are not so much rational optimizers as creatures who rely on biases and crude heuristics for making important decisions. In Nudge, Cass Sunstein, the former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Obama, and the economist Richard Thaler argue for a mode of social engineering that takes account of these psychological facts.5 For starters, we’re a lot lazier than the rational optimizer view would have it.

…

The jig itself is not flexible—indeed being rigid is the whole point of a jig—but it is deployed flexibly in the intelligent ordering of the environment by someone who is in command of his own actions. The local, actor-centered use of the jig is more attractive, to my mind, than the prospect of being nudged by Cass Sunstein. Let’s note right away that there is a risk of misstating the contrast between the jig and the nudge by putting too much emphasis on the jig being a creation of the agent himself. Quite apart from the extreme case of the push-button McDonald’s kitchen, it is true in general that a cook begins his day in an environment that has already been given a long-term structure by someone else, equipped with tools and facilities laid out in some arrangement.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

Robert Faris et al.,‘Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election’, Berkman Klein Center Research Paper <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=3019414> (accessed 8 December 2017). 5. See Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Cass R. Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the age of Social Media (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Alex Krasodomski-Jones, ‘Talking To Ourselves?’ Demos, September 2016 <https://www.demos.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/EchoChambers-final-version.pdf> (accessed 1 December 2017). 6.

…

utm_source=dd&utm_ medium=email&utm_campaign=10242016&variable=af3d170230 8a23693509dd3317fe68e7> (accessed 8 December 2017). 22. The Correspondence of John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, ed. Oscar A. Haac (London: Transaction, 1995), Foreword and Introduction. 23. Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context:Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 83. 24. Cass R. Sunstein, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 82. 25. Dworkin, Autonomy, 18. 26. Sarah Dean,‘A Nation of “Micro-Criminals”:The 11 Sneaky Crimes We Are Commonly Committing’, iNews, 22 October 2016 <https:// OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Notes 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 403 inews.co.uk/essentials/news/uk/nation-micro-criminals-11-sneakycrimes-commonly-committing/> (accessed 1 December 2017).

…

He called this ‘cerebral hygiene’.22 (Students: next time you haven’t done the required reading for class, blame ‘cerebral hygiene’.) I prefer the view of Helen Nissenbaum, that to be ‘utterly impervious to all outside influences’ is not to be autonomous: but to be a ‘fool’.23 Harvard professor Cass Sunstein has done some interesting thinking on this subject, most recently in OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Freedom and the Supercharged State 171 The Ethics of Influence (2016). For Sunstein, reminders, warnings, ­disclosures of factual information, simplification, and frameworks of ‘active choosing’ are nudges that influence people but preserve their freedom of choice.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

Levine, “Knowledge Transfer Between Groups via Personnel Rotation: Effects of Social Identity and Knowledge Quality,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 96, no. 1 (2005): 56–71, doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2004.09.002. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT And research also suggests: The idea of reputational cascades is introduced by Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein to refer to the phenomenon by which, “if a particular perception of an event somehow appears to have become the social norm, people seeking to build or protect their reputations will begin endorsing it through their words and deeds, regardless of their actual thoughts.” Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein, “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,” Stanford Law Review 51, no. 4 (1999): 687, doi.org/10.2307/1229439. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT high moral stakes: “Moral rebellion represents a threat to group members on three fronts: (a) The rebel’s moral stance is seen as an implicit criticism of those who did not take the stance, so group members anticipate condemnation from the rebel; (b) the actions of the rebel make you question your own assumptions and attitudes, leading to a dissonance-like state; and (c) the rebel strips those of us who conspire in immoral acts from the rationalization that we had no choice.”

…

Smith, “Culture and Conformity: A Meta-analysis of Studies Using Asch’s (1952b, 1956) Line Judgment Task,” Psychological Bulletin 119, no. 1 (1996): 111–37, doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.1.111. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT replicated by psychologists: Bond and Smith, “Culture and Conformity.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In the experiments: Cass R. Sunstein, David Schkade, and Daniel Kahneman, “Are Juries Less Erratic Than Individuals? Deliberation, Polarization, and Punitive Damages” (John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 81, 1999). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT groups deliberating on damages: Sunstein found that across a variety of mock damages cases, the average median compensation by an individual was $385,000, while the average median compensation determined by a group was $1,510,000.

…

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT groups deliberating on damages: Sunstein found that across a variety of mock damages cases, the average median compensation by an individual was $385,000, while the average median compensation determined by a group was $1,510,000. Sunstein, Schkade, and Kahneman, “Are Juries Less Erratic Than Individuals?” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “the law of group polarization”: Cass R. Sunstein, “The Law of Group Polarization” (John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 91, 1999). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Internal criticism and dissent”: Levi Adelman and Nilanjana Dasgupta, “Effect of Threat and Social Identity on Reactions to Ingroup Criticism: Defensiveness, Openness, and a Remedy,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 45, no. 5 (2018): 740, doi.org/10.1177/0146167218796785.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin
Published 10 Jan 2019

Jonathan Haidt, “The Key to Trump is Stenner’s Authoritarianism”, The Righteous Mind (blog), January 6, 2016. 7. “Andrew Yang for President” website, www.yang2020.com. 8. Samantha Reis and Brian Martin, “Psychological Dynamics of Outrage against Injustice,” The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies, 2008. 9. Cass R. Sunstein, David Schkade, and Daniel Kahneman, “Deliberating about Dollars: The Severity Shift,” Law & Economics Working Papers No. 95, 2000. 10. Cass Sunstein, “Growing Outrage,” in Behavioural Public Policy, 2018 (in press). 11. Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch, “The Political Aftermath of Financial Crises: Going to Extremes,” CEPR policy portal, VoxEU.org, November 21, 2015. 12.

…

And a similar thing happened in the opposite direction. When it came to mock crimes that seemed trivial or technocratic, the group as a whole acted more leniently after they deliberated together. The key point here is that this sort of group dynamics makes social outrage into a highly unstable, highly unpredictable thing. Cass Sunstein wrote a recent article discussing the key role that injustice played in the rapid spread of the #MeToo movement. He stressed the point that the reaction outrage causes can depend upon unexpected dynamics. “With small variations in starting points, and inertia . . . [o]utrage may fizzle or grow.”10 Another key point—and one that reinforces the notion that the globotics backlash will involve a fusing of white-collar and blue-collar furies—is that outrage usually springs from a bed of long-lived discontent.

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly
by John Kay
Published 30 Apr 2010

Igor Ansoff, Corporate Strategy (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), p. 41. 3 Ibid., p. 10. 4 Ibid., p. 312. 5 Robert Heller in Ansoff, Corporate Strategy, p. 360. 6 Ansoff, Corporate Strategy, pp. 326–7. 7 Saint-Gobain, “Annual Report 2008,” Courbevoie, 2008. 8 Charles Lindblom, “Still Muddling, Not Yet Through,” Public Administration Review 39, no. 6 (1979), pp. 517–26. 9 Cass R. Sunstein, Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapter 2. Chapter 8: Pluralism—Why There Is Usually More Than One Answer to a Problem 1 Dead Poets Society, directed by Peter Weir (Touchstone Pictures, 1989). 2 Dr. H. Igor Ansoff was a real person—he died in 2002.

…

Such an approach, he says, involves no sharp distinction between means and ends and drastically limits analysis by problem simplification and by ignoring many potentially available options. “The test of a ‘good’ policy,” Lindblom claimed, “is typically that various analysts find themselves directly agreeing on a policy (without their agreeing that it is the most appropriate means to an agreed objective).” The modern legal scholar Cass Sunstein (President Obama’s “regulatory czar”) calls this “an incompletely theorized agreement.”9 Sunstein’s insight is that decision making in politics, business and everyday life is often based on a common view of what to do that does not require a common view of the reasons for doing it. The modesty of Lindblom’s phrase muddling through invited Dr.

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy
by Seth Mnookin
Published 3 Jan 2012

Sec’y of Health and Human Services, 39–42, 252–53. 196 “I looked out at an audience”: Jane Johnson, interview with author, May 4, 2009. 196 “This is the federal government giving every kid”: Jane Johnson, interview with author, April 22, 2010. 196 “You wouldn’t be saying and doing”: Vicky Debold, interview with author, July 28, 2009. 196 a concept that was first articulated in a 1999 paper: Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein, “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,” Stanford Law Review 1999;51(4): 683–768. 196 “self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation”: Kuran and Sunstein, “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,” 683. 197 In the 2008 book Nudge: Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, Nudge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 197 “As all women”: Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, “Easy Does It: How to Make Lazy People Do the Right Thing,” The New Republic, April 9, 2008; available as “The Amsterdam Urinals” on Nudge, http://nudges.wordpress.com/the-amsterdam-urinals/.

…

And Theresa Cedillo lent her daughter’s name to the largest vaccine-related compensation lawsuit in the world. The process that explains this convergence of views is called an “availability cascade,” a concept that was first articulated in a 1999 paper by Timur Kuran, an economics and political science professor at Duke who was then at the University of Southern California, and Cass Sunstein, who currently heads up the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and was at the time a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Kuran and Sunstein defined the term as a “self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse.”46 Another way of saying this is that an availability cascade describes how the perception that a belief is widely held—the “availability” of that idea—can be enough to make it so.

…

“Clinical Presentation and Histologic Findings at Ileocolonoscopy in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder and Chronic Gastrointestinal Symptoms.” Autism Insights 2010;2: 1–11. Krugman, Richard. “Immunization ‘Dyspractice’: The Need for ‘No Fault’ Insurance.” Pediatrics 1975;56(2): 159–60. Kulenkampff, M., et al. “Neurological Complications of Pertussis Inoculation.” Archives of Disease in Childhood 1974;49: 46–49. Kuran, Timur, and Cass Sunstein. “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation.” Stanford Law Review 1999;51(4): 683–768. Laeth, Nasir. “Reconnoitering the Antivaccination Web Sites: News from the Front.” Journal of Family Practice 2000;49(8): 731–33. Langmuir, Alexander. “The Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Center for Disease Control.”

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
by Michael Lewis
Published 6 Dec 2016

The first volume of this remarkable series was published in 1930, and it continues to motor along, fueled by an endlessly renewable source of energy: the need felt by psychologists to explain why they are the way they are. At any rate, in grappling with my subject, I obviously leaned on the work of others. Here are those I leaned on: INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM THAT NEVER GOES AWAY Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. “Who’s on First.” New Republic, August 31, 2003. https://newrepublic.com/article/61123/whos-first. CHAPTER 1: MAN BOOBS Rutenberg, Jim. “The Republican Horse Race Is Over, and Journalism Lost.” New York Times, May 9, 2016. CHAPTER 2: THE OUTSIDER Meehl, Paul E. Clinical versus Statistical Prediction.

…

It’s like a movie monster that’s meant to have been killed but is somehow always alive for the final act. And so, once the dust had settled on the responses to my book, one of them remained more alive and relevant than the others: a review by a pair of academics, then both at the University of Chicago—an economist named Richard Thaler and a law professor named Cass Sunstein. Thaler and Sunstein’s piece, which appeared on August 31, 2003, in the New Republic, managed to be at once both generous and damning. The reviewers agreed that it was interesting that any market for professional athletes might be so screwed-up that a poor team like the Oakland A’s could beat most rich teams simply by exploiting the inefficiencies.

…

Drawing upon Kahneman and Tversky’s work, he pushed for changes in the rules, so that homeless kids no longer needed to enroll in the school meal program. Instead they automatically received free breakfast and lunch. Jason never went hungry, and remained in school. If you found #4 more probable than #3, you violated perhaps the simplest and most fundamental law of probability. But you’re also onto something. The lawyer’s name is Cass Sunstein. Among its other consequences, the work that Amos and Danny did together awakened economists and policy makers to the importance of psychology. “I became a believer,” said Nobel Prize–winning economist Peter Diamond of Danny and Amos’s work. “It’s all true. This stuff is not just lab stuff.

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World
by James Miller
Published 17 Sep 2018

David Graeber—the most prominent of those infatuated—responded to Hedges with an “open letter,” “Concerning the Violent Peace Police,” February 9, 2012, http://nplusonemag.com/concerning-the-violent-peace-police. “experiences of visionary inspiration”: David Graeber, “Revolution in Reverse,” in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays in Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (London: Minor Compositions, 2011), 64. “the law of group polarization”: Cass R. Sunstein, “The Law of Group Polarization,” John M. Olin Law & Economics Working Paper No. 91, www.law.uchicago.edu/Publications/Working/index.html. “the most important negative liberties”: Arendt, On Revolution, 284. Instead of single-mindedly pursuing a new form of “collective thinking”: Cf. John Gray, The Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: New Press, 2000), who has come to a similar conclusion.

…

Equally insidious are the paradoxical results that occur in a polarizing protest movement that simultaneously demands consensus in its organs of self-government. As a result of the willingness of moderates within such a movement to compromise, the consensus view that prevails is generally the most radical alternative on offer (as had happened before in SDS in the late 1960s—yet another illustration of what Cass Sunstein has called “the law of group polarization”). Some of these problems could be papered over briefly. Occupy proved that a handful of networked activists can exploit social media to muster a large, ostensibly leaderless protest movement. But when the tear gas and crowds have dispersed from the city squares, those left behind will have to face the fact that “organizing without organizations” is a fantasy—not a winning long-term political strategy.

…

“to the extent that polls also are accurate”: American Association for Public Opinion Research, “AAPOR’s Statement on 2012 Presidential Election Polling,” www.aapor.org/Communications/Press-Releases/AAPOR-s-Statement-on-2012-Presidential-Election-Po.aspx. The more refined such data: For a recent discussion of this problem, see Cass Sunstein, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). “were increasingly listening to what people”: James W. Beniger, “Comment on Charles Tilly,” Public Opinion Quarterly 47, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 481–482. “What we are confronted with”: Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, p. 263 (quoting from the third edition; the first edition appeared in 1942, the second in 1947).

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

Daniel Kahneman, Prospect Theory: an analysis of decision under risk (PN, 1977). Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Penguin, 2012). Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky (eds), Judgment under Uncertainty: heuristics and biases (Cambridge University Press, 1982). Richard A. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge (Penguin, 2009). Index A Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, 1759) 2, 5–6 Adelman, Irma 110 American Economic Association 170 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations see The Wealth of Nations anarchism 156 apartheid system in South Africa 199 Ariely, Dan 234 Arrow, Kenneth 191, 213 AT&T 22 austerity versus stimulus debate 43–4, 140–1 Austrian School of Economics 121–2 autarky concept 184 bank bailouts in the financial crisis 162 Bank of England 161 Barro, Robert 43 Barro-Ricardo equivalence 43–4 Becker, Gary (1930– ) 193–216 approach to human behaviour 212–15 building human capital 200–2, 210 early life and influences 195–7 economic perspective on discrimination 196–7, 198–9 Economics of Discrimination (1957) 196–7, 198–9 economics of the family 213–15 family decision making 203–6 key economic theories and writings 197–212 long-term impact 212–15 new home economics 203–6 Nobel Prize (1992) 194, 195–6 on crime and punishment 207–10 on drug addiction 210–12, 215 rational choice model 197, 212– 15, 216 verdict 215–16 Becker–Posner Blog 215 behavioural economics 218–19, 233–6 Bentham, Jeremy 31, 181 Bergmann, Barbara 206 Bergson, Abram 182 Bergson–Samuelson social welfare function 182–3 Bernanke, Ben 77, 159, 162 Bernoulli, Daniel 229 bias in decision making 222–5 in financial decision making 225–32 Bitcoin currency 138 Black, Fischer 187 Blinder, Alan 215 Bloomsbury Group 94 Blunt, Anthony 94 boom and bust cycles see business cycles Bretton Woods agreement 95, 108–9 Brown, Gordon 3, 42 Burgess, Guy 94 Burns, Arthur F. 147 Bush, George H.W. 139 business cycles 57, 65 Hayek’s explanation 123–6 Samuelson’s oscillator model 174–5 Butler, Eamonn 162 Cambridge School of economics 74, 86 Cambridge spy ring 94 capital flow controls 113 capital-intensive goods, effects of increase in wages 33 capitalism exploitation of the working class (Marx) 56–8, 62–3 Index239 ‘fictitious capital’ concept (Marx) 62 seeds of its own downfall (Marx) 56–8, 61–3 capitalist production process (Marx) 54–6 Carlyle, Thomas 33 cartels evil of 10–11 regulation to prevent 21–2 central banks control of economic activity 161 over-expansion of credit 123–4 central state planning, Hayek’s opposition to 134–6, 140 certainty effect 229, 230 ceteris paribus approach to economic analysis 79–80 Chapman, Bruce 19 Chicago School of economic thought 146, 160, 194 China savings and investment imbalance with the US 113 trade imbalance with the US 45 choice architecture 234 Churchill, Winston 98 classical economics 40, 54 Coase, Ronald 73 cognitive biases (Kahneman) 222–5 communism 19, 50 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 52, 58–61 company bailouts in the financial crisis 162 comparative advantage 35–8, 183–4 complex adaptive systems, science of 138 complex financial products 61–2, 187 computer-games-based money 138 confirmation bias 227 consumer demand marginal rate of substitution 180 revealed preference theory 180–1 consumption smoothing concept 149, 163 Corn Laws, attack by Ricardo 33–5 costs of production, relationship to value 75–7 credit expansion, as a driver of boom and bust cycles 123–4 crime and punishment, views of Becker 207–10 Darling, Alistair 112 Das Kapital (Marx) 52, 53–4, 59–61, 62, 67–8 decision making biases and errors in financial decisions 225–32 heuristics and bias in 222–5 Prospect Theory (Kahneman) 228–32, 234 under risk 228–32 demand side economics 127 depression Keynesian interventionist view 92–3, 94, 105–6 see also Great Depression (1930s) dialectic style of analysis 52, 54 Diamond, Peter 179 diminishing marginal utility 82 discrimination economic perspective of Becker 196–7, 198–9 views of Friedman 157 distribution of economic value (Marx) 54–6 division of labour and productivity 11–14 car production 20–1 in daily life 20–1 divorce rates 205 drug addiction, views of Becker 210–12, 215 Dubner, Stephen 234 Eastern Europe, influence of Hayek 140 Ebenstein, Larry 158 Economics: An Introductory Analysis (Samuelson, 1948) 168, 171–3, 188–9 Economics of Discrimination (Becker, 1957) 196–7, 198–9 Efficient Market theory 111, 112, 187 240Index elasticity of demand 82–4 Elizabeth II, Queen 158 emerging markets, offshoring of jobs to 41 endogenous growth 202 endowment effect 232, 234 Engels, Friedrich 52, 58–61 ethical judgements in economics 182–3 European Central Bank 161 exchange rates, impact of trade on 185–6 expected utility theory (EUT) 228, 229–30, 232 externalities 85 factor price equalisation theorem 186–7 Fama, Eugene 160, 187 family decision making economic perspective 183, 203–6, 213–15 welfare decision making 183 fiat currency 152 ‘fictitious capital’ concept (Marx) 62 financial decision making, biases and errors in 225–32 financial economics, work of Samuelson 187 First World War 95 Folbre, Nancy 206 Ford Model-T car, assembly-line production system 21 Foundations of Economic Analysis (Samuelson, 1947) 168, 169–70 Fox, Charles James 23 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner) 234 free-market mechanism of supply and demand 8–9 free market system view of Adam Smith 13–14, 16–18 view of Hayek 131–3 view of Friedman 155–7 free rider problem in public goods 177–8 Free to Choose (Friedman and Friedman, 1980) 158 free trade, influence of Adam Smith 22–3 Freeman, Richard 201 frictional unemployment 155 Friedman, David 156 Friedman, Milton (1912–2006) 94, 110, 145–64, 190–1, 196 advocate of the free market 155–7 belief in individualism 155–7 criticism of Keynesianism 149–50 early life and influences 147–8 economics in action 160–3 fiat currency 152 Free to Choose (1980 ) 158 influence of the Great Depression (1930s) 148 influence on modern economic theory 158–60 limited role of government in the economy 152, 155–7 long-term legacy 157–63 monetarism 151–2 monetarist rule 152 monetary policy 151–2 ‘natural’ rate of unemployment 153–5 new explanation for the Great Depression 150–1 Nobel Prize in economics (1976) 146, 147–8, 154, 161 non-accelerating inflation of unemployment (NAIRU) 153–5 permanent income hypothesis 148–50 role of money supply in the economy 151–2 verdict 163–4 Friedman, Rose (formerly Rose Director) 147, 148, 157, 158, 160 FTSE-listed plcs 86 Funk, Walter 108 Funk Plan 108 Galbraith, J.K. 159 gambler’s fallacy (misconception of chance) 224 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 40 Index241 general equilibrium theory 8 genetically modified foods 42 geographical effects in economics 84–6 Giffen goods 84 global financial crisis (2007–8) 92, 174 and Keynesianism 111–13 global stimulus package 113 Marxist view 61–3 global free trade influence of Adam Smith 22–3 influence of Ricardo 40–2 global public goods 177–8 global recession (2009) see Great Recession (2009) gold standard, criticism by Keynes 95, 98, 107 government debt and the Great Recession (2009) 43 taxpayer view of (Ricardo) 38–9 government role in the economy anti-central planning view of Hayek 134–6, 140 Keynesian view 92–3, 94, 105–6 view of Adam Smith 9, 10, 16–18 view of Friedman 152, 155–7 Great Crash (1929) 98, 99 Great Depression (1930s) 19, 22–3, 85, 92 explanation of Friedman and Schwartz 150–1 influence on Friedman 148 influence on Keynes 99–100 role of the Federal Reserve 159 Great Recession (2009) 23 and government debt 43 arguments against protectionism 42 austerity versus stimulus debate 43–4, 140–1 Greece, sovereign debt crisis 113–14 Greenspan, Alan 111–12, 235 Grossman, Michael 212 Hansen, Lars Peter 160 Hayek, Friedrich (1899–1992) 110, 111, 119–42 business cycle theory 123–6 clash with Keynes 120, 126–31 collapse of the Soviet Union 140 early life and influences 120 emphasis on individual freedom 134–6, 140 explanation for boom and bust cycles 123–6 First World War 121 focus on supply side economics 127 influence in Eastern Europe 140 influence on George H.W.

…

The EU’s competition authority used behavioural economics in the recent Microsoft competition case when it insisted that its products offered a selection of rival internet browsers as well as Microsoft’s own Explorer. 234 The Great Economists We have seen how Thaler coined the term endowment effect to capture and expand on Kahneman’s finding that people value things more highly once they own them. Thaler, who is a professor of behavioural science and economics at Chicago University, built on the Prospect Theory to devise a positive theory of consumer choice – how people actually make decisions compared with how they should. He coined the phrase choice architecture with law professor Cass Sunstein to describe the way in which decisions may (and can) be influenced by how the choices are presented. Thaler has developed many strands of thinking in behavioural economics, encapsulated in his book written with Sunstein aimed at a mass market, Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness, which makes use of Kahneman’s three heuristics.

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again
by Nicholas Dunbar
Published 11 Jul 2011

See the remarks by Goldman’s then head of firmwide risk, Bob Litzenberger, in Nicholas Dunbar, Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the Legends Behind It (Chichester: Wiley, 2000), 203. 12. The BIS actually further liberalized the VAR-based capital rules in 1998, introducing a so-called specific risk amendment that a Federal Reserve official described in 2009 as “the kiss of death.” 13. For example, see the chapter on consumer credit in Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 14. The products are normally sold to intermediaries such as small banks or insurance companies before passing into the hands of the consumer. 15. An edited version of my interview with Sartori di Borgoricco was published in “The Key to Successful Client Solutions,” Risk, October 2004, 53. 16.

…

They were envisaged as gifted beings who could frame their beliefs about potential investments in the form of detailed probability distributions, including the correlations between investments. In a footnote to his paper, Markowitz said, “This paper does not consider the difficult question of how investors do (or should) form their probability beliefs.” Since then, analysts have typically assumed that beliefs are formed purely from historical statistics. 13. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 14. Barclays issued an emerging market CDO structured by Usi’s group named RF Alts Finance in January 2000. 15. E-mail evidence presented at Banca Popolare di Intra and Barclays Bank PLC, transcript of High Court Hearing, February 9, 2010; and witness statement of Stefano Silocchi quoted in Barclays’ pre-trial argument to the High Court. 16.

…

Behavioral economists call it naive diversification, in part because it seems to be hardwired into the human psyche. Psychological experiments show that when people are not restricted to a single choice on a menu, they will spread their allocation across whatever is available. For example, in an experiment cited by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their book Nudge, children who are offered multiple brands of chocolate will almost always divide their picks so that they can taste all the chocolates rather than sticking with a single brand.13 In the same way, and with no more justification for doing so, investors who are offered a menu of different retirement funds blindly split their allocations across the menu, even when it is not in their interests to do so.

Think Like a Freak
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 11 May 2014

Krueger, What Makes a Terrorist (Princeton University Press, 2007); Claude Berrebi, “Evidence About the Link Between Education, Poverty and Terrorism Among Palestinians,” Princeton University Industrial Relations Section working paper, 2003; and Krueger and Jita Maleckova, “Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, no. 4 (Fall 2003). / 172 Trying to keep a public men’s room clean?: See Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge (Yale University Press, 2008). / 172 “. . . We are also blind to our blindness”: See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). / 173 “It’s easier to jump out of a plane”: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, “20 Things Boys Can Do to Become Men,” Esquire.com, October 2013. 173 HOW MUCH DID THE ANTI-DRUG CAMPAIGN CUT DRUG USE?

…

So you might think it would be pretty easy to change the minds of people who haven’t thought very hard about an issue. But we’ve seen no evidence of this. Even on a topic that people don’t care much about, it can be hard to get their attention long enough to prompt a change. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, pioneers of the “nudge” movement, recognized this dilemma. Rather than try to persuade people of the worthiness of a goal—whether it’s conserving energy or eating better or saving more for retirement—it’s more productive to essentially trick people with subtle cues or new default settings. Trying to keep a public men’s room clean?

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks
Published 8 Mar 2011

Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average (New York: Broadway Books, 2009), 92–93. 4 In department stores Paco Underhill, Call of the Mall: The Geography of Shopping by the Author of Why We Buy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 49–50. 5 pairs of panty hose Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 103. 6 At restaurants, people eat more Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Ann Arbor, MI: Caravan Books, 2008), 64. 7 Marketing people also realize Hallinan, 99. 8 Capital Pacific Homes David Brooks, “Castle in a Box,” The New Yorker, March 26, 2001, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/03/26/010326fa_fact_brooks. 9 For all of human history Steven E.

…

Frank, The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 129. 4 Ninety-four percent of college professors Andrew Newburg and Mark Robert Waldman, Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth (New York: Free Press, 2006), 73. 5 Ninety percent of entrepreneurs Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Ann Arbor, MI: Caravan Books, 2008), 32. 6 Ninety-eight percent of students Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 109. 7 College students vastly overestimate Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Vintage, 2007), 18. 8 Golfers on the PGA tour Joseph T.

…

Augustine’s Press, 2000), 39. 2 “Reason is and ought only” David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 2, sect. 3 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 286. 3 “We are generally” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 87. 4 “senses and imagination captivate” Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Vintage, 2005), 76. 5 Level 2 is like Mr. Spock Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Ann Arbor, MI: Caravan Books, 2008), 22. 6 The recall process James Le Fanu, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (New York: Vintage, 2010), 213. 7 Half had significant errors Robert A. Burton, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (New York: St.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

under significant criticism: Josh Constine, “Zuckerberg says Facebook will offer GDPR privacy controls everywhere,” Techcrunch, April 4, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/04/zuckerberg-gdpr/. “If people really knew”: Nicholas Confessore, “The Unlikely Activists Who Took On Silicon Valley—and Won,” New York Times, August 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/magazine/facebook-google-privacy-data.html. Nudges are design features: Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). a neutral online identifier: Jordan Mitchell, “The Evolution of the Internet, Identity, Privacy and Tracking,” IAB Technology Laboratory, September 4, 2019, https://iabtechlab.com/blog/evolution-of-internet-identity-privacy-tracking/.

…

And we all know how invective can be directed at particular people online: flaming, doxxing, and constant harassment meant to drive them off platforms. When this happens, the ideal of the internet as a marketplace of ideas deteriorates into an environment that fails to respect the equal communicative liberty and dignity of all. What Are the Offline Harms of Online Speech? Back in 2001, Harvard professor Cass Sunstein warned of the harmful effects of social media on democracy and human dignity. His main concern was that online spaces tend to favor “enclave” deliberation—conversations among like-minded people who encounter information and arguments that reinforce, rather than challenge, their preexisting views.

…

“time to stop shitposting”: Raymond Lin, “New Zealand Shooter Kills 50 in Attack on Mosques,” Guide Post Daily, April 1, 2019, https://gnnguidepost.org/2923/news/new-zealand-shooter-kills-50-in-attack-on-mosques/. 7 or 8 out of every 10,000: Guy Rosen, “Community Standards Enforcement Report, Fourth Quarter 2020,” Facebook Newsroom, February 11, 2021, https://about.fb.com/news/2021/02/community-standards-enforcement-report-q4-2020/. “breeding extremism”: Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 69, 78 “asking an epidemiologist”: Joshua Cohen, “Against Cyber-Utopianism,” Boston Review, June 19, 2012, https://bostonreview.net/joshua-cohen-reflections-on-information-technology-and-democracy. this area of scholarly research: Nathaniel Persily and Joshua A.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

You’re on Casino Camera,” Associated Press, February 11, 2009, http://www.cbsnews.com/2100–205_162–274604.html. 198 Canadian casinos have recently solved: Ashlee Vance, “A Privacy-Friendly Way to Ban Gambling Addicts from Casinos,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 29, 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012–08–29/a-privacy-friendly-way-to-ban-gambling-addicts-from-casinos. 198 what Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler call “nudges”: Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, updated ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 199 as some recent studies speculate: F. Godlee, “Obesity and Climate Change,” British Medical Journal 345 (2012), http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e6516. 200 “Moral communities need to keep debating”: Brownsword, “Lost in Translation,” 1356. 200 John Dewey expressed almost a century earlier: the best short introduction to Dewey’s thought on technology and paternalism (from which most of the Dewey quotes in the book are taken) is Tan Sor Hoon, “Paternalism—a Deweyan Perspective,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 13, no. 1 (January 1, 1999): 56–70.

…

Perhaps shifting the registers will result in greater efficiency or utility or less crime—in which case we are back to SCP and Kerr’s digital locks. Or perhaps the regulators believe that you are subject to the same cognitive biases and limitations as the rest of us humans; as such, you might be tempted to do the wrong thing even if you really don’t want to. This last set of assumptions accounts for the proliferation of what Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler call “nudges”: clever manipulations of default settings—what the authors call “choice architecture”—to get you to eat healthy foods or save money for retirement. Nudging is to manipulation what public relations is to advertising: it gets things done while making all the background tinkering implicit and invisible.

…

“Rather than hope that we as a nation develop more willpower in order to meet our biggest challenges, our best bet might be to take self-control out of the equation whenever possible—or at least reduce the self-control demands of doing the right thing,” she writes. Thus, she endorses the nudges of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, for they “make it easier for people to make good decisions consistent with their values and goals.” In practice this means that instead of confronting open-ended devices like the Caterpillar cord or the Forget Me Not lamp that force us to recognize our own consumption habits, McGonigal would rather have us switch to fully automated systems that simply turn off the standby devices and reading lamps without any human intervention.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

Barnes, 1851), 199. 121 “Imagine a future”: Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (Knopf, 1995), 153. 121 the “Daily Me”: Ibid. 122 the “Daily We”: Cass Sunstein, “The Daily We,” Boston Review, June 1, 2001, http://bostonreview.net/cass-sunstein-internet-democracy-daily-we. 122 “You’re the only person”: Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (Penguin, 2011), 9. 123 “YouTube cannot contain”: Aric Toler, “‘No Safe Spaces on the Flat Earth’—Emerging Alt-Right Inspires Flat Earth Online Communities,” Bellingcat, June 7, 2017, https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2017/06/07/flat-earth-online-communities/. 123 The best predictor: We consulted several excellent sources for a primer on homophily. See Aris Anagnostopoulos et al., “Viral Misinformation: The Role of Homophily and Polarization,” arXiv:1411.2893 [cs.SI], November 2014; Walter Quattrociocchi, Antonia Scala, and Cass R. Sunstein, “Echo Chambers on Facebook” (discussion paper no. 877, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, September 2016), http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/Sunstein_877.pdf; Michela Del Vicario et al., “The Spreading of Misinformation Online,” PNAS 113, no. 3 (2016): 554–59, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289263634_The_spreading_of_misinformation_online; Delia Mocanu et al., “Collective Attention in the Age of (Mis)information,” arXiv:1403.3344 [cs.SI], March 2014. 123 “love of the same”: Aaron Recitca, “Homophily,” New York Times Magazine, December 10, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10Section2a.t-4.html. 124 Yale University researchers: Gordon Pennycook, Tyrone Cannon, and David G.

…

utm_term=.apjBaw3rL#.tezr61jzN. 120 “You see they like”: Smith and Banic, “Fake News.” 120 Of the top twenty: Silverman, “This Analysis Shows.” 120 “Pope Francis Shocks World”: Ibid. 120 Three times as many: Ibid. 120 Pope Francis didn’t: Philip Pullella, “Pope Warns Media over ‘Sin’ of Spreading Fake News, Smearing Politicians,” Reuters, December 7, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pope-media/pope-warns-media-over-sin-of-spreading-fake-news-smearing-politicians-idUSKBN13W1TU. 120 “I didn’t force anyone”: Smith and Banic, “Fake News.” 120 “They’re not allowed”: Ibid. 120 President Obama himself: David Remnick, “Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency. 121 “access to their own”: James Breiner, “What Freedom of the Press Means for Those Who Own One,” MediaShift, December 10, 2014, http://mediashift.org/2014/12/what-freedom-of-the-press-means-for-those-who-own-one/. 121 “axiom of political science”: Alexis de Tocqueville, The Republic of the United States of America, and Its Political Institutions, Reviewed and Examined, trans. Henry Reeves (A. S. Barnes, 1851), 199. 121 “Imagine a future”: Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (Knopf, 1995), 153. 121 the “Daily Me”: Ibid. 122 the “Daily We”: Cass Sunstein, “The Daily We,” Boston Review, June 1, 2001, http://bostonreview.net/cass-sunstein-internet-democracy-daily-we. 122 “You’re the only person”: Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (Penguin, 2011), 9. 123 “YouTube cannot contain”: Aric Toler, “‘No Safe Spaces on the Flat Earth’—Emerging Alt-Right Inspires Flat Earth Online Communities,” Bellingcat, June 7, 2017, https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2017/06/07/flat-earth-online-communities/. 123 The best predictor: We consulted several excellent sources for a primer on homophily.

…

As the web exploded in popularity and the first elements of the “Daily Me” began to take shape, some pondered whether the opposite might actually be true. Rather than expanding their horizons, people were just using the endless web to seek out information with which they already agreed. Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein rebranded it as the “Daily We.” Imagine . . . a system of communications in which each person has unlimited power of individual design. If some people want to watch news all the time, they would be entirely free to do exactly that. If they dislike news, and want to watch football in the morning and situation comedies at night, that would be fine too . . .

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox
Published 29 May 2009

Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi, “Save More Tomorrow: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Savings,” Journal of Political Economy (Feb. 2004): pt. 2, S164–S187. 14. Justin Fox, “Why Johnny Can’t Save for Retirement,” Fortune, March 21, 2005. 15. Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 16. Cass R. Sunstein, ed., Behavioral Law and Economics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 17. Aditya Chakrabortty, “From Obama to Cameron, why do so many politicians want a piece of Richard Thaler?” Guardian, July 12, 2008, 16. 18.

…

Bush made his unsuccessful push to replace part of Social Security with individual investment accounts, almost all the proposals centered on a simple, low-cost default option such as a life-cycle fund. “We’ve accepted the argument of behavioralists like Dick Thaler that people do dumb things,” said William Niskanen, a former Chicago student of Milton Friedman and chairman of the Cato Institute, the libertarian Washington think tank.14 Thaler joined forces with Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein to apply his ideas beyond retirement savings. They dubbed their guided approach to choice “libertarian paternalism,” and showed how it could improve lending regulation, Medicare prescription plans, public schools, and marriage.15 Just as the law and economics movement that emerged from Chicago gave intellectual backing to the great deregulation of the 1970s through the 1990s, Sunstein became a leading proponent of a new behavioral law and economics movement that aimed to guide a rethink of law and regulation.16 Sunstein’s friend Barack Obama, a former part-time Chicago law professor, put together a presidential campaign platform replete with behaviorist ideas—and appointed Sunstein as his regulation czar after he was elected.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

,” Guardian, March 24, 2014. 18 On the impracticality of this law, see, for example, this rather self-serving piece by Google’s legal czar David Drummond: “We Need to Talk About the Right to Be Forgotten,” Guardian, July 10, 2014. 19 Roger Cohen, “The Past in Our Future,” New York Times, November 27, 2013. 20 Jonathan Freedland, “From Memory to Sexuality, the Digital Age Is Changing Us Completely,” Guardian, June 21, 2013. 21 Mark Lilla, “The Truth About Our Libertarian Age,” New Republic, June 17, 2014. 22 Ibid. 23 Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Current, 2014), p. 9. 24 Mic Wright, “Is ‘Shadow’ the Creepiest Startup Ever? No, CIA Investment Palantir Owns That Crown,” Telegraph, September 21, 2013. 25 Cass R. Sunstein, Why Nudge: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 116. 26 Cohen, “Beware the Lure of Mark Zuckerberg’s Cool Capitalism.” 27 europarl.europa.eu/ep_products/poster_invitation.pdf. 28 John Naughton, “Amazon’s History Should Teach Us to Beware ‘Friendly’ Internet Giants,” Guardian, February 22, 2014. 29 Richard Sennett, “Real Progressives Believe in Breaking Up Google,” Financial Times, June 28, 2013. 30 Ibid. 31 Rebecca Solnit, “Who Will Stop Google?

…

Bentham’s utilitarianism, that bizarre project to quantify every aspect of the human condition, has reappeared in the guise of the quantified-self movement. Even the nineteenth-century debate between Bentham’s utilitarianism and John Stuart Mill’s liberalism over individual rights has reappeared in what Harvard Law School’s Cass Sunstein calls “the politics of libertarian paternalism”—a struggle between “Millville” and “Benthamville” about the role of “nudge” in a world where the government, through partnerships with companies like Acxiom and Palantir, has more and more data on us all25 and Internet companies like Facebook and OkCupid run secretive experiments designed to control our mood.

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Published 14 Jul 2010

On the surface, this approach seems reasonable and prudent. Harm must be anticipated and preempted. Better safe than sorry. Unfortunately, the Precautionary Principle works better in theory than in practice. “The precautionary principle is very, very good for one thing—stopping technological progress,” says philosopher and consultant Max More. Cass R. Sunstein, who devoted a book to debunking the principle, says, “We must challenge the Precautionary Principle not because it leads in bad directions, but because read for all it is worth, it leads in no direction at all.” Every good produces harm somewhere, so by the strict logic of an absolute Precautionary Principle no technologies would be permitted.

…

This is a refreshing, fast read about the two years Brende lived off the grid near an Amish community. His book is the best way to get the feel—the warmth, the smell, the atmosphere—of the minimal lifestyle. Because Brende comes from a technological background, he anticipates your questions. Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle. Cass Sunstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Case studies on the faults of the Precautionary Principle and a suggested framework for an alternative approach. Whole Earth Discipline. Stewart Brand. New York: Viking, 2009. Many of my themes about progress and urbanization and constant vigilance were first developed by Brand.

…

DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163. 247 such as Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco: Lawrence A. Kogan. (2008) “The Extra-WTO Precautionary Principle: One European ‘Fashion’ Export the United States Can Do Without.” Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, 17 (2). p. 497. http://www.itssd.org/Kogan%2017%5B1%5D.2.pdf. 247 “it leads in no direction at all”: Cass Sunstein. (2005) Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 14. 248 DDT around the insides of homes: Lawrence Kogan. (2004) “‘Enlightened’ Environmentalism or Disguised Protectionism? Assessing the Impact of EU Precaution-Based Standards on Developing Countries,” p. 17. http://www.wto.org/english/forums_e/ngo_e/posp47_nftc_enlightened_e.pdf. 248 EU agreed to phase out DDT altogether: Tina Rosenberg. (2004, April 11) “What the World Needs Now Is DDT.”

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

See Don Watkins, RooseveltCare: How Social Security Is Sabotaging the Land of Self-Reliance (Irvine, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 2014). 8. Nicholas Eberstadt, “American Exceptionalism and the Entitlement State,” National Affairs, Winter 2015, http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/american-exceptionalism-and-the-entitlement-state (accessed May 28, 2015). 9. Cass R. Sunstein, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (New York: The Free Press, 1995), pp. 18–19. 10. Ibid., p. 19. 11. Paul Krugman, “Losing Our Country,” New York Times, June 10, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/opinion/10krugman.html (accessed April 13, 2015). 12. Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: W.

…

According to the alarmists, if we all enter that room as equal and informed citizens, if we are each given the same amount of time to speak, if we all are committed to arguing in terms of what policies will be for the good of the entire group rather than our own good, and if at the end of that process of deliberation we each get one vote to decide the outcome, the result will be governance aimed at “the common good.” According to President Obama’s former regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein: In such a system, politics is not supposed merely to protect preexisting private rights or to reflect the outcomes of interest-group pressures. It is not intended to aggregate existing private preferences, or to produce compromises among various affected groups with self-interested stakes in the outcome.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 26 Mar 2013

This is a powerful and easy-to-read book offering an overview of the problems of decision making, along with the authors’ solid recommendations for tackling those problems. For Even More: Dan Ariely (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. A popular book about the irrational decisions we make, written with wit by one of the cleverest researchers in the field of decision making. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Great book by a behavioral economist and a law professor. Should be required reading for HR leaders, government officials, and anyone else who designs systems that allow other people to make choices. Michael A. Roberto (2009).

…

*See this page for a more thorough list of our recommended decision books, but to understand the problems we face in making decisions, essential reading would include Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, mentioned above, and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. One of the handful of books that provides advice on making decisions better is Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which was written for “choice architects” in business and government who construct decision systems such as retirement plans or organ-donation policies. It has been used to improve government policies in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries. 1 The Four Villains of Decision Making 1.

Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 25 Mar 2014

STORRS LECTURES ON JURISPRUDENCE Yale Law School, 2012 Cass R. Sunstein Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College. Copyright © 2014 by Cass R. Sunstein. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use.

…

To be sure, the individual mandate can be, and has been, powerfully defended on nonpaternalistic grounds; above all, it should be understood as an effort to overcome a free-rider problem that exists when people do not obtain health insurance (but are nonetheless subsidized in the event that they need medical help). 6. MILL, supra note 2. 7. Id. 8. Id. 9. An authoritative discussion is DANIEL KAHNEMAN, THINKING, FAST AND SLOW (2011). On behavioral economics and public policy, see CASS R. SUNSTEIN, SIMPLER: THE FUTURE OF GOVERNMENT (2013); RICHARD H. THALER & CASS R. SUNSTEIN, NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, and HAPPINESS (2008). 10. Richard A. Posner, Why Is There No Milton Friedman Today, 10 ECON. J. WATCH 210, 212 (2013), available at http://econjwatch.org/articles/why-is-there-no-milton-friedman-today-RP. 11.

…

Rev. 133 135–42 (2006), which emphasizes the ability of those in the private sector to balance relevant values and to incorporate new information. 11. Mill, supra note 2. 12. Id. 13. See Cass R. Sunstein, Impersonal Default Rules vs. Active Choices vs. Personalized Default Rules: A Triptych (SSRN Elec. Library, Working Paper No. 2,171,343, 2012), http://ssrn.com/abstract=2171343, at 21–24. 14. See, e.g., Gordon Tullock, Arthur Seldon & Gordon Lo Brady, Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice (2002). 15. See Timur Kuran & Cass R. Sunstein, Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation, 51 Stan. L. Rev. 683 (1999). The point regarding the shortcomings of behavioral economics is emphasized in Wright & Ginsburg, supra note 5. 16.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
by Rebecca MacKinnon
Published 31 Jan 2012

CHAPTER 6: DEMOCRATIC CENSORSHIP 87 In a blog post explaining her decision: Dan Frost, “The Attack on Kathy Sierra,” SFGate, March 27, 2007, www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=14783 (accessed June 27, 2011). 88 The Offensive Internet, published in early 2011: Danielle Keats Citron, “Civil Rights in our Information Age,” and Cass R. Sunstein, “Believing False Rumors,” in The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation, ed. Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 31–49, 91–106. 89 Constitutional lawyer Lee Bollinger: His book is Lee C. Bollinger, Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century (Inalienable Rights) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 48. 90 “dog poop girl”: Jonathan Krim, “Subway Fracas Escalates into Test of the Internet’s Power to Shame,” Washington Post, July 7, 2005, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/06/AR2005070601953.html (accessed August 3, 2011). 90 Cyber-harassment has already caused a number of celebrity suicides: “Cyber Bullying Campaign Against Korean Singer Dies Down,” Agence France-Presse, October 13, 2010, www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ig4StQI4mbvccWeFCGC5uuihUyAg?

…

In the essay “Civil Rights in an Information Age,” University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron describes an Internet with two faces: “One propels us forward with exciting opportunities for women and minorities to work, network, and spread their ideas online. The other brings us back to a time when anonymous mobs prevented vulnerable people from participating in society as equals.” Cass Sunstein, writing in his capacity as a Harvard law professor although the book was published while he was serving under Obama as head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, describes how anonymous online speech enables false rumors about public officials and current events to spread like wildfire and become ingrained in the minds of large segments of a nation’s or region’s population.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
by Amy Webb
Published 5 Mar 2019

Marisa Fernandez, “Amazon Leaves Retail Competitors in the Dust, Claims 50% of US E-Commerce Market,” Axios, July 13, 2018, https://www.axios.com/amazon-now-has-nearly-50-of-the-us-e-commerce-market-1531510098-8529045a-508d-46d6-861f-1d0c2c4a04b4.html. 8. Art Kleiner, “The Man Who Saw the Future,” Strategy+Business, February 12, 2003, https://www.strategy-business.com/article/8220?gko=0d07f. 9. Cass R. Sunstein, “Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law,” Chicago Unbound, John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 138, 2001. 10. “Quick Facts 2015,” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812348. 11. “Aviation Statistics,” National Transportation Safety Board, https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/data/Pages/aviation_stats.aspx. 12.

…

The Royal Dutch Shell company popularized scenario planning when it revealed that scenarios had led managers to anticipate the global energy crisis (1973 and 1979) and the collapse of the market in 1986 and to mitigate risk in advance of their competition.8 Scenarios are such a powerful tool that Shell still, 45 years later, employs a large, dedicated team to researching and writing them. I’ve prepared risk and opportunity scenarios for the future of AI across many industries and fields and for a varied group of organizations. Scenarios are a tool to help us cope with a cognitive bias behavioral economics and legal scholar Cass Sunstein calls “probability neglect.”9 Our human brains are bad at assessing risk and peril. We assume that common activities are safer than novel or uncommon activities. For example, most of us feel completely safe driving our cars compared to flying on a commercial airline, yet air travel is the safest mode of transportation.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

Adam, “Political Affiliation of Canadian University Professors,” Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol. 33:4 (2008), 873–98, https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/cjs/index.php/CJS/article/viewFile/1036/3661; James Galbraith, “The Future of the Left in Europe?” American Prospect, August 17, 2016, http://prospect.org/article/future-left-europe. 37 Jonathan Kay, “A Black Eye for the Columbia Journalism Review,” Quillette, June 18, 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/06/18/a-black-eye-for-the-columbia-journalism-review/. 38 Cass R. Sunstein, “The Problem With All Those Liberal Professors,” Bloomberg, September 17, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-17/colleges-have-way-too-many-liberal-professors; Chase Watkins, “Study finds ‘ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination’ rampant in academic philosophy,” College Fix, August 21, 2019, https://www.thecollegefix.com/study-inds-ideological-similarity-hostility-and-discrimination-rampant-in-academic-philosophy/. 39 Rex Murphy, “Laurier, trading ‘free speech’ for ‘better speech,’ proves unspeakably clueless still,” National Post, August 3, 2018, https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-now-laurier-wants-to-ditch-free-speech-for-better-speech-can-we-converse. 40 Kate Hardiman, “Universities require scholars pledge commitment to diversity,” College Fix, April 14, 2017, https://www.thecollegefix.com/universities-require-scholars-pledge-commitment-diversity/. 41 James Barrett, “University Panel: Is Intersectionality a Religion?”

…

Roughly half of British voters lean to the right, while less than 12 percent of academics do.35 Similar ratios are common across Europe and in Canada.36 This political skewing has the effect of transforming much of academia into something resembling an ideological reeducation camp. For example, prominent schools of journalism, including Columbia’s, have moved away from teaching the fundamentals of reporting, to openly advancing a leftist “social justice” agenda.37 Even some progressives, like the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, recognize that “students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.”38 Yet there seems to be little desire among university administrators to counter the slide ever deeper into ideological conformism.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves
by John Cheney-Lippold
Published 1 May 2017

Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), 135. 47. Katia Genel, “The Question of Biopower: Foucault and Agamben,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 18, no. 1 (2006): 43–62. 48. Let’s Move!, “Get Active,” 2014, www.letsmove.gov. 49. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 50. Let’s Move!, “Get Active.” 51. Quantified Self, “About the Quantified Self,” 2014, http://quantifiedself.com. 52. Dawn Nafus and Jamie Sherman, “Big Data, Big Questions | This One Does Not Go Up to 11: The Quantified Self Movement as an Alternative Big Data Practice,” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 1785. 53.

…

Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 69. 81. Ibid., 30. 82. Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 42. 83. Cheney-Lippold, “New Algorithmic Identity.” 84. Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin Books, 2012). 85. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1980). 86. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 34. 87.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

Munger,” Harrison Barnes, January 17, 2015, https://www.hb.org/the-psychology-of-human-misjudgment-by-charles-t-munger/#07. 7. Thinkmentalmodels.com, “Deprival Syndrome—The Takeaway,” accessed December 10,2019, http://www.thinkmentalmodels.com/page66/page89/page89.html. 8. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2009). 9. Bill Gates, “This Animal Kills More People in a Day Than Sharks Do in a Century,” GatesNotes, April 23, 2018, https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Mosquito-Week-2018. 10. Benjamin Graham and Jason Zweig, The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing, rev. ed.

…

Tervooren, Tyler. “Advice from Warren Buffet [sic]: Games Are Won By Players Who Focus on the Field.” Riskology. https://www.riskology.co/focus-on-the-field. Tetlock, Philip, and Dan Gardner. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. New York: Broadway, 2016. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 2009. “There Are 3 Stages in a Typical Bull Market.” Ivanhoff Capital (blog), February 2, 2012. http://ivanhoff.com/2012/02/02/there-are-3-stages-in-a-typical-bull-market. Thorndike, William. The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success.

…

Instead of looking at overall portfolio performance, we try to gain from every single stock. This narrow framing is known as the disposition effect, and it results in selling winners and holding on to losers. As Peter Lynch puts it, this is the equivalent of “cutting the flowers and watering the weeds.” Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein take the idea of aversion to loss one step further.8 They explain that investors also suffer from myopic loss aversion; the more often we evaluate our portfolios, the more likely we are to see losses. And the more often we see losses, the more often we experience loss aversion, which then becomes a vicious cycle.

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 25 Apr 2011

Clemens, “Herd Immunity Conferred by Killed Oral Cholera Vaccines in Bangladesh: A Reanalysis,” Lancet 366 (2005): 44–49. 37 The psychological research has found its way in economics thanks to researchers such as Dick Thaler from the University of Chicago, George Lowenstein from Carnegie-Mellon, Matthew Rabin from Berkeley, David Laibson from Harvard, and others, whose work we cite here. 38 Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2008). 39 See a comparative cost-effectiveness analysis on the Web site of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, available at http://www.povertyactionlab.org/policy-lessons/health/child-diarrhea. 40 Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Rachel Glennerster, “Is Decentralized Iron Fortification a Feasible Option to Fight Anemia Among the Poorest?”

…

Fines or incentives can push individuals to take some action that they themselves consider desirable but perpetually postpone taking. More generally, time inconsistency is a strong argument for making it as easy as possible for people to do the “right” thing, while, perhaps, leaving them the freedom to opt out. In their best-selling book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, an economist and a law scholar from the University of Chicago, recommend a number of interventions to do just this.38 An important idea is that of default option: The government (or a well-meaning NGO) should make the option that it thinks is the best for most people the default choice, so that people will need to actively move away from it if they want to.

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War
by Fred Kaplan
Published 1 Mar 2016

That same day: “Administration White Paper: Bulk Collection of Telephony Metadata Under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act,” Aug. 9, 2013, http://www.publicrecordmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/EOP2013_pd_001.pdf; “The National Security Agency: Missions, Authorities, Oversight and Partnerships,” Aug. 9, 2013, https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/speeches_testimonies/2013_08_09_the_nsa_story.pdf. Sunstein had written an academic paper in 2008: Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories” (Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 08-03; University of Chicago Public Law Working Paper No. 199), Jan. 15, 2008, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585. The other Chicagoan, Geoffrey Stone: See esp. Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W.

…

Michael Morell was the establishment pick, a thirty-three-year veteran of the CIA, who had just retired two months earlier as the agency’s deputy director and who’d been the main point of contact between Langley and the White House during the secret raid on Osama bin Laden’s lair in Pakistan. Morell’s presence on the panel would go some distance toward placating the intelligence community. Two of the choices were colleagues of Obama from his days, in the 1990s, teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. One of them, Cass Sunstein, had also worked on his presidential campaign, served for three years as the chief administrator of his regulatory office, and was married to Samantha Power, his long-standing foreign policy aide, who had recently replaced Susan Rice as U.N. ambassador. An unconventional thinker on issues ranging from the First Amendment to animal rights, Sunstein had written an academic paper in 2008, proposing that government agencies infiltrate the social networks of extremist groups and post messages to undermine their conspiracy theories; some critics of Obama’s panel took this paper as a sign that Sunstein was well disposed to NSA domestic surveillance.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
by Tim Harford
Published 2 Feb 2021

Not everyone who is arrested has committed a crime, and not everyone who commits a crime is arrested. I (and my sources) should have been more careful, per my advice under rule three. 20. Jon Kleinberg et al., “Human Decisions and Machine Predictions,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 1 (February 2018), 237–93, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx032; see also Cass R. Sunstein, “Algorithms, Correcting Biases,” working paper, December 12, 2018. 21. David Jackson and Gary Marx, “Data Mining Program Designed to Predict Child Abuse Proves Unreliable, DCFS Says,” Chicago Tribune, December 6, 2017; and Dan Hurley, “Can an Algorithm Tell When Kids Are in Danger?,” New York Times Magazine, January 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/magazine/can-an-algorithm-tell-when-kids-are-in-danger.html. 22.

…

Alternatively, they could have jailed 40 percent fewer people without any increase in crime. Thousands of crimes could have been prevented, or thousands of people released pending trial, purely as a result of the algorithm outperforming the human judges. One important error that the judges make is what American legal scholar Cass Sunstein calls “current offense bias”—that is, when they make decisions about bail, they focus too much on the specific offense the defendant has been accused of. Defendants whose track record suggests they’re a high risk are treated as low risk if they’re accused of a minor crime, and defendants whose track record suggests they’re low risk are treated as high risk if the current offense is serious.

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 23 Aug 2006

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge CASS R. SUNSTEIN OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Infotopia/ !"#$%&'()%#*+)*+#,*'--.%-)/+%0-'*1% CASS R. SUNSTEIN / Infotopia / How Many Minds Produce Knowledge / 1 2006 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

…

Ibid., 4. 1 Columbia Accident Investigation Board, NASA, The Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, 2003, 97–204, available at http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/home/CAIB_Vol1.html. Ibid., 12, 102 (internal citation omitted), 183. See Cass R. Sunstein, David Schkade, and Lisa Michelle Ellman, “Ideological Voting on Federal Courts of Appeals: A Preliminary Investigation,” Virginia Law Review 90 (2004): 304–6, 314 (showing effects of panel composition on judicial behavior); Cass R. Sunstein et al., Are Judges Political?: An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2006). Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 2d ed. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2001), 30. 232 / Notes to Pages 12–15 18.

…

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sunstein, Cass R. Infotopia : how many minds produce knowledge / Cass R. Sunstein. p. cm. ISBN-13 978-0-19-518928-5 ISBN 0-19-518928-0 1. Personal information management. 2. Knowledge management. 3. Internet. I. Title. HD30.2.S85 2006 303.48'33—dc22 2005036052 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Leon Wieseltier !"#$%&'()%#*+)*+#,*'--.%-)/+%0-'*1% Preface and Acknowledgments / Every day of every year, each of us relies on information that is provided by others.

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 7 Mar 2017

Federal Communications Commission, 395 U.S. 367 (1969). 9.See, for example, Denver Area Educational Telecommunications Consortium v. Federal Communications Commission, 518 U.S. 727 (1996). For a defense of the Court’s caution, see Cass R. Sunstein, One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 10.See Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905). 11.See Lessig, Free Culture; Benkler, Wealth of Networks. 12.For an effort in this direction, see Cass R. Sunstein, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (New York: Free Press, 1995). 13.For an overview, see ibid., 77–81. 14.James Madison, “Report on the Virginia Resolution, January 1800,” in Writings of James Madison, ed.

…

Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Jacket design by Amanda Weiss Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sunstein, Cass R., author. Title: #Republic : divided democracy in the age of social media / Cass R. Sunstein. Other titles: Hashtag republic Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2017. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016038668 | ISBN 9780691175515 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Information society—Political aspects. | Internet— Political aspects. | Social media—Political aspects. | Polarization (Social sciences) | Political participation—Technological innovations

…

Landrum, Katie Carpenter, Laura Helft, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing,” Advances in Political Psychology 38 (forthcoming) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2816803 (accessed August 29, 2016); Andrew M. Guess, Media Choice and Moderation: Evidence from Online Tracking Data (2016), https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/663930/GuessJMP.pdf (accessed August 29, 2016). 4.See Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 5.Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes, “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2012): 405, http://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2012/iyengar-poq-affect-not-ideology.pdf (accessed August 29, 2016). 6.Ibid. 7.See Shanto Iyengar and Sean J.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
Published 19 Aug 2019

“Attention, Economy and the Brain.” Culture Machine 13 (2012): 1–19. . “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 63–88. Terry, Nicolas. “Big Data Proxies and Health Privacy Exceptionalism.” Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine 24, no. 1 (2014): 65–101. Thaler, Richard, and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Thatcher, Jim, David O’Sullivan, and Dillon Mahmoudi. “Data Colonialism Through Accumulation by Dispossession: New Metaphors for Daily Data.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 6 (2017): 990–1006. Thornhill, John. “How to Fix Facebook.”

…

He says nothing about the close connections between ubiquitous data collection and the new direction of capitalism, and he says little about the familiar ways of understanding the social that this new “social physics” casts into permanent shadow.141 Pentland’s “social physics” presents in sharp profile what elsewhere is a more diffuse recalibration of social science values. A decade ago a book called Nudge by a behavioral economist (Richard Thaler) and a legal theorist (Cass Sunstein) shot up the reading lists of government advisers around the world. The nudge is a basic way of influencing actions by subtle prompts and signals. Whereas critics quickly saw Nudge as a way of locking in market-oriented behavior, Thaler and Sunstein claim that the nudge is just a tilting of the “choice environment” that helps individuals reach the outcomes they would want anyway “as judged by themselves.”142 But how many times does an environment have to nudge you before it starts to govern what you want?

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference
by David Halpern
Published 26 Aug 2015

For example, in 2004, just eleven years ago, I organised a session at the American Economics Association annual meeting that had the cheeky title: ‘Memos to the Council of Behavioral Economic Advisers’. None of the participants, including me, ever thought we would see the day that any government institution vaguely resembling such an entity would exist. Nothing about this forecast changed when Cass Sunstein and I published our book Nudge, in 2008. The idea of the book was that it might be possible to use the findings of the behavioural and social sciences to help people achieve their goals, and to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of government policies, without requiring anyone to do anything.

…

Similarly, it is not difficult to conclude that our brains weren’t made for the day-to-day financial judgements that are the foundation of modern economies: from mortgages, to pensions, to the best buy in a supermarket. Yet classic economic and regulatory models are themselves based on mental shortcuts, or naive models of humanity that do not ring true. They’re like ill-fitting suits, because the model on which they are based is a simplistic mental mannequin. In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe these simplified creatures as ‘econs’. These econs consider and weigh up all the options, coolly and accurately, like the Vulcan Mr Spock from Star Trek, or the legendary Deep Blue that finally defeated the great chess champion Garry Kasparov (or at least how people think it ‘thought’).

…

A ‘nudge’ is essentially a means of encouraging or guiding behaviour, but without mandating or instructing, and ideally without the need for heavy financial incentives or sanctions. We know what it means in everyday life: it’s a gentle hint; a suggestion; a conspicuous glance at a heap of clothes that we’re hoping our kids or our partner might clear away. It stands in marked contrast to an obligation; a strict requirement; or the use of force. For Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, originators of the term ‘nudge’, a key element is that it avoids shutting down choices, unlike a law or formal requirement. But, as we shall see, a ‘nudge’ is a subset of a wider, more empirical and behaviourally focused approach to policymaking. Consider how a law actually works.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Published 7 Apr 2008

NUDGE NUDGE * * * Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness * * * Richard H. Thaler Cass R. Sunstein Yale University Press New Haven & London A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org. Copyright © 2008 by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

…

Set in Galliard and Copperplate 33 types by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thaler, Richard H., 1945– Nudge : improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness / Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-12223-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Economics— Psychological aspects. 2. Choice (Psychology)—Economic aspects. 3. Decision making—Psychological aspects. 4. Consumer behavior. I. Sunstein, Cass R. II. Title. HB74.P8T53 2008 330.01’9—dc22 2007047528 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

…

American Economic Review 91, no. 1 (2001): 79–98. —-. “How Much Is Investor Autonomy Worth?” Journal of Finance 57 (2002): 1593–1616. —-. “Heuristics and Biases in Retirement Savings Behavior.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 3 (2007): 81–104. Benartzi, Shlomo, Rchard H. Thaler, Stephen P. Utkus, and Cass R. Sunstein. “The Law and Economics of Company Stock in 401(k) Plans.” Journal of Law and Economics 50 (2007): 45–79. Benjamin, Daniel, and Jesse Shapiro. “Thin-Slice Forecasts of Gubernatorial Elections.” Working paper, University of Chicago, 2007. Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2005, http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jun/17/opinion/ed-wiki17. 16 James Rainey, “‘Wikitorial’ Pulled Due to Vandalism,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2005, http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jun/21/nation/na-wiki21. 17 “Los Angeles Times Launches Editorial Wiki,” Wikinews, June 19, 2005, http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Times_launches_editorial_wiki. 18 Ross Mayfield, “Wikitorial Fork,” Corante blog, June18, 2005, http://many.corante.com/archives/2005/06/18/wikitorial_fork.php. 19 Don Singleton, in his blog: “Write the News Yourself,” June 20, 2005, http://donsingleton.blogspot.com/2005/06/write-news-yourself.html. 20 Harvard Law School announcement, http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2008/02/19_sunstein.html. 21 Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton University Press, 2001). 22 Ibid., p. 57. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 60. 25 Ibid., pp. 65ff. 26 Ibid., p. 69. 27 Ibid., p. 71. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 206. Here, Sunstein is referring in general to the question of whether the Internet poses a threat to democracy. 31 Interview with Clay Shirky, March 30, 2010. 32 See Francesca Polletta, Pang Ching Bobby Chen, and Christopher Anderson, “Is Information Good for Deliberation?

…

If we’re holing ourselves up with people who think exactly the way we do, then knowledge is hiding from diversity, excluding more differences than ever before. If the Net is creating more echo chambers, the biggest loser will be democracy, for the citizenry will be polarized and thus be less able to come to agreement, and to compromise when it cannot. This is perhaps the greatest concern expressed by Cass Sunstein, a constitutional scholar and currently the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein, who is the most-cited living legal scholar in the United States,20 has written a couple of books on the topic. In Republic.com, published in 2001, he argues that when people get to choose what they see, they will tend toward that which is familiar, comfortable, and reinforcing of their existing beliefs, a tendency others call “homophily.”21 Sunstein shows the distressing power of homophily by pointing out that “[i]f you take the ten most highly rated television programs for whites, and then take the ten most highly rated programs for African-Americans, you will find little overlap between them.

…

For example, Ethan Zuckerman, my colleague at the Berkman Center, took a careful look at it and drew exactly the opposite conclusions.35 He points out that the study finds that Net users are more insular than users of just about all the old media. Indeed, if we were simply to look around the Net, using our own experience as a guide—the opposite of a careful methodology, granted—many of us would, like Cass Sunstein, conclude that people do seem to be more polarized and more uncivil than ever. If you want to attract attention on the Internet, talking in extremes seems to be an effective tactic. We are not yet close to having a solid answer to Sunstein’s question. Yet, it’s worth noting that it always seems to be “those other folks” who are being made stupid by the Net.

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
by Laszlo Bock
Published 31 Mar 2015

Michael Barbaro, “The Bullpen Bloomberg Built: Candidates Debate Its Future,” New York Times, March 22, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/nyregion/bloombergs-bullpen-candidates-debate-its-future.html. 208. Chris Smith, “Open City,” New York, September 26, 2010, http://nymag.com/news/features/establishments/68511/. 209. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 15. 210. An obvious difference between a nudge and a bonus plan is that the former is often not disclosed, while a bonus plan is explicitly set up to drive certain behaviors. But once you concede that a company can legitimately shape its employees’ behaviors, then you’re left with a more difficult question of where exactly the company crosses the line from “good” shaping to “bad” shaping.

…

And that it works”208 [asterisks mine]. The common theme here is that we are far less consistent, objective, fair, and self-aware in how we navigate the world than we think we are. And because of this, organizations can help people make better decisions. In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School, document at length how an awareness of the flaws in our brains can be used to improve our lives. They define a nudge as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.… To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2010

Wilson, Jim Stimpson, and Peter E. Hilsenrath, “Gasoline Prices and Their Relationship to Rising Motorcycle Fatalities, 1990–2007,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 99, no. 10 (October 2009). 11. Jaime Sneider, “Good Propaganda, Bad Economics,” New York Times, May 16, 2000, p. A31. 12. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). 13. Press release from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, October 9, 2002. 14. Jonathan Gruber, “Smoking’s ‘Internalities,’” Regulation, vol. 25, no. 4 (Winter 2002/2003). 15.

…

And there is a range of views in between (e.g., you’re allowed to sniff glue and roll down the steps but only while wearing a helmet). One intriguing and practical middle ground is the notion of “libertarian paternalism,” which was advanced in an influential book called Nudge by Richard Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago, and Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor now serving in the Obama administration. The idea behind benign paternalism is that individuals do make systematic errors of judgment, but society should not force you to change your behavior (that’s the libertarian part); instead, we should merely point you in the right direction (that’s the paternalism part).

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

food on the honor Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt (6 Jun 2004), “What the Bagel Man Saw: An Accidental Glimpse at Human Nature,” New York Times Magazine, 62–5. follow social norms Daniel Kahneman and Dale T. Miller (1986), “Norm Theory: Comparing Reality to Its Alternatives,” Psychological Review, 93:136–53. Cass R. Sunstein (1996), “Social Norms and Social Roles,” Columbia Law Review, 96:903–68. Helen Bernhard, Ernst Fehr, and Urs Fischbacher (2006), “Group Affiliation and Altruistic Norm Enforcement,” American Economic Review, 96:217–21. Emmanuel Levinas Michael L. Morgan (2011), The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas, Cambridge University Press.

…

Natural Biases Barry Glassner (1999), The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, Basic Books. Paul Slovic (2000), The Perception of Risk, Earthscan Publications. Daniel Gilbert (2 Jul 2006), “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming,” Los Angeles Times. Jeffrey Kluger (26 Nov 2006), “How Americans Are Living Dangerously,” Time. Cass Sunstein and Richard Zeckhauser (2011), “Overreaction to Fearsome Risks,” Environmental & Resource Economics, 48:435–49. John Mueller wrote John Mueller (2004), “A False Sense of Insecurity?” Regulation, 27:42–6. exaggerate the risk John Mueller (2006), Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, Free Press.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu
Published 2 Nov 2010

Apparently taken from an interview with Bob Hope in the mid-1970s, this ironic quote by the founder of one of the nation’s most watched news networks is from Patrick Parsons, Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 453. 8. This point is drawn from Becker’s book on modern cultural identities and sexual politics as examined through the lens of media coverage and representation of gay America: Ron Becker, Gay TV and Straight America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 86. 9. Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), xi. 10. Ken Auletta, Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way (New York: Random House, 1991), 5. CHAPTER 17: MASS PRODUCTION OF THE SPIRIT 1. An account of the rise and fall of United Artists, itself a story of open period filmmaking, may be found in Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 2.

…

Indeed, the television writer Ron Becker observes, “cable networks and TV shows were designed not only to appeal to those in a targeted demographic group but also to send clear signals to unwanted eyes that certain media products weren’t meant for them.” The alienation was, in a way, the message, and the product.8 Critics like the law professor Cass Sunstein go so far as to describe the fragmenting powers of cable and other technologies, notably the Internet, as a threat to the notion of a free society. “In a democracy,” writes Sunstein, “people do not live in echo chambers or information cocoons. They see and hear a wide range of topics and ideas.”9 There is a bit of a paradox to this complaint that must be sorted out.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
by Stuart Ritchie
Published 20 Jul 2020

Cheney, ‘Super Bowls: Serving Bowl Size and Food Consumption’, JAMA 293, no. 14 (13 April 2005): pp. 1727–28; https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.293.14.1727. It was featured and described as ‘another Wansink … masterpiece’ in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s influential 2008 book Nudge. Sunstein has since won a real Nobel Prize for economics. Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008): p. 43. 45.  Portion-size research: Wansink & Cheney, ‘Super Bowls’. Shopping when hungry: Aner Tal & Brian Wansink, ‘Fattening Fasting: Hungry Grocery Shoppers Buy More Calories, Not More Food’, JAMA Internal Medicine 173, no. 12 (June 24, 2013): 1146–48; https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.650.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

mod=article_inline; Aaron Zitner and Dante Chinni, “Democrats and Republicans Live in Different Worlds,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2019. partisans also select into right- or left-leaning media audiences: Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson, Changing Minds or Changing Channels? Partisan News in an Age of Choice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). “filter bubbles” of polarized content: Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (London: Penguin UK, 2011). Some studies find small increases in polarization with Internet use: Yphtach Lelkes, Gaurav Sood, and Shanto Iyengar, “The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect,” American Journal of Political Science 61, no. 1 (2017): 5–20.

…

That said, partisans also select into right- or left-leaning media audiences, making it difficult to determine whether the news media causes polarization or if an already-polarized public simply chooses which polarized media to watch. Fourth, the Internet is frequently blamed for the rise of polarization, as personalization and targeting combine to create what legal scholar Cass Sunstein and activist and MoveOn.org director Eli Pariser describe as “filter bubbles” of polarized content, which allow various factions to consume completely different information and facts about the world. That said, there is conflicting evidence on the Internet’s contribution to polarization. Some studies find small increases in polarization with Internet use, while others find that polarization is more prevalent among those with less Internet use.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

“This line of demarcation [between the state and civil society] shapes how other actors on the political scene orient their actions towards the ‘state,’ acting as if it existed. And struggles over dominant or hegemonic political and state imaginaries can be decisive in shaping the nature, purposes and stakes of government.” Jessop, The State. 106. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 107. Patrick Wintour, “David Cameron’s ‘Nudge Unit’ Aims to Improve Economic Behaviour,” The Guardian, September 9, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/sep/09/cameron-nudge-unit-economic-behaviour. 108. “ ‘Nudge Unit’ Sold off to Charity and Employees,” BBC News, February 5, 2014, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26030205. 109.

…

In the next section, we’ll see the various and subtle ways in which neoliberal governments seek to plan without the appearance of planning—from nudging their subjects into adopting the “right” behaviors to influencing the way we think about state power. Nudged over the Edge In 2008, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein published Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which rapidly became the most famous text in the field of behavioral economics.106 The question the authors wanted to answer was “Why do people sometimes behave so irrationally?” Even those who want to live long, healthy lives drink, smoke, and eat unhealthily despite knowing that doing so is going to harm them over the long run.

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain
by Daniel Gardner
Published 23 Jun 2009

In a different experiment, Tversky and Daniel Kahneman also showed that when people were told a flu outbreak was expected to kill 600 people, people’s judgments about which program should be implemented to deal with the outbreak were heavily influenced by whether the expected program results were described in terms of lives saved (200) or lives lost (400). The vividness of language is also critical. In one experiment, Cass Sunstein—a University of Chicago law professor who often applies psychology’s insights to issues in law and public policy—asked students what they would pay to insure against a risk. For one group, the risk was described as “dying of cancer.” Others were told not only that the risk was death by cancer but that the death would be “very gruesome and intensely painful, as the cancer eats away at the internal organs of the body.”

…

This focus on certainty helps explain our unfortunate tendency to think of safety in black-and-white terms—something is either safe or unsafe—when, in reality, safety is almost always a shade of gray. And all this is true when there’s no fear, anger, or hope involved. Toss in a strong emotion and people can easily become—to use a term coined by Cass Sunstein—“probability blind.” The feeling simply sweeps the numbers away. In a survey, Paul Slovic asked people if they agreed or disagreed that a one-in-10 million lifetime risk of getting cancer from exposure to a chemical was too small to worry about. That’s an incredibly tiny risk—far less than the lifetime risk of being killed by lightning and countless other risks we completely ignore.

…

And if we aren’t sure whether we should worry about this risk or that, whether other people are worried makes a huge difference. “Imagine that Alan says that abandoned hazardous waste sites are dangerous, or that Alan initiates protest action because such a site is located nearby,” writes Cass Sunstein in Risk and Reason. “Betty, otherwise skeptical or in equipoise, may go along with Alan; Carl, otherwise an agnostic, may be convinced that if Alan and Betty share the relevant belief, the belief must be true. It will take a confident Deborah to resist the shared judgments of Alan, Betty and Carl.

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

There is no formula for assessing it: I can’t give Google three of my privacy points in exchange 88 TH E G OOGL IZATION OF US for 10 percent better service. More seriously, Mayer and Google fail to acknowledge the power of default settings in a regime ostensibly based on choice. T H E IRR EL EVANC E O F C H O I C E In their 2007 book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the economist Richard Thaler and law professor Cass Sunstein describe a concept they call “choice architecture.” Plainly put, the structure and order of the choices offered to us profoundly influence the decisions we make. So, for instance, the arrangement of foods in a school cafeteria can influence children to eat better. The positions of restrooms and break rooms can influence the creativity and communality of office staff.

…

Neil Netanel and David Nimmer gave me an opportunity to outline my perspectives on Google for their seminar at UCLA Law School. Their students gave me valuable feedback on a draft of part of this book. Oren Bracha did me the great favor of bringing me back to my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, to speak about Google Books in its early days. Cass Sunstein assured me I was on the right track with my approach. Frank Pasquale went above and beyond the duties of friendship by engaging with me in conversation on the various blogs to which he contributes about the many facets of Google. Andrew Chin, my dear friend since our early undergraduate years at the University of Texas, read the entire manuscript and helped me avoid some serious mistakes.

…

Barry Schwartz, “First Google Image Result for Michelle Obama Pure Racist,” Search Engine Round Table, November 13, 2009, www.seroundtable.com/ archives/021162.html; David Colker, “Google Won’t Exclude Distorted Michelle Obama Image from Its Site,” Los Angeles Times, November 25, 2009; Judit BarIlan, “Web Links and Search Engine Ranking: The Case of Google and the Query ‘Jew’,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57, no. 12 (2006): 1581. 8. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 9. Levy, “Secret of Googlenomics.” 10. Randall E. Stross, Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know (New York: Free Press, 2008), 109–28. 11. Cecillia Kang, “AT&T Accuses Google of Violating Telecom Laws; Google Rejects Claims,” Post I.T., blog, September 25, 2009; Amy Schatz, “AT&T Asks for Curbs on Google,” WSJ.com, September 26, 2009; John Markoff and Matt Richtel, “F.C.C.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

On Rand, see Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Doubleday, 2009); and Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). 62.Burns, Goddess of the Market, 68, 114. 63.Duggan, Mean Girl, 10–11; Cass R. Sunstein, “The Siren of Selfishness,” New York Review of Books, April 9, 2020, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/04/09/ayn-rand-siren-selfishness/, accessed September 14, 2021. The 1960s and 1970s moment of Rand encounter was very different from later ones experienced by Paul Ryan, Peter Theil, Mike Pompeo, and others at a time when neoliberalism was already riding high.

…

The cultural studies scholar Lisa Duggan has written about the “voluminous correspondence” testifying “to the appeal of Rand’s novels” across a broad range of adolescents, including in later decades, those seeking a feminist and queer politics. The legal scholar and Obama administration official Cass Sunstein has confessed his own enchantment with Rand when he encountered her fiction in the 1960s as a teenager. Sunstein’s Rand attraction did not last long. The transitory nature of Rand’s appeal probably describes a lot of teenage encounters with her fiction. Rand was a “mean girl,” to use Duggan’s language, whose contempt for ordinary people, amply displayed in her novels, could begin to grate.

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey
Published 12 Oct 2017

It is not a surprise, therefore, that the size of the lobbying industry has grown at the same time that the internal capacity of government has been cut (although, of course, that growth has other sources as well). Lobbying by suppling information may sound more genteel than twisting arms and buying votes, but when spread over the thousands of small decisions that aggregate up into governance, it can produce a powerful bias in policymaking. For instance Cass Sunstein, who served as the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), saw no outright arm-twisting in his time in government. “But if people in the private sector presented arguments, with evidence, about the importance of going in a particular direction, those arguments could matter.”

…

OMB is a famously high-status destination for civil servants, attracting some of the best talent from the nation’s public policy schools. With its strong reputation and its placement in the White House, OMB has the prestige and power to push back against poorly considered programs or regulations. The unlikely liberal/libertarian duo of Cass Sunstein and Edward Glaeser has argued for extending central review of regulations to the states, where much of the relevant rent-seeking occurs.19 Creating 51 state-level Offices of Information and Regulatory Affairs wouldn’t be easy, since to serve as more than just a tool of gubernatorial power those offices would need to build the reputation and organizational culture that OMB has taken years to generate.

…

The City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 14.The general phenomenon of the erosion of public interest legislation is discussed in Eric Patashnik, Reforms at Risk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 15.Arthur Wilmarth, “Turning a Blind Eye: Why Washington Keeps Giving In to Wall Street,” University of Cincinnati Law Review 81, no. 4 (2013): 1283-1446. 16.Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff, “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (February 2006): 69–84; Richard Hall and Frank Wayman, “Buying Time: Moneyed Interests and the Mobilization of Bias,” American Political Science Review 84, no. 3 (September 1990): 797–820. 17.Cass Sunstein, Simpler: The Future of Government (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), p. 175. 18.Lee Drutman, The Business of America Is Lobbying (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 19.Douglas Arnold, The Logic of Congressional Action (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 20.Baumgartner and Jones, The Politics of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), ch. 4. 21.Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability. 22.Charles Geisst, Wall Street: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 23.James Kwak, “Cultural Capital and the Financial Crisis,” in Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It, ed.

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by Eric Klinenberg
Published 10 Sep 2018

While today, people in the United States and Europe are more likely to marry someone from a different ethnic background, they are also far more likely to marry someone from the same social class. The United States was segregated and unequal, but the social infrastructure supported shared experiences and forms of group mixing that are uncommon today. “We are living in different political universes,” writes the Harvard political scientist and legal scholar Cass Sunstein. “Of course mixed groups are no panacea….But mixed groups have been shown to have two desirable effects. First, exposure to competing positions generally increases political tolerance….Second, mixing increases the likelihood that people will be aware of competing rationales and see that their own arguments might be met with plausible counterarguments.”

…

“I have sponsored and passed laws with colleagues who I likely wouldn’t have spoken to, let alone gotten to know, without this team” she said. * * * Establishing meaningful connections with people we conceive as different is not only a challenge in historically divided places like South Africa and politically contentious cities like Washington, DC. Scholars such as Sherry Turkle, Cass Sunstein, and Jonathan Haidt argue that the rapid rise of the Internet has changed the ways that people everywhere view and treat one another, creating vast terrains of social distance, even between friends. There’s no doubt that parts of the Internet bring out the worst in human behavior, but does it actually cause polarization?

…

The quote is from Peter Bearman and Delia Baldassarri, “Dynamics of Political Polarization,” American Sociological Review 72 (October 2007): 787. On the rise of marriage within a social class (or “assortative mating”), see Robert Mare, “Educational Homogamy in Two Gilded Ages,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 663 (2016): 117–39. “met with plausible counterarguments”: Cass Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 91–92. It’s urgent that we understand them: See Elijah Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). “they all meet up”: Hafstein is quoted in https://www.cnn.com/​2017/​03/​20/​health/​iceland-pool-culture/.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite
by Michael Lind
Published 20 Feb 2020

Theodore Lowi, “The Public Philosophy: Interest Group Liberalism,” American Political Science Review 61, March 1967, pp. 5–24; and Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1969). 3. Nicholas Lemann, “Interest-Group Liberalism,” Washington Post, October 21, 1986. 4. Alan Blinder, “Is Government Too Political?” Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997. 5. Quoted in Aaron Timms, “The Sameness of Cass Sunstein,” New Republic, June 20, 2019; Cass Sunstein, How Change Happens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). 6. James S. Henry, “The Price of Offshore Revisited,” Tax Justice Network, July 2012, cited in Robert Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 230. 7. Jane Gravelle, “Tax Havens: International Tax Avoidance and Evasion,” Congressional Research Service, January 2015, cited in Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?

…

In 1997 former Federal Reserve vice chairman Alan Blinder, a neoliberal Democrat, asked: “Do we want to take more policy decisions out of the realm of politics and put them in the realm of technocracy?” Blinder suggested that tax policy, trade policy, and environmental policy might be delegated to independent technocratic agencies, with only minimal congressional control.4 In 2019, Cass Sunstein, who had been the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012, during the Obama administration, suggested that the US was afflicted by excessive “partyism,” for which the cure “lies in delegation, and in particular in strengthening the hand of technocratic forces in government.”5 Economic activities that could not be insulated from democratic meddling by transferring them to technocratic government agencies could be transferred wholly to private sector elites by privatization and marketization.

Economic Dignity
by Gene Sperling
Published 14 Sep 2020

Determining that a certain policy was a net job creator fails to account for how deep the economic pain was for those who did lose jobs. A family that loses everything to a new policy will understandably draw little comfort from the fact that the same policy helped create a job for a young worker or two in another state. Cass Sunstein—one of the nation’s top cost-benefit gurus and former regulatory chief under President Obama—stresses that even cost-benefit done right should be seen not as a cold, dollars-and-cents calculation, but as an effort to weigh ultimate impacts on well-being. Sunstein’s discussion makes clear why even from a cost-benefit perspective, one could choose a policy with higher monetary cost (spread a non-consequential few dollars per person across millions) over a policy with a smaller monetary cost that would cause devastating harm to a small number of people.

…

Like MLK’s vision, FDR’s New Deal vision was deeply rooted in the expansion of the two-way compact of contribution that asked individuals who could to carry their weight in exchange for a broader government guarantee of economic dignity in being able to care for family. FDR stated, “The Federal Government has no intention or desire to force either upon the country or the unemployed themselves a system of relief which is repugnant to American ideals of individual self-reliance.”7 In his book on FDR, Cass Sunstein points out that New Deal policymakers were willing to opt for “employment relief” even if it was more expensive than pure cash relief, as it honored the sense of a social compact “and was preferred by both the administration and recipients alike.”8 Frances Perkins wrote in The Roosevelt I Knew about the discussion within the Roosevelt White House of the resistance to just a handout strategy “when Americans wanted, above everything, to work and contribute.”9 She wrote of a favorite story that was “not lost on Roosevelt” of an elderly man getting $15 a week in relief who “went out regularly, without being asked, to sweep the streets of his village.

…

These include, but are not limited to, Larry Mishel, Tom Kalil, LaPhonza Butler, Sasha Post, Neera Tanden, Thea Lee, Ron Klain, Bill Godfrey, Felicia Wong, Michael Calhoun, Bob Reich, Judy Lichtman, Andrew Kassoy, Wade Henderson, Jackie Woodson, Brian Highsmith, Joe Sanberg, John Podesta, Pauline Abernathy, Rick Samans, Meeghan Prunty, Bob Greenstein, Josh Steiner, Dan Porterfield, Barry Lynn, Sarah Bianchi, Sarah Miller, Samantha Power, Victoria Palomo, Leo Gerard, Tom Conway, Kelly Friendly, Rebecca Winthrop, Monique Dorsainvil, Liz Fine, Michael Shapiro, Jason Miller, Nick Merrill, Sheryl Sandberg, and Trelaine Ito. After all this time, I still often ask what Chris Georges would think on so many issues—and am grateful to have his parents, Jerry and Mary Georges, still in my life. A special thanks to Cass Sunstein, the most prolific book author most of us know, for his passion for the concept of dignity and his advice and early encouragement of me writing this book. Thanks to another amazing author, Walter Isaacson, as well for his early encouragement. So much of this book was written at my favorite café.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

Gibbs also wrote about this in his 2012 book Principles of Urban Retail Planning and Development. Bob Gibbs was kind enough to speak with me. I asked whether the no-left-turn rule was still alive and well. He assured me that it continues to guide where shopping centers and stores are built today. Cass Sunstein has written: Cass Sunstein wrote about white lines in parking lots as a kind of hidden default in his 2008 book with Richard Thaler, Nudge. citizens are default opted-out: Data on organ donation rates comes from a 2004 study, “Defaults and Donation Decisions,” by Eric J. Johnson and Daniel G. Goldstein.

…

Q: Why did the customer cross the road? A: They didn’t. HIDDEN DEFAULTS The no-left-turn rule is an example of a hidden default. An unseen influence on our behavior. Hidden defaults are subtle nudges that guide us, like the white lines of a parking lot, as Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein has written. The modern world is full of these hidden defaults. And for good reason: they’re very effective. Take organ donation rates. You would expect a country’s cultural beliefs around death to determine whether people choose to donate their organs or not. In reality we exercise less choice than we think.

Money Moments: Simple Steps to Financial Well-Being
by Jason Butler
Published 22 Nov 2017

So why did I succumb to an impulsive purchase of an expensive and unnecessary item instead of putting that money in my retirement plan? A key reason is because we have two modes of thinking, one instinctive and the other reflective. Think of these two modes as a bit like having different financial personalities. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, two distinguished professors of behavioural economics describe these personalities as a far-sighted ‘Planner’ and a myopic ‘Doer’. The Planner represents the reflective thinking mode and the Doer represents the instinctive mode. ‘The Planner is trying to promote your long-term welfare but must cope with the feelings, mischief, and strong will of the Doer, who is exposed to the temptations that come with arousal.

…

Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, Gallup Press. 2010. 2Financial Well-Being: The Goal of Financial Education, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (01/2015), p18 http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201501_cfpb_report_financial-well-being.pdf (accessed 17.10.17) 3Ibid, p19 4Momentum UK Household Financial Wellness Index 2017 Summary Report https://www.momentumgim.co.uk/wps/wcm/connect/mgim2/3a6e04d0-4d20-47f9-b1e2-26ed81db67bb/Final+summary+report+-+Financial+Wellness+2017.pdf?MOD=AJPERES (accessed 21.10.17) 5Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein. Nudge. London: Penguin Books, 2009. p45-46 6Ajzen, Icek. 1991. “The Theory of Planned Behaviour.” Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes 50:2: 179-211. 7Frank, R. H. 2004. “How not to buy happiness.” Daedalus 133, 69-79. 8Van Boven, L., M. C. Campbell and T. Gilovich. 2010. “Stigmatizing materialism: on stereotypes and impressions of materialistic and experiential pursuits.”

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
by Henry Jenkins
Published 31 Jul 2006

Such a process tends Skenovano pro studijni ucely 85 86 Buying into American Idol to p u l l toward a consensus over time, and then, over a longer time, the consensus no longer seems to be something that was disputed or haggled over; it is the commonsense outcome. We can see this as part of the process through w h i c h collective intelligence generates shared knowledge. Some critics, such as Cass Sunstein, argue that this process of consensus formation tends to decrease the diversity of perspectives that any community member encounters; people tend to flock toward groups that share their existing biases, and over time they hear less and less disagreement about those core assumptions. A t the same time, this consensus-forming process increases the likelihood that these brand a n d fan communities w i l l speak u p when corporate interests cross the group's consensus.

…

I dismissed it, secure i n the armor provided by the communities of people w h o share m y values. . . . What I find disturbing, however, is h o w easy the internet has made it not just to Google the fact that I need w h e n I need it, but to get the m i n d set I want w h e n I want i t . 47 Cass Sunstein, a l a w professor at the University of Chicago, has argued that Web communities fragmented the electorate a n d tended to exaggerate whatever consensus emerged i n the g r o u p . 48 Time maga- zine adopted a similar argument w h e n it described the g r o w i n g d i v i d e between "Blue T r u t h " a n d " R e d T r u t h " : " R e d Truth looks at B u s h and sees a savior; Blue Truth sees a zealot w h o must be stopped.

…

Koenig, " B u i l d ing Brand C o m m u n i t y , " Journal of Marketing, January 2002, p p . 38-54. 42. Deborah Starr Seibel, "American Idol Outrage: Your Vote Doesn't C o u n t , " Broadcasting & Cable, M a y 17, 2004, p. 1. 43. Deborah Jones, "Gossip: Note on Women's O r a l C u l t u r e , " Women's Studies International Quarterly 3 (1980): 194-195. 44. Cass Sunstein, Republic.Com (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 45. Wade Paulsen, "Distorted American Idol Voting Due to an Overtaxed American Power G r i d ? " Reality TV World, h t t p : / / w w w . r e a l i t y t v w o r l d . c o m / index/articles/story.php?s=2570. 46. Staff, "The Right Fix for Fox," Broadcasting & Cable, M a y 24, 2004, p. 36.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal
Published 26 Dec 2013

Damien Brevers and Xavier Noël, “Pathological Gambling and the Loss of Willpower: A Neurocognitive Perspective,” Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 3, no. 2 (Sept. 2013), doi:10.3402/snp.v3i0.21592. 13. Paul Graham, “The Acceleration of Addictiveness,” (accessed Nov. 12, 2013), http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html. 14. Night of the Living Dead, IMDb, (accessed June 25, 2014), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063350. 15. Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, and John P. Balz, “Choice Architecture” (SSRN Scholarly Paper, Rochester, NY), Social Science Research Network (April 2, 2010), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1583509. Chapter 1: The Habit Zone 1. Wendy Wood, Jeffrey M. Quinn, and Deborah A. Kashy, “Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion, and Action,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 6 (Dec. 2002): 1281–97. 2.

…

Kara Swisher and Liz Gannes, “Pinterest Does Another Massive Funding—$225 Million at $3.8 Billion Valuation (Confirmed),” All Things Digital (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://allthingsd.com/20131023/pinterest-does-another-massive-funding-225-million-at-3-8-billion-valuation/. Chapter 6: What Are You Going to Do with This? 1. For further thoughts on the morality of designing behavior, see: Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, and John P. Balz, “Choice Architecture” (SSRN Scholarly Paper, Rochester, New York), Social Science Research Network, (April 2, 2010), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1583509. 2. Charlie White, “Survey: Cellphones vs. Sex—Which Wins?,” Mashable (accessed), http://mashable.com/2011/08/03/telenav-cellphone-infographic. 3.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 17 Jul 2018

Assorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias—why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there’s a primitive instinct to defend one’s turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence. Group dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book Going to Extremes: insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group’s leader “does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion.”

…

Trump supporters who booed: Alexander Nazaryan, “John McCain Cancer Is ‘Godly Justice’ for Challenging Trump, Alt-Right Claims,” Newsweek, July 20, 2017. “The enduring, complicated divides”: Andrew Sullivan, “America Wasn’t Built for Humans,” New York, Sept. 19, 2017. confirmation bias: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” New Yorker, Feb. 27, 2017. “does not encourage dissent”: Cass Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 87. “the information and views”: Ibid., 4. “binary tribal world”: Sykes, “How the Right Lost Its Mind and Embraced Donald Trump”; Sykes, “Charlie Sykes on Where the Right Went Wrong.” “In the new Right media culture”: Charles Sykes, How the Right Lost Its Mind (New York: St.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

Nudge: The discussion of Nudge draws on the following sources: Christopher Caldwell, “The Perils of Shaping Choice,” Financial Times, April 4, 2008. Christopher Caldwell, “Coaxers and Coercers on Common Ground,” Financial Times, March 1, 2013. “largely an empirical question”: Cass Sunstein, “It’s for Your Own Good!,” review of Sarah Conly, Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism, New York Review of Books, March 7, 2013. “So I left him”: Plato, The Apology 21, in The Dialogues of Plato, Jowett translation (New York: Macmillan, 1892), 113–14. “We agree that”: Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2008), 238. When New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan: Andrew Sullivan, “Here Comes the Groom,” New Republic, August 28, 1989: 20–22.

…

Now the word “bias,” which had once carried overtones of bigotry and evil, had come to mean something like “human nature.” During the presidential campaign of 2008, two of Barack Obama’s friends and advisors from the University of Chicago collaborated on a book called Nudge, which used behavioral economics to justify an activist state. The law professor Cass Sunstein would become the senior advisor on regulation to the Obama White House. The economist Richard Thaler, an early collaborator of Kahneman, would take up a similar role as head of the Behavioural Insights Team for Britain’s Conservative prime minister David Cameron. Thaler and Sunstein laid out the baleful consequences of poorly designed choosing systems and suggested ways to fix them.

…

Strauss, Leo. Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Strauss, William, and Neil Howe. Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. New York: Quill, 1991. Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Theoharis, Jeanne. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: NYRB Books, 2008 [1950].

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 20 Feb 2018

SCIENCE AND SCIENTISM Indeed, one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism—in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. For instance, it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler types—those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior—much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.

…

Whether it is superstition or something else, some deep scientific understanding of probability that is stopping you, it doesn’t matter, so long as you don’t sleep under dead trees. And if you dream of making people use probability in order to make decisions, I have some news: more than ninety percent of psychologists dealing with decision making (which includes such regulators and researchers as Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler) have no clue about probability, and try to disrupt our efficient organic paranoias. FIGURE 4. The classical “large world vs small world” problem. Science is currently too incomplete to provide all answers—and says it itself. We have been so much under assault by vendors using “science” to sell products that many people, in their mind, confuse science and scientism.

…

fn2 Also the IYI thinks this criticism of IYIs means “everybody is an idiot,” not realizing that their group represents, as we said, a tiny minority—but they don’t like their sense of entitlement to be challenged, and although they treat the rest of humans as inferiors, they don’t like it when the water hose is turned to the opposite direction (what the French call arroseur arrosé). For instance, the economist and psycholophaster Richard Thaler, partner of the dangerous GMO advocate übernudger Cass Sunstein, interpreted this piece as saying that “there are not many non-idiots not called Taleb,” not realizing that people like him are less than 1 percent or even less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the population. CHAPTER 7: INEQUALITY AND SKIN IN THE GAME fn1 It came to my notice that in countries with high rent-seeking, wealth is seen as something zero-sum: you take from Peter to give to Paul.

The Tyranny of Metrics
by Jerry Z. Muller
Published 23 Jan 2018

Only when multiple compromises have been made and a deal has been reached can it be subjected to public scrutiny, that is, made transparent.3 The same holds true for the performance of the government. Here, too, effective functioning often depends on not making internal deliberations open to the public—but rather on maintaining a lack of transparency. We need to distinguish between those elements of government that ought to be made public and those that should not be. Cass R. Sunstein, a wide-ranging academic who has also served in government, makes a useful distinction between government inputs and outputs. Outputs include data that the government produces on social and economic trends, as well as the results of government actions, such as regulatory rules. Outputs, he argues, ought to be made as publicly accessible as possible.

…

Tom Daschle, foreword to Jason Grumet, City of Rivals: Restoring the Glorious Mess of American Democracy (New York, 2014), p. x. 3. See on this Jonathan Rauch, “How American Politics Went Insane,” The Atlantic, July–August, 2016; Jonathan Rauch, “Why Hillary Clinton Needs to be Two-Faced,” New York Times, October 22, 2016; and Matthew Yglesias, “Against Transparency,” Vox, September 6, 2016. 4. Cass R. Sunstein, “Output Transparency vs. Input Transparency,” August 18, 2016, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2826009. 5. Wikipedia, “Chelsea Manning.” 6. Christian Stöcker, “Leak at WikiLeaks: A Dispatch Disaster in Six Acts,” Spiegel Online, September 1, 2011. 7. Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation, p. 164. 8.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Published 22 Nov 2013

Accessed December 24, 2012. CHAPTER 9 1. From Nico Macdonald's seminar "Designerly Thinking and Beyond" for design interactions MA students at the RCA (January 25, 2006). Available at http:// www.spy.co.uk/Communication/Talks/Colleges/RCA_ID/2006. Accessed December 24, 2012. 2. See Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (London: Penguin, 2009). 3. For more on this, see B.J.Fogg, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Thin k and Do (Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2003). 4. Available at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/behavioural-insights-team.

…

Gottingen: Steidl, 2009. Suarez, Mauricio, ed. Fictions in Science: Philosophical Essays on Modeling and Idealization. London: Routledge, 2009. Talshir, Gayil, Mathew Humphrey, and Michael Freeden, eds. Taking Ideology Seriously: 21st Century Reconfigurations. London: Routledge, 2006. Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. London: Penguin, 2009. Thomas, Ann. The Photography of Lynne Cohen. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Thomson, Rupert. Divided Kingdom. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Tsuzuki, Kyoichi. Image Club. Osaka: Amus Arts Press, 2003. Tunbjork, Lars.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

One widespread and important innovation is the creation of economic think tanks interested in creating policies based on the insights of behavioral economics. These think tanks have been called “nudge units,” following the Behavioral Insights Team in the UK government in 2010. Working with the ideas popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, these units try to redesign government institutions toward “nudging” people away from their irrational behavior without coercing them. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, there are now close to two hundred such units around the world.6 I advocate formalizing some of the intuitive judgment that national leaders already use to acknowledge and harness changing economic narratives.

…

Kozinets, Robert V., Kristine de Valck, Andrea Wojnicki, and Sarah J. S. Wilner. 2010. “Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities.” Journal of Marketing 74:71–89. Kuran, Timur. 2012. The Great Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kuran, Timur, and Cass Sunstein. 1999. “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation.” Stanford Law Review 51(4):683–768. Kuziemko, Ilyana, and Ebonya Washington. 2015. “Why Did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 21703. Kydland, Finn E., and Edward C.

…

“Mary Mallon (1869–1938) and the History of Typhoid Fever.” Annals of Gastroenterology 26(2):132–34. Marx, Groucho. 2017 [1959]. Groucho and Me. Muriwai Books. McCabe, Brian J. 2016. No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community, and the Politics of Homeownership. New York: Oxford University Press. McCaffery, Edward. 2000. “Cognitive Theory and Tax.” In Cass Sunstein, ed., Behavioral Law and Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCloskey, Deirdre. 2016. “Adam Smith Did Humanomics: So Should We.” Eastern Economic Journal 42(4):503–13. McCullough, David. 1993. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster. McDaniel, M. A., and G. O. Einstein. 1986. “Bizarre Imagery as an Effective Memory Aid: The Importance of Distinctiveness.”

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything
by Peter Morville
Published 14 May 2014

Of course, the two tactics usually work best when paired. For instance, asking designers and engineers to collaborate may have a limited effect, unless we also co-locate their desks. As Winston Churchill famously remarked “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” In Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein define a “choice architect” as a person responsible for “organizing the context in which people make decisions.”cxvii They note that by rearranging a school cafeteria, it’s possible to increase or decrease the consumption of many food items by as much as 25 percent.cxviii Of course the context need not be physical.

…

cx The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge (1990), p.57. cxi Senge (1990), p.88. cxii Senge (1990), p.63. cxiii Schein (1999), p.34. cxiv Schein (1999), p.223. cxv Schein (1999), p.86. cxvi Leading from the Emerging Future by Otto Scharmer and Katrim Kaufer (2013), p.16. cxvii Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008), p.3. cxviii Thaler and Sunstein (2008), p.1. cxix Thaler and Sunstein (2008), p.71. cxx Thaler and Sunstein (2008), p.111. cxxi Culture Mapping by Dave Gray. cxxii The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg (2012), p.139. cxxiii The Fastest Way to Make Change (2012). cxxiv Meetup’s Dead Simple User Testing (2008).

Data for the Public Good
by Alex Howard
Published 21 Feb 2012

Civic developer and startup communities are creating a new distributed ecosystem that will help create that community, from BuzzData to Socrata to new efforts like Max Ogden’s DataCouch. Smart Disclosure There are enormous economic and civic good opportunities in the “smart disclosure” of personal data, whereby a private company or government institution provides a person with access to his or her own data in open formats. Smart disclosure is defined by Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House Office for Information and Regulatory Affairs, as a process that “refers to the timely release of complex information and data in standardized, machine-readable formats in ways that enable consumers to make informed decisions.” For instance, the quarterly financial statements of the top public companies in the world are now available online through the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

Using people’s own choices to determine the price we are willing to pay to save lives could lead society down some uncomfortable paths. Given the choice between pulling a dozen thirty-year-olds from a blazing fire or saving a dozen sixty-year-olds instead, it might be an odd choice to save the seniors from the point of view of social welfare. For starters, saving the young would save many more years of life than the old. Cass Sunstein, the legal scholar from the University of Chicago who currently heads the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees these valuations, has proposed focusing government policies on saving years of life rather than lives, even though that would discount the value of seniors.

…

The value of health warnings on cigarette packs in Australia is in “Cost-Benefit Analysis of Proposed New Health Warnings on Tobacco Products,” Report Prepared for the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing, December 2003 (http://www.treasury.gov.au/contentitem.asp?ContentID=794&NavID, accessed on 08/08/2010). 51-54 Do We Know How Much We Are Worth?: The value of an old life versus a young life is debated in Cass Sunstein, “Lives, Life-Years and Willingness to Pay,” University of Chicago John M. Olin Law and Economics Program Working Paper, June 2003; Joseph Aldy and W. Kip Viscusi, “Age Differences in the Value of Statistical Life Revealed Preference Evidence,” Resources for the Future Discussion Paper, April 2007; and John Graham, “Benefit-Cost Methods and Lifesaving Rules,” Memorandum from the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs to the President’s Management Council, May 2003.

…

Kip Viscusi, “Racial Differences in Labor Market Values of a Statistical Life,” Harvard Law School Center for Law, Economics, and Business Discussion Paper (April 2003); James Hammitt and María Eugenia Ibarrarán, “The Economic Value of Reducing Fatal and Non-Fatal Occupational Risks in Mexico City Using Actuarial- and Perceived-Risk Estimates,” Health Economics, Vol. 15, No. 12, 2006, pp. 1329-1335; James Hammitt and Ying Zhou, “The Economic Value of Air-Pollution-Related Health Risks in China: A Contingent Valuation Study,” Environmental and Resource Economics, Vol. 33, No. 3, 2006, pp. 399-423; Cass Sunstein, “Are Poor People Worth Less Than Rich People? Disaggregating the Value of Statistical Lives,” University of Chicago, Olin Law and Economics Program Research Paper, February 2004. Data on deaths on the Titanic is in http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/titanic.html. 54-58 The Price of Health: Data on cervical cancer in Mexico is found in Cristina Gutiérrez-Delgado, Camilo Báez-Mendoza, Eduardo González-Pier, Alejandra Prieto de la Rosa, and Renee Witlen, “Relación costo-efectividad de las intervenciones preventivas contra el cáncer cervical en mujeres mexicanas,” Salud Pública Méx, Vol. 50, No. 2, 2008, pp. 107-118; Olga Georgina Martinez M., “Introducing New Health Commodities into National Programs: Mexico’s Experience with the HPV Vaccine,” Presentation at the Microbicide Access Forum, Mexico City, August 3, 2008; Liliana Alcántara and Thelma Gomez, “Papiloma, Vacuna de la Discordia,” El Universal, March 5, 2009.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman
Published 2 Mar 2021

In recent years, engaging guides have helped us understand many of the mysteries of everyday life. If the tools of modern microeconomic analysis interest you, then look at Freakonomics, where Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner provide a fresh perspective on everything from cheating and crime to parenting and sports. If you’re more psychologically minded, read Nudge, where Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler show how to make better decisions for health, wealth, and happiness. Economics and psychology are great tools. They explain a lot. But they also miss a lot. Both tend to take ownership for granted, when it is anything but fixed. In the chapters that follow, we use common sayings and intuitions about what’s mine as starting points to reveal the ownership design principles that control our lives.

…

If they don’t like that choice, drivers may opt out when they renew their licenses. With a no-donation baseline, relatively few opt in. (In Chapter 5, we explore additional solutions for organ shortages based in self-ownership.) These behavioral asymmetries around ownership baselines and opt-in versus opt-out rules are the engine that drive what Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have called the “nudge” lever in policy making. The conflict between individual self-ownership and industry labor arises every day—it’s not just genes. Our phones help marketers (and law enforcement) compile databases of our every location; omnipresent cameras feed facial recognition databases; most valuable of all, our every online move creates a clickstream of trackable data.

…

Historically excluded communities: Giorgio Sirugo, Scott M. Williams, and Sarah A. Tishkoff, “The Missing Diversity in Human Genetic Studies,” Cell 177 (March 2019): 26–30. “You can’t say data is valuable”: Adele Peters, “This Health Startup Lets You Monetize Your DNA,” Fast Company, December 13, 2018. “nudge”: Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2009). In 2018, insights: Steve Lohr, “Calls Mount to Ease Big Tech’s Grip on Your Data,” New York Times, July 25, 2019. If you want a sense of what companies know about you, see Thorin Klosowski, “Big Companies Harvest Our Data.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

Some critics believe that a world in which news is divided up into much smaller and more diverse sources will inevitably lead to political echo chambers, where like-minded partisans reinforce their beliefs by filtering out dissenting views. Perhaps the most articulate and influential advocate for this belief is the legal scholar and Obama administration official Cass Sunstein, who describes the echo-chamber effect this way: If Republicans are talking only with Republicans, if Democrats are talking primarily with Democrats, if members of the religious right speak mostly to each other, and if radical feminists talk largely to radical feminists, there is a potential for the development of different forms of extremism, and for profound mutual misunderstandings with individuals outside the group.

…

For another, more skeptical, overview of journalism’s future in the age of peer networks, see “Confidence Game,” by Dean Starkman, published in the Columbia Journalism Review. My book Where Good Ideas Come From explores the eco-system metaphor for information technology in more detail; see also James Boyle’s “Cultural Environmentalism and Beyond,” published in Law and Contemporary Problems. Cass Sunstein’s theories on echo chambers appear in his books Republic.com and Echo Chambers: Bush v. Gore, Impeachment, and Beyond, the latter a digital publication from Princeton University Press. For a rebuttal to Sunstein’s theory, see “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline,” by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M.

American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup
by F. H. Buckley
Published 14 Jan 2020

Secession might also seem like a reasonable way to resolve unbridgeable partisan differences, in which case an Article V convention to amend the Constitution might work out our own velvet divorce. Finally, the right of secession might find support in the Supreme Court, were it to follow the decision of the Canadian Supreme Court when it was faced with the possibility of a successful independence referendum in Quebec. Cass Sunstein has said that “no serious scholar or politician now argues that a right to secede exists under American constitutional law.”3 He’s right. But I will show how it could still happen through constitutional means. Rehabilitating James Buchanan President James Buchanan (1857–61), pompous and dithering, was wholly incapable of solving the secession crisis.

…

Cutler, “Using Morals, Not Money on Pretoria,” New York Times, August 3, 1986. 2 Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kirgizia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Serbia, Kosovo. On the rise of secessionist movements following the end of the Cold War, see Ryan D. Griffiths, Age of Secession: The International and Domestic Determinants of State Birth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 3 Cass Sunstein, “Constitutionalism and Secession,” University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 58, no. 2 (1991): 633. 4 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), I.54 (May 31). (Hereafter, “Farrand.”) 5 Farrand I.165 (June 8). 6 Farrand II.466 (August 30).

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
by Kathryn Schulz
Published 7 Jun 2010

Zalta, ed., (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/francis-bacon); and Francis Bacon, Bacon’s Essays, Edwin A. Abbott, ed. (Longmans, Green and Co., 1886), lxxii–lxxiii. Thomas Gilovich. Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (The Free Press, 1991), 112. Cass Sunstein. Cass Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Harvard University Press, 2005), v. James Surowiecki. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (Anchor Books, 2005), 43. John Locke and David Hume. This rejection of secondhand information as insufficient grounds for knowledge is part of the same epistemological tradition articulated by, among others, Descartes (who cautioned against believing anything based on scanty evidence) and William Clifford (James’s foil in “The Will To Believe”).

…

This is a notion that has received considerable support well outside the domain of pop songs. The Cornell psychologist and behavioral economist Thomas Gilovich has observed that, “Other things being equal, the greater the number of people who believe something, the more likely it is to be true.” And the legal scholar Cass Sunstein has pointed out that, “Conformity of this kind is not stupid or senseless,” since “the decisions of other people convey information about what really should be done.” The financial writer James Surowiecki calls this notion “social proof”—the idea that “if lots of people are doing something or believe something, there must be a good reason why.”* The other side of the Fifty Million Frenchmen coin is the one your mother loves: if all your friends were jumping off the roof, would you jump, too?

…

The disorder is characterized by, among other things, an overpowering need to be right and a corresponding inability to accept the possibility of error, or the potential validity of multiple viewpoints. * In the long run, the suppression of disagreement is likely to be bad for the rulers as well as the ruled over. As the legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in Why Societies Need Dissent, “Dictators, large and small, tend to be error-prone as well as cruel. The reason is that they learn far too little. Those with coercive authority, from presidents to police chiefs, do much better if they encourage diverse views and expose themselves to a range of opinions.”

Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity
by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods
Published 13 Jul 2020

Biden, “Remarks: Joe Biden,” National Constitution Center, 16 October 2017 (2017), published online https://constitutioncenter.org/​liberty-medal/​media-info/​remarks-joe-biden. 52. S. A. Frisch, S. Q. Kelly, Cheese Factories on the Moon: Why Earmarks Are Good for American Democracy (Routledge, 2015). 53. Cass R. Sunstein, Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America (New York: Dey Street Books, 2018). 1 Thinking About Thinking 1. M. Tomasello, M. Carpenter, U. Liszkowski, “A New Look at Infant Pointing,” Child Development 78, 705–22 (2007). 2. Brian Hare, “From Hominoid to Hominid Mind: What Changed and Why?”

…

Hegre, “Democracy and Armed Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 51, 159–172 (2014). 12. Peter Levine, The New Progressive Era: Toward a Fair and Deliberative Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). 13. James Madison, The Federalist no. 10 (1787). 14. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Penguin, 1986). 15. Cass R. Sunstein, Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America (New York: Dey Street Books, 2018). 16. James Madison, The Federalist no. 51 (1788). 17. James Madison, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers, edited by Jim Miller (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2014), 253–57. 18.

The Road to Character
by David Brooks
Published 13 Apr 2015

RANDOM HOUSE, AN IMPRINT AND DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC: Excerpt from Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith, copyright © 2012 by Jean Edward Smith. Reprinted by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. CASS SUNSTEIN: Excerpt from a toast given by Leon Wieseltier at the wedding of Cass Sunstein to Samantha Power. Used by permission. By DAVID BROOKS On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement The Road to Character ABOUT THE AUTHOR DAVID BROOKS writes an op-ed column for The New York Times, teaches at Yale University, and appears regularly on PBS NewsHour, NPR’s All Things Considered, and NBC’s Meet the Press.

…

I am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached myself. He is worthy of the sacrifice I have incurred, and my only anxiety is that he should be rightly judged.” All love is narrowing. It is the renunciation of other possibilities for the sake of one choice. In a 2008 wedding toast to Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power, Leon Wieseltier put it about as well as possible: Brides and grooms are people who have discovered, by means of love, the local nature of happiness. Love is a revolution in scale, a revision of magnitudes; it is private and it is particular; its object is the specificity of this man and that woman, the distinctness of this spirit and that flesh.

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems
by Heather Adkins , Betsy Beyer , Paul Blankinship , Ana Oprea , Piotr Lewandowski and Adam Stubblefield
Published 29 Mar 2020

Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering. https://oreil.ly/ZN18B. 7 This topic is closely related to nudging, a method of changing behavior by subtly encouraging people to do the right thing. Nudge theory was developed by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, who were awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics for their contribution to behavioral economics. For more information, see Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 8 Dave Rensin, Director of Customer Reliability Engineering at Google, considers this topic in greater detail in his talk “Less Risk Through Greater Humanity”. 9 The final report of the Columbia Disaster Investigation Board is preserved on the NASA website for the general public to read.

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
by Peter Singer
Published 3 Mar 2009

In seven countries with “opt out” systems, the lowest proportion of potential donors is 85.9 percent.8 Just as we tend to leave unchanged the factory settings on a computer, so other kinds of “defaults” can make a big difference to our behavior—and, in the case of organ donations, save thousands of lives. There is a new wave of interest in exploring how to frame choices so that people make better decisions. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, professors of economics and law, respectively, teamed up to write Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which advocates using defaults to nudge us to make better choices.9 Even when we are choosing in our own interests, we often choose unwisely. When employees have the option of participating in a retirement-savings scheme, many do not, despite the financial advantages of doing so.

…

Plan International, “Sponsor a Child: Frequently Asked Questions,” www.plan-international.org/sponsorshipform/sponsorfaq/, accessed January 16, 2008. 8. Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein, “Do Defaults Save Lives?” Science 302 (November 2003), pp. 1338-39. I owe this reference to Eldar Shafir, whose comments on this topic were very helpful. 9. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 10. Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea, “The Power of Suggestion: Inertia in 401(k) Participation and Savings Behavior,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116:4 (2001), pp. 1149-87. 11. Louise Story, “A Big Salary With a Big Stipulation: Share It,” The New York Times, November 12, 2007. 12.

The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data
by Michael P. Lynch
Published 21 Mar 2016

We read the blogs of those we agree with, watch the cable news network that reports on the world in the way that we see it, and post and share jokes made at the expense of the “other side.”5 The real worry is not, as Popper feared, that an open digital society makes us into independent individuals living Robinson Crusoe–like on smartphone islands; the real worry is that the Internet is increasing “group polarization”—that we are becoming increasingly isolated tribes. As one of the most influential thinkers about digital culture, Cass Sunstein, has noted, one reason the Internet contributes to polarization is that “repeated exposure to an extreme position, with the suggestion that many people hold that position, will predictably move those exposed, and likely predisposed, to believe in it.”6 So, with a steady diet of Fox News, conservatives will become more conservative.

…

When it comes to global warming, at least we’ll get to realize the consequences of our current policies (or lack of them) one way or another. But the abuse of knowledge isn’t going to be so obvious, and the abusers will have every reason to hide behind good intentions. That was one of the points made by the President’s own review panel’s report in 2013.8 That panel—made up of not only writers and scholars including Cass Sunstein but former leaders of the CIA—suggested, in fact, more than simply fencing the pool (passing legislation to make it more difficult to access); they suggested the pool be drained. That is, they urged that all incidentally collected information (again, mostly on Americans, and far outweighing the amount being collected on warranted targets) simply be removed from the NSA’s databases.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge
Published 27 Feb 2018

so infatuated with markets and money: For a discussion of the limits of markets, see, e.g., Margaret Jane Radin, “From Babyselling to Boilerplate: Reflections on the Limits of the Infrastructures of the Market,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 54, no. 2, forthcoming; Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper No. 28/2017 (January 24, 2017); University of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper No. 16-031; University of Michigan Public Law Research Paper No. 530, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2905141. a better-than-even chance to know the truth: Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 25ff. the probability of events related to Google projects: Other companies have also experimented with prediction markets, but Google’s appear to be the largest and longest experiments conducted in the corporate world. See Bo Cowgill, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitzewitz, “Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google,” in Sanmay Das, Michael Ostrovsky, David Pennock, and Boleslaw K.

…

The development of Cybersyn also underlies the plot of a work of fiction: see Sascha Reh, Gegen die Zeit (Frankfurt, Germany: Schöffling, 2015). Great Famine of 1932–1933: See Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York: Doubleday, 2017). to coax us to transact appropriately: See, e.g., Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). CHAPTER 9: UNBUNDLING WORK “The drive was as mundane”: Alex Davies, “Uber’s Self-Driving Truck Makes Its First Delivery: 50,000 Beers,” Wired, October 25, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/10/ubers-self-driving-truck-makes-first-delivery-50000-beers.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

Can we quantify in any real sense the difference between a rule that asks that we not waste water in the shower and the use of a water-saving showerhead technology that ensures that we do not? In their book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein recount the story of a fake housefly placed in each of the urinals at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. By giving urinating men something to aim at, spillage was reduced by a whole 80 percent.37 While few would likely decry the kind of soft paternalism designed to keep public toilets clean, what about the harder paternalism of a car that forcibly brakes to stop a person breaking the speed limit?

…

Common Knowledge, vol. 3, no. 2, 1994. 36 To extend this argument to its deterministic extreme, we might turn to Karl Marx and his assertion in The Poverty of Philosophy: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” I take more of a social constructionist perspective, seeing technological development as the interplay of inventors, entrepreneurs, customers and social circumstance. 37 Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). 38 Brownsword, Roger. “What the World Needs Now: Techno-Regulation, Human Rights and Human Dignity,” in Global Governance and the Quest for Justice. Vol. 4: Human Rights. (Oxford, UK: Hart, 2004). 39 Conly, Sarah.

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
by Barry Schwartz
Published 1 Jan 2004

And if “constraint” sometimes affords a kind of liberation while “freedom” affords a kind of enslavement, then people would be wise to seek out some measure of appropriate constraint. Second-Order Decisions AWAY OF EASING THE BURDEN THAT FREEDOM OF CHOICE IMPOSES IS to make decisions about when to make decisions. These are what Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit call second-order decisions. One kind of second-order decision is the decision to follow a rule. If buckling your seat belt is a rule, you will always buckle up, and the issue of whether it’s worth the trouble for a one-mile trip to the market just won’t arise. If you adopt the rule that you will never cheat on your partner, you will eliminate countless painful and tempting decisions that might confront you later on.

…

I write about the time problem in The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2001). Sociologist Arlie Hochschild writes brilliantly about it in The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Metropolitan, 1997). Economist and historian A.O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). These are what Cass Sunstein C.R. Sunstein and E. Ullmann-Margalit, “Second-Order Decisions,” in C.R. Sunstein (ed.), Behavioral Law and Economics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 187–208. At the turn of J. von Uexkull, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” in C.H. Schiller (ed.), Instinctive behavior (New York: International Universities Press, 1954), pp. 3–59.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 16 Nov 2010

The most interesting part about the Saudi censorship scheme is that it at least informs the user why a website has been blocked; many other countries simply show a bland message like “the page cannot be displayed,” making it impossible to discern whether the site is blocked or simply unavailable because of some technical glitches. In the Saudi case, banned porn websites carry a message that explains in detail the reasons for the ban, referencing a Duke Law Journal article on pornography written by the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein and a 1,960-page study conducted by the U.S. attorney general’s Commission on Pornography in 1986. (At least for most nonlawyers, those are probably far less satisfying than the porn pages they were seeking to visit.) The practice of “crowdsourcing” censorship is becoming popular in democracies as well.

…

If that accusation is repeated by a hundred other bloggers—even if some of them look rather dubious—most sane critics of the government think twice before reposting that blogger’s critical message. The best way to create such a culture of mistrust is for governments to cultivate extremely agile rapid-response blogging teams that fight fire with fire. The benefits of such an approach have not been lost on Western policy wonks. In 2008 Cass Sunstein, a prominent American legal scholar who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, coauthored a punchy policy paper that recommended the U.S. government practice “cognitive infiltration” of Internet groups that are spreading conspiracy theories, suggesting that “government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups.”

…

Special interests have successfully explored the Internet to plant their own messages, micro-tailoring them to the newly segmented audiences and prompting the political commentator Robert Wright to complain that “technology has subverted the original idea of America,” adding that “the new information technology doesn’t just create generation-3.0 special interests; it arms them with precision-guided munitions.” The list of unanswered questions about the relationship between the Internet and democracy is infinite. Will the Internet foster political polarization and promote what Cass Sunstein called “enclave extremism”? Will it further widen the gap between news junkies and those who avoid political news at all costs? Will it decrease the overall amount of political learning, as young people learn news from social networks? Will it prevent our future politicians from making any risky statements—now stored for posterity—in their prepolitical careers so as not to become unelectable?

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford
Published 25 Sep 2023

It is also increasingly doubtful whether the market-driven model is delivering on its promise to enhance democracy as hatred and disinformation are often replacing the civic debates that were supposed to thrive online. Instead of nurturing inclusive democracy, online engagement has often increased societal polarization. Cass Sunstein has warned about the perils of polarization resulting from online platforms delivering a highly “personalized experience” for each user.174 Social media has become a venue characterized by filter bubbles and “information cocoons” where citizens are no longer exposed to alternative viewpoints.175 This feeds social divisions and nurtures more extremist ideas.

…

My warm thanks to Bill Alford, Yochai Benkler, Akeel Bilgrami, Kurt Björklund, Gabby Blum, Rachel Brewster, John Coates, Jonathan Cole, Alex de Streel, Einer Elhauge, Luca Enriques, Tom Ginsburg, Jack Goldsmith, Monica Hakimi, Howell Jackson, Suzanne Kingston, Ben Liebman, Tambiama Madiega, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, Amanda Parsons, Nicolas Petit, Katharina Pistor, Christina Ponsa-Kraus, Eric Posner, Kal Raustiala, Gustavo Ribeiro, Dan Richman, Tim Rühlig, Paul Schwartz, Thomas Streinz, Holger Spamann, Cass Sunstein, and Salome Viljoen. Thank you for helping me see where I was advancing the conversation and where the argument needed more. Special thanks to the colleagues who helped me fill the many gaps in my knowledge. You taught me about US constitutional law, national security, espionage, empires, technical standards, fundamental rights, the Chinese Communist Party, digital taxation, venture capital, and more.

…

I am keenly aware how much your personal interactions and life experiences are shaped by technology. My concern for your future gave me a keen sense of purpose to better understand the digital world in the making. We owe it to you to govern technology in ways that it serves you, protects you, empowers you, and never undermines you. New York December 2022 Notes Introduction 1.Cass Sunstein, Is Social Media Good or Bad for Democracy?, Sur: Int’l J. on Hum. Rts. 83, 84–87 (2018). 2.See generally Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019). 3.Alison Beard, Can Big Tech Be Disrupted?, Harv. Bus. Rev., Jan.–Feb. 2022. 4.Leo Lewis, Tokyo Stock Market Eclipsed by the Four Tech Leviathans, Fin.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
by Alex Rosenblat
Published 22 Oct 2018

Angèle Christin, “Algorithms in Practice: Comparing Web Journalism and Criminal Justice,” July 16, 2017, Big Data & Society 4 (2): 1–14, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2053951717718855. 44. Rosenblat and Hwang, “Wisdom of the Captured,” 4–5. 45. Ibid. 46. Drivers do resist some of Uber’s control—for example, by GPS spoofing. 47. Rosenblat and Hwang, “Wisdom of the Captured,” 4. 48. Rosenblat and Stark, “Algorithmic Labor,” 3768. 49. Ibid., 3766. 50. Cass R. Sunstein, “Misconceptions about Nudges,” September 6, 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3033101. 5. BEHIND THE CURTAIN 1. “New LAX Rule: Taxi Drivers Who Discriminate Will Lose Permits,” CBS Los Angeles, February 2, 2016, http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2016/02/02/la-city-council-to-consider-revoking-permits-from-taxi-cab-drivers-who-refuse-service-at-lax/; Yanbo Ge, Christopher R.

…

Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowskie, and Kristen Foot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); Angele Christin, “Algorithms in Practice: Comparing Web Journalism and Criminal Justice,” Big Data & Society (2017): 1–4, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951717718855. 7. On nudging as “choice architecture,” see, e.g., Cass R. Sunstein, “Nudging: A Very Short Guide,” Journal of Consumer Policy 37, no. 4 (2014): 583–588, doi:10.1007/s10603–014–9273–1. 8. Josh Horwitz, “Uber Customer Complaints from the US Are Increasingly Handled in the Philippines,” Quartz, July 30, 2015, https://qz.com/465613/uber-customer-complaints-from-the-us-are-increasingly-handled-in-the-philippines/. 9.

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society
by Cordelia Fine
Published 13 Jan 2017

Risk researchers have also found that both knowledge and familiarity in a particular domain reduces perceptions of risk.30 Plausibly, men may tend to be relatively more knowledgeable or familiar with some of the risky activities that tend to feature in surveys (like sports betting, financial investments, and motorcycle riding). The point is that an “unruly amalgam of things” underlies choices, as Harvard University legal scholar Cass Sunstein puts it: “aspirations, tastes, physical states, responses to existing roles and norms, values, judgments, emotions, drives, beliefs, whims.”31 And so, we’re not only sensitive to the material benefits and costs when we make choices, Sunstein argues, but also to the less tangible effects a particular choice could have on self-concept and reputation.

…

In their own cross-cultural research, Henrich and colleagues therefore use large stakes “to focus the informants’ attention on the game payoffs rather than on exogenous social concerns.”33 As you’ll recall, sex didn’t predict financial risk taking when this research method was used with the Mapuche, Sangu, and Huinca communities of Chile and Tanzania. Their research protocol is also in perfect keeping with Cass Sunstein’s argument (first met in Chapter 5) that the consequences of a decision for one’s self-concept and reputation are vital ingredients in the recipe from which preferences emerge. This aspect of the decision-making context is something that economists, in particular, have not been especially interested in.

Thinking in Bets
by Annie Duke
Published 6 Feb 2018

After all, it feels good to hear our ideas echoed back to us. If there is any doubt about how easy it can be to fall into this confirmatory drift, we can even see this tendency in groups we consider some of the most dedicated to truthseeking: judges and scientists. Federal judges: drift happens Cass Sunstein, now a Harvard law professor, conducted a massive study with colleagues when he was on the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School, on ideological diversity in federal judicial panels. Sunstein recognized at the outset that the U.S. Courts of Appeals are “an extraordinary and longstanding natural experiment” in diversity.

…

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. New York: Crown, 2015. Thaler, Richard. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. ———“Some Empirical Evidence on Dynamic Inconsistency.” Economics Letters 8, no. 3 (January 1981): 201–07. Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Upd. ed. New York: Penguin, 2009. Todes, Daniel. Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Tomlin, Damon, David Rand, Elliot Ludvig, and Jonathan Cohen.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Sep 2019

The Journal of Modern History 80: 1–54, 1. 13 Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel. 2015. ‘Minority women, austerity and activism.’ Race and Class 57(2): 86–95, 90. 14 George Tavlas, 2013. ‘Anna Jacobson Schwartz: in memoriam.’ Cato Journal 33(3): 321–332. 15 Political philosopher and legal scholar Cass Sunstein points out the similarities between On Liberty and Taylor’s earlier work, but he doesn’t mention Mill’s insistence on their co-authorship. See Cass Sunstein, 2015. ‘John & Harriet: Still mysterious’ (New York Review of Books, April 2). 16 For an excellent study of oracles in Greek life, see Michael Scott, Delphi: A History of the Centre of the Ancient World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 17 See Katja Vogt’s compelling explorations of Socratic reflections on knowledge and ignorance.

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State
by Paul Tucker
Published 21 Apr 2018

As a result, they were excluded from the executive orders mandating that OIRA review drafts of significant government rules and regulations that they conduct formal cost-benefit analysis. Chu and Shedd, “Presidential Review.” 13 Obama Executive Order 13579, saying that independent agencies should (not must or shall) comply with orders binding on executive agencies; and letter of November 8, 2011, from Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke to Cass R. Sunstein, Administrator, OIRA. 14 In Humphrey’s Executor (1935), the Court concluded that where congressional legislation provides that officers can be fired only “for cause,” the president cannot fire them just because of disagreement. This case is widely seen as signaling the acceptability of independent agencies under the US Constitution.

…

In Cambridge, MA, I have been helped, at Harvard, by Eric Beerbohm, Dan Carpenter, John Coates, Richard Cooper, Chris Desan, Marty Feldstein, Jeff Frieden, Ben Friedman, Jacob Gersen, Robin Greenwood, Peter Hall, Olivier Hart, Howell Jackson, Louis Kaplow, Frank Michelman, Joe Nye, Richard Parker, Carmen Reinhart, Ken Rogoff, David Scharfstein, Hal Scott, Emile Simpson, Jeremy Stein, Cass Sunstein, Richard Tuck, Adrian Vermeule, and Richard Zeckhauser; and although we never met, I should mention Jenny Mansbridge, who e-introduced me to Philip Pettit. At MIT: Bengt Holmstrom, Athanasios Orphanides, and David Singer. Over the river: Vivien Schmidt (BU), Dan Coquillette (Boston College), and Alasdair Roberts (formerly Sussex).

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society
by Binyamin Appelbaum
Published 4 Sep 2019

Older chairs, however, were not recalled and, in 1987, an eighteen-month-old child climbed onto a recliner at a day-care center in Orange County, California, fell between the seat and leg rest, and suffered permanent brain damage.62 The government’s growing reliance on cost-benefit analysis meant that economists like Prunella were exercising significant influence over life-and-death decisions. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who is a leading proponent of cost-benefit analysis — and who supervised regulation under President Obama — says the process enhanced democracy because it served “to translate social problems into terms that lay bare the underlying variables and make them clear for all to see.”63 But cost-benefit analysis also displaced democracy, by elevating the judgments of economists above the judgments of politicians.

…

By the end of the 1980s, the pace of rule writing had rebounded.68 But the new regulations increasingly were shaped by cost-benefit analyses.69 “What’s the alternative?” asked Christopher DeMuth, who had helped to create the EPA as a young Nixon aide, and who succeeded Miller as Reagan’s regulator of regulators. “Flipping a coin? Consulting a Ouija board?”70 There were undoubtedly theoretical imperfections and shortcomings but, in the words of Cass Sunstein, “a signal advantage of cost-benefit analysis is that we can actually engage in it.”71 By refusing to engage, opponents of cost-benefit analysis were allowing others to determine the rules used to make the rules. Paralysis by Analysis W. Kip Viscusi was determined to persuade liberals to embrace cost-benefit analysis.

…

Griffith told police that he could not bear his daughter’s suffering. He was convicted of first-degree murder. 61. Bill McAllister, “Formula for Product Safety Raises Questions About Human Factor,” Washington Post, May 26, 1987. 62. Bill Billiter, “Family Settles for $5 Million in Recliner Suit,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1991. 63. Cass Sunstein, The Cost-Benefit Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), ebook loc. 932. In 1981, Sunstein, then working as a young lawyer at the Justice Department, was tasked with preparing the official opinion on the legality of Reagan’s order requiring cost-benefit analysis. He approved. 64. William R.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives
by Tim Harford
Published 3 Oct 2016

Even if we rarely steal from these rival tribes or insult them to their faces, the annoyance we feel is quite real, and often owes more to our tribal feelings than to any genuine offense the accounting team may have committed. One instructive study was conducted by the legal scholar and policy wonk Cass Sunstein, with two social psychologists, Reid Hastie and David Schkade. The three researchers assembled participants from two quite different cities: Boulder, Colorado, where people often lean to the left (it’s known jokingly as “The People’s Republic of Boulder”) and Colorado Springs, which is well known as a conservative stronghold.

…

Except where otherwise stated, descriptions of the Robbers Cave experiment are from Muzafer Sherif et al., The Robbers Cave Experiment: Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988). 13. Gary Alan Fine, “Forgotten Classic: The Robbers Cave Experiment,” Sociological Forum 19, no. 4 (December 2004), DOI: 10.1007/s11206-004-0704-7. 14. The study is described in Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie, Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), pp. 81–83. 15. Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972). 16. The Asch experiments are often known as the “conformity” experiments, although most subjects did not conform every time.

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics
by Ben Buchanan
Published 25 Feb 2020

For more on the development and challenges of NOBUS, see Ben Buchanan, “Nobody But Us: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Signals Intelligence,” Aegis Series Paper No. 1708, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA, August 30, 2017; David Aitel, “Hope Is Not a NOBUS Strategy,” CyberSecPolitics, May 13, 2019. 17. When some decryption programs became public, a major review commission pointed out the severe risk of blowback and unintended consequences. Richard A. Clarke, Michael J. Morell, Geoffrey R. Stone, Cass R. Sunstein, and Peter Swire, “Liberty and Security in a Changing World,” President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies report, December 12, 2013, 36. 18. Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, “ ‘Black Budget’ Summary Details U.S. Spy Network’s Successes, Failures and Objectives,” Washington Post, August 29, 2013.

…

See also Michelle Nichols, “North Korea Took $2 Billion in Cyberattacks to Fund Weapons Program: U.N. Report,” Reuters, August 5, 2019. 8. John Markoff and Thom Shanker, “Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates U.S. Fear of Cyberwar Risk,” New York Times, August 1, 2009. 9. Richard A. Clarke, Michael J. Morell, Geoffrey R. Stone, Cass R. Sunstein, and Peter Swire, “Liberty and Security in a Changing World,” President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, report, December 12, 2013, 221. 10. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, When to Rob a Bank (New York: HarperCollins, 2015). 11. Associated Press, “Suspect in Major Brazil Robbery Is Found Dead,” New York Times, October 22, 2005. 12.

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web
by Paul Adams
Published 1 Nov 2011

We often change our behavior to conform to the expectations, attitudes, and behavior of our group. We overrate the advice of experts. Random strangers can often outperform experts. Further reading 1. See the Wikipedia article titled Mirror Neuron for an introduction and further reading. 2. See Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008). 3. In their book Connected (Little, Brown, 2009), Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler describe how people are influenced by social proof. 4. See the 2002 research paper “Evidence on learning and network externalities in the diffusion of home computers” by Austan Goolsbee and Peter Klenow. 5.

The Wisdom of Crowds
by James Surowiecki
Published 1 Jan 2004

Other studies showed that people who had a pessimistic view of the future became even more pessimistic after deliberations. Similarly, civil juries that are inclined to give large awards to plaintiffs generally give even larger awards after talking it over. More recently, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has devoted a great deal of attention to polarization, and in his book Why Societies Need Dissent, he shows both that the phenomenon is more ubiquitous than was once thought and that it can have major consequences. As a general rule, discussions tend to move both the group as a whole and the individuals within it toward more extreme positions than the ones they entered the discussion with.

…

Vinokur and E. Burnstein, “Novel Argumentation and Attitude Change: The Case of Polarization Following Group Discussion,” European Journal of Social Psychology 8 (1978): 335–48. An excellent look at the evidence for small-group decision making, group polarization, and the value of differing opinions is Cass Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). The experiments with the military fliers were done by E. P. Torrance. See E. P. Torrance, “Some Consequences of Power Differences on Decisions in B-26 Crews,” United States Air Force Personnel and Training Research Center research bulletin 54–128 (1954); and Torrance, “Some Consequences of Power Differences in Permanent and Temporary Three-Man Groups,” in Small Groups, edited by A.

Licence to be Bad
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 5 Jun 2019

The central lesson of behavioural economics is that people make poor decisions – yet the policy innovation it provoked seeks to rely on precisely those poor decisions to bring about desirable outcomes. Welcome to the weird world of Nudge. Nudge began with a 2008 book of that name by economist Richard Thaler and lawyer Cass Sunstein. Both of them had worked with Kahneman and Tversky, who had shown that real people do not act like homo economicus. Rather than weighing up all relevant considerations and carefully calculating the ‘optimal’ choice, people are guided by rules of thumb, intuition, impulse and inertia. The core idea behind Nudge is that rather than fighting these forces, we should use them, to steer or nudge people to make the choices they would want to make – the choices homo economicus would make, or at least something close.

…

objection, 107, 119–20 Friedman, Milton, 4–5, 56, 69, 84, 88, 126, 189 awarded Nobel Prize, 132 and business responsibility, 2, 152 debate with Coase at Director’s house, 50, 132 as dominant Chicago thinker, 50, 132 on fairness and justice, 60 flawed arguments of, 132–3 influence on modern economics, 131–2 and monetarism, 87, 132, 232 at Mont Pèlerin, 5, 132 rejects need for realistic assumptions, 132–3 Sheraton Hall address (December 1967), 132 ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’ (essay, 1953), 132–3 ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits’ (article, 1970), 2, 152 Frost, Gerald, Antony Fisher: Champion of Liberty (2002), 7* Galbraith, John Kenneth, 242–3 game theory assumptions of ‘rational behaviour’, 18, 28, 29–32, 35–8, 41–3, 70, 124 Axelrod’s law of the instrument, 41 backward induction procedure, 36–7, 38 and Cold War nuclear strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 focus on consequences alone, 43 as form of zombie science, 41 and human awareness, 21–3, 24–32 and interdependence, 23 limitations of, 32, 33–4, 37–40, 41–3 minimax solution, 22 multiplicity problem, 33–4, 35–7, 38 Nash equilibrium, 22–3, 24, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 the Nash program, 25 and nature of trust, 28–31, 41 the Prisoner’s Dilemma, 26–8, 29–32, 42–3 real world as problem for, 21–2, 24–5, 29, 31–2, 37–8, 39–40, 41–3 rise of in economics, 40–41 and Russell’s Chicken, 33–4 and Schelling, 138–9 and spectrum auctions, 39–40 theory of repeated games, 29–30, 35 tit-for-tat, 30–31 and trust, 29, 30–31, 32, 41 uses of, 23–4, 34, 38–9 view of humanity as non-cooperative/distrustful, 18, 21–2, 25–32, 36–8, 41–3 Von Neumann as father of, 18, 19, 20–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 41 zero-sum games, 21–2 Gates, Bill, 221–2 Geithner, Tim, 105 gender, 127–8, 130–31, 133, 156 General Electric, 159 General Motors (GM), 215–16 George, Prince of Cambridge, 98 Glass–Steagall Act, repeal of, 194 globalization, 215, 220 Goldman Sachs, 182, 184, 192 Google, 105 Gore, Al, 39 Great Reform Act (1832), 120 greed, 1–2, 196, 197, 204, 229, 238 Greenspan, Alan, 57, 203 Gruber, Jonathan, 245 Haifa, Israel, 158, 161 Harper, ‘Baldy’, 7 Harsanyi, John, 34–5, 40 Harvard Business Review, 153 Hayek, Friedrich and Arrow’s framework, 78–9 economics as all of life, 8 and Antony Fisher, 6–7 influence on Thatcher, 6, 7 and Keynesian economics, 5–6 and legal frameworks, 7* at LSE, 4 at Mont Pèlerin, 4, 5, 6, 15 and Olson’s analysis, 104 and public choice theory, 89 rejection of incentive schemes, 156 ‘spontaneous order’ idea, 30 The Road to Serfdom (1944), 4, 5, 6, 78–9, 94 healthcare, 91–2, 93, 178, 230, 236 hedge funds, 201, 219, 243–4 Heilbroner, Robert, The Worldly Philosophers, 252 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, 98, 107, 243–4 Helmsley, Leona, 105 hero myths, 221–3, 224 Hewlett-Packard, 159 hippie countercultural, 100 Hoffman, Abbie, Steal This Book, 100 Holmström, Bengt, 229–30 homo economicus, 9, 10, 12, 140, 156–7 and Gary Becker, 126, 129, 133, 136 and behaviour of real people, 15, 136, 144–5, 171, 172, 173, 250–51 and behavioural economics, 170, 171, 172, 255 long shadow cast by, 248 and Nudge economists, 13, 172, 173, 174–5, 177 Hooke, Robert, 223 housing market, 128–9, 196, 240–41 separate doors for poor people, 243 Hume, David, 111 Huxley, Thomas, 114 IBM, 181, 222 identity, 32, 165–6, 168, 180 Illinois, state of, 46–7 immigration, 125, 146 Impossibility Theorem, 72, 73–4, 75, 89, 97 Arrow’s assumptions, 80, 81, 82 and Duncan Black, 77–8 and free marketeers, 78–9, 82 as misunderstood and misrepresented, 76–7, 79–82 ‘paradox of voting’, 75–7 as readily solved, 76–7, 79–80 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 incentives adverse effect on autonomy, 164, 165–6, 168, 169–70, 180 authority figure–autonomy contradiction, 180 and behavioural economics, 171, 175, 176–7 cash and non-cash gifts, 161–2 context and culture, 175–6 contrast with rewards and punishments, 176–7 ‘crowding in’, 176 crowding out of prior motives, 160–61, 162–3, 164, 165–6, 171, 176 impact of economists’ ideas, 156–7, 178–80 and intrinsic motivations, 158–60, 161–3, 164, 165–6, 176 and moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 morally wrong/corrupting, 168–9 origins in behaviourism, 154 and orthodox theory of motivation, 157–8, 164, 166–7, 168–70, 178–9 payments to blood donors, 162–3, 164, 169, 176 as pervasive in modern era, 155–6 respectful use of, 175, 177–8 successful, 159–60 as tools of control/power, 155–7, 158–60, 161, 164, 167, 178 Indecent Proposal (film, 1993), 168 India, 123, 175 individualism, 82, 117 and Becker, 134, 135–8 see also freedom, individual Industrial Revolution, 223 inequality and access to lifeboats, 150–51 and climate change, 207–9 correlation with low social mobility, 227–8, 243 and demand for positional goods, 239–41 and economic imperialism, 145–7, 148, 151, 207 and efficiency wages, 237–8 entrenched self-deluding justifications for, 242–3 and executive pay, 215–16, 219, 224, 228–30, 234, 238 as falling in 1940–80 period, 215, 216 Great Gatsby Curve, 227–8, 243 hero myths, 221–3, 224 increases in as self-perpetuating, 227–8, 230–31, 243 as increasing since 1970s, 2–3, 215–16, 220–21 and lower growth levels, 239 mainstream political consensus on, 216, 217, 218, 219–21 marginal productivity theory, 223–4, 228 new doctrine on taxation since 1970s, 232–5 and Pareto, 217, 218–19, 220 poverty as waste of productive capacity, 238–9 public attitudes to, 221, 226–8 rises in as not inevitable, 220, 221, 242 role of luck downplayed, 222, 224–6, 243 scale-invariant nature of, 219, 220 ‘socialism for the rich’, 230 Thatcher’s praise of, 216 and top-rate tax cuts, 231, 233–5, 239 trickle-down economics, 232–3 US and European attitudes to, 226–7 ‘you deserve what you get’ belief, 223–6, 227–8, 236, 243 innovation, 222–3, 242 Inside Job (documentary, 2010), 88 Institute of Economic Affairs, 7–8, 15, 162–3 intellectual property law, 57, 68, 236 Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go, 148 Jensen, Michael, 229 Journal of Law and Economics, 49 justice, 1, 55, 57–62, 125, 137 Kahn, Herman, 18, 33 Kahneman, Daniel, 170–72, 173, 179, 202–3, 212, 226 Kennedy, President John, 139–40 Keynes, John Maynard, 11, 21, 162, 186, 204 and Buchanan’s ideology, 87 dentistry comparison, 258–9, 261 on economics as moral science, 252–3 Friedman’s challenge to orthodoxy of, 132 Hayek’s view of, 5–6 massive influence of, 3–4, 5–6 on power of economic ideas, 15 and probability, 185, 186–7, 188–9, 190, 210 vision of the ideal economist, 20 General Theory (1936), 15, 188–9 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 128 Khrushchev, Nikita, 139–40, 181 Kilburn Grammar School, 48 Kildall, Gary, 222 Kissinger, Henry, 184 Knight, Frank, 185–6, 212 Krugman, Paul, 248 Kubrick, Stanley, 35*, 139 labour child labour, 124, 146 and efficiency wages, 237–8 labour-intensive services, 90, 92–3 lumpenproletariat, 237 Olson’s hostility to unions, 104 Adam Smith’s ‘division of labour’ concept, 128 Laffer, Arthur, 232–3, 234 Lancet (medical journal), 257 Larkin, Philip, 67 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 Lazear, Edward, ‘Economic Imperialism’, 246 legal system, 7* and blame for accidents, 55, 60–61 and Chicago School, 49, 50–52, 55 and Coase Theorem, 47, 49, 50–55, 63–6 criminal responsibility, 111, 137, 152 economic imperialist view of, 137 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 ‘mimic the market’ approach, 61–3, 65 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 transaction costs, 51–3, 54–5, 61, 62, 63–4, 68 Lehmann Brothers, 194 Lexecon, 58, 68 Linda Problem, 202–3 LineStanding.com, 123 Little Zheng, 123, 124 Lloyd Webber, Andrew, 234–5, 236 lobbying, 7, 8, 88, 115, 123, 125, 146, 230, 231, 238 loft-insulation schemes, 172–3 logic, mathematical, 74–5 The Logic of Life (Tim Harford, 2008), 130 London School of Economics (LSE), 4, 48 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 201, 257 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 89, 94 Mafia, 30 malaria treatments, 125, 149 management science, 153–4, 155 Mandelbrot, Benoît, 195, 196, 201 Mankiw, Greg, 11 marginal productivity theory, 223–4 Markowitz, Harry, 196–7, 201, 213 Marx, Karl, 11, 101, 102, 104, 111, 223 lumpenproletariat, 237 mathematics, 9–10, 17–18, 19, 21–4, 26, 247, 248, 255, 259 of 2007 financial crash, 194, 195–6 and Ken Arrow, 71, 72, 73–5, 76–7, 82–3, 97 axioms (abstract assumptions), 198 fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201, 219 and orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 214 Ramsey Rule on discounting, 208–9, 212 and Savage, 189–90, 193, 197, 198, 199, 205 and Schelling, 139 Sen’s framework on voting systems, 80–81 standard deviation, 182, 192, 194 and stock market statistics, 190–91, 195–6 use of for military ends, 71–2 maximizing behaviour and Becker, 129–31, 133–4, 147 and catastrophe, 211 and Coase, 47, 55, 59, 61, 63–9 economic imperialism, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 147, 148–9 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 profit-maximizing firms, 228 see also wealth-maximization principle; welfare maximization McCluskey, Kirsty, 194 McNamara, Robert, 138 median voter theorem, 77, 95–6 Merton, Robert, 201 Meucci, Antonio, 222 microeconomics, 9, 232, 259 Microsoft, 222 Miles, David, 258 Mill, John Stuart, 102, 111, 243 minimum wage, national, 96 mobility, economic and social correlation with inequality, 226–8, 243 as low in UK, 227 as low in USA, 226–7 US–Europe comparisons, 226–7 Modern Times (Chaplin film, 1936), 154 modernism, 67 Moivre, Abraham de, 193 monetarism, 87, 89, 132, 232 monopolies and cartels, 101, 102, 103–4 public sector, 48–9, 50–51, 93–4 Mont Pèlerin Society, 3–9, 13, 15, 132 Morgenstern, Oskar, 20–22, 24–5, 28, 35, 124, 129, 189, 190 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 91, 92–3 Murphy, Kevin, 229 Mussolini, Benito, 216, 219 Nash equilibrium, 22–3, 24, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 Nash, John, 17–18, 22–3, 24, 25–6, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 awarded Nobel Prize, 34–5, 38, 39, 40 mental health problems, 25, 26, 34 National Health Service, 106, 162 ‘neoliberalism’, avoidance of term, 3* Neumann, John von ambition to make economics a science, 20–21, 24–5, 26, 35, 125, 151, 189 as Cold War warrior, 20, 26, 138 and expansion of scope of economics, 124–5 as father of game theory, 18, 19, 20–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 41 final illness and death of, 19, 34, 35, 43–4 genius of, 19–20 as inspiration for Dr Strangelove, 19 and Nash’s equilibrium, 22–3, 25, 38* simplistic view of humanity, 28 theory of decision-making, 189, 190, 203 neuroscience, 14 New Deal, US, 4, 194, 231 Newton, Isaac, 223 Newtonian mechanics, 21, 24–5 Nixon, Richard, 56, 184, 200 NORAD, Colorado Springs, 181 nuclear weapons, 18–19, 20, 22, 27, 181 and Ellsberg, 200 and game theory, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), 35, 138 and Russell’s Chicken, 33–4 and Schelling, 138, 139 Nudge economists, 13, 171–5, 177–8, 179, 180, 251 Oaten, Mark, 121 Obama, Barack, 110, 121, 157, 172, 180 Olson, Mancur, 103, 108, 109, 119–20, 122 The Logic of Collective Action (1965), 103–4 On the Waterfront (Kazan film, 1954), 165 online invisibility, 100* organs, human, trade in, 65, 123, 124, 145, 147–8 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 42–3 Osborne, George, 233–4 Packard, David, 159 Paine, Tom, 243 Pareto, Vilfredo 80/20 rule’ 218 and inequality, 217, 218–19, 220 life and background of, 216–17 Pareto efficiency, 217–18, 256* Paul the octopus (World Cup predictor, 2010), 133 pensions, workplace, 172, 174 physics envy, 9, 20–21, 41, 116, 175–6, 212, 247 Piketty, Thomas, 234, 235 plastic shopping bag tax, 159–60 Plato’s Republic, 100–101, 122 political scientists and Duncan Black, 78, 95–6 Black’s median voter theorem, 95–6 Buchanan’s ideology, 84–5 crises of the 1970s, 85–6 influence of Arrow, 72, 81–2, 83 see also public choice theory; social choice theory Posner, Richard, 54, 56–63, 137 ‘mimic the market’ approach, 61–3, 65 ‘The Economics of the Baby Shortage’ (1978), 61 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 price-fixing, 101, 102, 103–4 Princeton University, 17, 19–20 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 26–8, 29–32, 42–3 prisons, cell upgrades in, 123 privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 probability, 182–4 and Keynes, 185, 186–7, 188–9, 210 Linda Problem, 202–3 modern ideas of, 184–5 Ramsey’s personal probabilities (beliefs as probabilities), 187–8, 190, 197, 198, 199, 204–5 and Savage, 190, 193, 197, 198, 199, 203, 205 ‘Truth and Probability’ (Ramsey paper), 186–8, 189, 190 see also risk and uncertainty Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 productivity Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 and efficiency wages, 237–8 improvement in labour-intensive services, 92–3 labour input, 92 protectionism, 246, 255 psychology availability heuristic, 226 behaviourism, 154–8, 237 and behavioural economics, 12, 170–71 cognitive dissonance, 113–14 and financial incentives, 156–7, 158–60, 163–4, 171 framing effects, 170–71, 259 of free-riding, 113–14, 115 intrinsic motivations, 158–60, 161–3, 164, 165–6, 176 irrational behaviour, 12, 15, 171 learning of social behaviour, 163–4 moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 motivated beliefs, 227 ‘self-command’ strategies, 140 view of in game theory, 26–31 view of in public choice theory, 85–6 and welfare maximization, 149 ‘you deserve what you get’ belief, 223–6, 227–8, 236, 243 public choice theory as consensus view, 84–5 and crises of the 1970s, 85–6 foolish voter assumption, 86–8 ‘paradox of voter turnout’, 88–9, 95–6, 115–16 partial/self-contradictory application of, 86, 87–9 ‘political overload’ argument, 85, 86–7 ‘public bad, private good’ mantra, 93–4, 97 and resistance to tax rises, 94, 241 self-fulfilling prophecies, 95–7 and selfishness, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 94, 95–7 as time-bomb waiting to explode, 85 public expenditure in 1970s and ’80s, 89 Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 and Keynesian economics, 4 and public choice theory, 85–8, 89, 241 and tax rises, 241–2 public-sector monopolies, 48–9, 50–51, 93–4 Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers, 118–19 queue-jumping, 123, 124 QWERTY layout, 42 racial discrimination, 126–7, 133, 136, 140 Ramsey, Frank, 186–8, 189, 190, 205, 208 Ramsey Rule, 208–9, 212 RAND Corporation, 17, 41, 103, 138, 139 and Ken Arrow, 70–71, 72–3, 74, 75–6, 77, 78 and behaviourism, 154 and Cold War military strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 70, 73, 75–6, 141, 200, 213 and Ellsberg, 182–4, 187, 197–8, 200 and Russell’s Chicken, 33 Santa Monica offices of, 18 self-image as defender of freedom, 78 rational behaviour assumptions in game theory, 18, 28, 29–32, 35–8, 41–3, 70, 124 axioms (abstract mathematical assumptions), 198 Becker’s version of, 128–9, 135, 140, 151 behavioural economics/Nudge view of, 173, 174–5 distinction between values and tastes, 136–8 economic imperialist view of, 135, 136–8, 140, 151 and free-riding theory, 100–101, 102, 103–4, 107–8, 109–10, 115–16 and orthodox decision theory, 198, 199 public choice theory relates selfishness to, 86 term as scientific-sounding cover, 12 see also homo economicus Reader’s Digest, 5, 6 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 87–8, 89, 104, 132 election of as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 and top-rate tax cuts, 231, 233 regulators, 1–2 Chicago view of, 40 Reinhart, Carmen, 258 religion, decline of in modern societies, 15, 185 renewable energy, 116 rent-seeking, 230, 238 ‘right to recline’, 63–4 risk and uncertainty bell curve distribution, 191–4, 195, 196–7, 201, 203–4, 257 catastrophes, 181–2, 191, 192, 201, 203–4, 211–12 delusions of quantitative ‘risk management’, 196, 213 Ellsberg’s experiment (1961), 182–4, 187, 197, 198–200 errors in conventional thinking about, 191–2, 193–4, 195–7, 204–5, 213 financial orthodoxy on risk, 196–7, 201–2 and First World War, 185 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 hasard and fortuit, 185* ‘making sense’ of through stories, 202–3 ‘measurable’ and ‘unmeasurable’ distinction, 185–6, 187–9, 190, 210–11, 212–13 measurement in numerical terms, 181–4, 187, 189, 190–94, 196–7, 201–2, 203–5, 212–13 orthodox decision theory, 183–4, 185–6, 189–91, 193–4, 201–2, 203–5, 211, 212–14 our contemporary orthodoxy, 189–91 personal probabilities (beliefs as probabilities), 187–8, 190, 197, 198, 199, 204–5 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 pure uncertainty, 182–3, 185–6, 187–9, 190, 197, 198–9, 210, 211, 212, 214, 251 redefined as ‘volatility’, 197, 213 the Savage orthodoxy, 190–91, 197, 198–200, 203, 205 scenario planning as crucial, 251 Taleb’s black swans, 192, 194, 201, 203–4 ‘Truth and Probability’ (Ramsey paper), 186–8, 189, 190 urge to actuarial alchemy, 190–91, 197, 201 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 see also probability Robertson, Dennis, 13–14 Robinson, Joan, 260 Rodrik, Dani, 255, 260–61 Rogoff, Ken, 258 Rothko, Mark, 4–5 Rumsfeld, Donald, 232–3 Russell, Bertrand, 33–4, 74, 97, 186, 188 Ryanair, 106 Sachs, Jeffrey, 257 Santa Monica, California, 18 Sargent, Tom, 257–8 Savage, Leonard ‘Jimmie’, 189–90, 193, 203, 205scale-invariance, 194, 195–6, 201, 219 Scandinavian countries, 103, 149 Schelling, Thomas, 35* on access to lifeboats, 150–51 awarded Nobel Prize, 138–9 and Cold War nuclear strategy, 138, 139–40 and economic imperialism, 141–5 and game theory, 138–9 and Washington–Moscow hotline, 139–40 work on value of human life, 141–5, 207 ‘The Intimate Contest for Self-command’ (essay, 1980), 140, 145 ‘The Life You Save May be Your Own’ (essay, 1968), 142–5, 207 Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, 172 Schmidt, Eric, 105 Scholes, Myron, 201 Schwarzman, Stephen, 235 Second World War, 3, 189, 210 selfishness, 41–3, 178–9 and Becker, 129–30 and defence of inequality, 242–3 as free marketeers’ starting point, 10–12, 13–14, 41, 86, 178–9 and game theory, 18 and public choice theory, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 94, 95–7 Selten, Reinhard, 34–5, 36, 38, 40 Sen, Amartya, 29, 80–81 service sector, 90–93, 94 Shakespeare, William, Measure for Measure, 169 Shaw, George Bernard, 101 Shiller, Robert, 247 Simon, Herbert, 223 Skinner, Burrhus, 154–5, 158 Smith, Adam, 101, 111, 122 The Wealth of Nations (1776), 10–11, 188–9 snowflakes, 195 social choice theory, 72 and Ken Arrow, 71–83, 89, 95, 97, 124–5, 129 and Duncan Black, 78, 95 and free marketeers, 79, 82 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 social media, 100* solar panels, 116 Solow, Bob, 163, 223 Sorites paradox, 117–18, 119 sovereign fantasy, 116–17 Soviet Union, 20, 22, 70, 73, 82, 101, 104, 167, 237 spectrum auctions, 39–40, 47, 49 Stalin, Joseph, 70, 73, 101 the state anti-government attitudes in USA, 83–5 antitrust regulation, 56–8 dismissal of almost any role for, 94, 135, 235–6, 241 duty over full employment, 5 economic imperialist arguments for ‘small government’, 135 increased economic role from 1940s, 3–4, 5 interventions over ‘inefficient’ outcomes, 53 and monetarism, 87, 89 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 3, 4, 5 and privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 public-sector monopolies, 48–50, 93–4 replacing of with markets, 79 vital role of, 236 statistical lives, 141–5, 207 Stern, Nick, 206, 209–10 Stigler, George, 50, 51, 56, 69, 88 De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum (with Becker, 1977), 135–6 Stiglitz, Joseph, 237 stock markets ‘Black Monday’ (1987), 192 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 193–4, 201 Strittmatter, Father, 43–4 Summers, Larry, 10, 14 Sunstein, Cass, 173 Nudge (with Richard Thaler, 2008), 171–2, 175 Taleb, Nassim, 192 Tarski, Alfred, 74–5 taxation and Baumol’s cost disease, 94 and demand for positional goods, 239–41 as good thing, 231, 241–2, 243 Laffer curve, 232–3, 234 new doctrine of since 1970s, 232–4 property rights as interdependent with, 235–6 public resistance to tax rises, 94, 239, 241–2 and public spending, 241–2 revenue-maximizing top tax rate, 233–4, 235 tax avoidance and evasion, 99, 105–6, 112–13, 175, 215 ‘tax revolt’ campaigns (1970s USA), 87 ‘tax as theft’ culture, 235–6 top-rate cuts and inequality, 231, 233–5, 239 whines from the super-rich, 234–5, 243 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 153–4, 155, 167, 178, 237 Thaler, Richard, 13 Nudge (with Cass Sunstein, 2008), 171–2, 175 Thatcher, Margaret, 2, 88, 89, 104, 132 election of as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 and Hayek, 6, 7 and inequality, 216, 227 privatization programme, 93–4 and top-rate tax cuts, 231 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944), 20, 21, 25, 189 Titanic, sinking of (1912), 150 Titmuss, Richard, The Gift Relationship, 162–3 tobacco-industry lobbyists, 8 totalitarian regimes, 4, 82, 167–8, 216, 219 see also Soviet Union trade union movement, 104 Tragedy of the Commons, 27 Truman, Harry, 20, 237 Trump, Donald, 233 Tucker, Albert, 26–7 Tversky, Amos, 170–72, 173, 202–3, 212, 226 Twitter, 100* Uber, 257 uncertainty see risk and uncertainty The Undercover Economist (Tim Harford, 2005), 130 unemployment and Coase Theorem, 45–7, 64 during Great Depression, 3–4 and Keynesian economics, 4, 5 United Nations, 96 universities auctioning of places, 124, 149–50 incentivization as pervasive, 156 Vietnam War, 56, 198, 200, 249 Villari, Pasquale, 30 Vinci, Leonardo da, 186 Viniar, David, 182, 192 Volkswagen scandal (2016), 2, 151–2 Vonnegut, Kurt, 243–4 voting systems, 72–4, 77, 80, 97 Arrow’s ‘Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives’, 81, 82 Arrow’s ‘Universal Domain’, 81, 82 and free marketeers, 79 ‘hanging chads’ in Florida (2000), 121 recount process in UK, 121 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 Waldfogel, Joel, 161* Wanniski, Jude, 232 Watertown Arsenal, Massachusetts, 153–4 Watson Jr, Thomas J., 181 wealth-maximization principle, 57–63 and Coase, 47, 55, 59, 63–9 as core principle of current economics, 253 created markets, 65–7 extension of scope of, 124–5 and justice, 55, 57–62, 137 and knee space on planes, 63–4 practical problems with negotiations, 62–3 and values more important than efficiency, 64–5, 66–7 welfare maximization, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 148–9, 176 behavioural economics/Nudge view of, 173 and vulnerable/powerless people, 146–7, 150 welfare state, 4, 162 Wilson, Charlie, 215 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 186, 188 Wolfenschiessen (Swiss village), 158, 166–7 Woolf, Virginia, 67 World Bank, 96 World Cup football tournament (2010), 133 World Health Organization, 207 Yale Saturday Evening Pest, 4–5 Yellen, Janet, 237 THE BEGINNING Let the conversation begin … Follow the Penguin twitter.com/penguinukbooks Keep up-to-date with all our stories youtube.com/penguinbooks Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your pinterest.com/penguinukbooks Like ‘Penguin Books’ on facebook.com/penguinbooks Listen to Penguin at soundcloud.com/penguin-books Find out more about the author and discover more stories like this at penguin.co.uk ALLEN LANE UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia India | New Zealand | South Africa Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com First published 2019 Copyright © Jonathan Aldred, 2019 The moral right of the author has been asserted Jacket photograph © Getty Images ISBN: 978-0-241-32544-5 This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

They become suspicious and distrustful of society and susceptible to “sinister attribution errors.” As Cass Sunstein puts it, “This error occurs when people feel that they are under pervasive scrutiny, and hence they attribute personalistic motives to outsiders and overestimate the amount of attention they receive. Benign actions that happen to disadvantage the group are taken as purposeful plots, intended to harm. They overestimate the amount of attention they receive [emphasis mine]. Benign actions that happen to disadvantage the group are taken as purposeful plots, intended to harm.” See Cass R. Sunstein and Adrain Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories,” Coase-Sandor Working Papers in Law and Economics, University of Chicago Law School, 2008.

Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 2006

Without the enforcement of rights, and without the necessary fiscal support for that set of provisions not to appear to the governed as a scheme, societies may swing back and forth between a widespread sense of anomie, at one extreme, and at the other a diffuse awareness that those rights should operate as a sort of free gift. These processes are more complex because they put us on notice, as Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein have shown very clearly, that rights have costs: In practice, rights become more than mere declarations only if they confer power on bodies whose decisions are legally binding. . . . As a general rule, unfortunate individuals who do not live under a government capable of taxing and delivering an effective remedy have no legal rights.

…

The fact that I enjoy a certain level of protection with respect to external threats does not mean that another individual enjoys a diminished level of defense; similarly, no individual can be excluded from the benefit of the common defense, as the preamble of the Argentine Constitution says, independent of whether he or she pays taxes. Juan J. Llach and María Marcela Harriague, “Un sistema impositivo para el desarrollo y la equidad,” paper presented at the Fundación Producir Conservando, Buenos Aires, June 2005, p. 45. Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes ( New York: Norton, 1999), p. 19. Ibid., p. 146. See ibid., p. 205. S. E. Finer, The History of Government, vol. 1: Ancient Monarchies and Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 81. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, edited by Isaac Kramnick ( New York: Penguin, 1987), article XXIII.

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy
by David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale
Published 23 May 2011

As nobody enters married life thinking that he or she might get divorced, nobody enters the investment world thinking he or she might fail. Doing the opposite would require humility, which is a quality not found in abundance within the world of investment. Potentially a victim of this hubris, my prediction for 2011 may in the end be nothing more than wishful thinking. If it is, how disconcerting! When Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein published Nudge–Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness with Yale University Press in 2008, they showed that what’s come out of behavioral economics—and by extension neuroeconomics—can lead to improved decisions in terms of better health or sounder investments. Soon, some of their ideas on how to nudge made their way into policy-making.

…

Olivier Oullier, “The Useful Brain: How Neuroeconomics Might Change Our Views on Rationality and a Couple of Other Things,” chap. 10 in The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World, vol. 1, ed. Erwann O. Michel-Kerjan and Paul Slovic (Philadelphia: PublicAffairs, 2010). 3. These policy units are led by Dr. David Halpern in the United Kingdom and by Dr. Olivier Oullier in France; while Cass Sunstein has become the “regulatory czar” in the Obama administration. 23 THE DIMINISHING RETURNS OF THE INFORMATION AGE Mark Roeder At the dawn of the Internet age in the mid-1990s, many pundits predicted that the Internet would empower billions of people to become smarter, or at least better informed, simply by making so much information easily accessible.

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats
by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake
Published 15 Jul 2019

Instead, she suggested, might they think about a “nudge”? No one in the room had any idea what she was talking about. She pulled out a copy of a book called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, and suggested they do some reading. The book was coauthored by her boss, Cass Sunstein. Sunstein, a Democrat, was not necessarily a fan of regulation. A former colleague of President Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School, Sunstein had advocated for simple but not always popular ideas, such as subjecting regulation to cost-benefit analysis. With the economist Richard Thaler, Sunstein had written Nudge, arguing that government may be more effective when it shapes voluntary action rather than when it sets mandatory requirements.

…

The CSIS commission report: “Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency,” Report of the CSIS Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency, Center for Strategic and International Studies, December 2008, https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/media/csis/pubs/081208_securingcyberspace_44.pdf. She pulled out a copy of a book: Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2009). Twenty years ago, when President Clinton: “Defending America’s Cyberspace: National Plan for Information Systems Protection,” White House, 2000, https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd/CIP-plan.pdf. Surprisingly, the Department: U.S.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

And indeed – although this is less obvious in Offer’s exposition – the interests of affected others. The idea that paternalistic interventions in the ‘choice architecture’ can help us counter short-termism and overcome social traps has been proposed by economist Richard Thaler and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein in their enormously popular book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. So, for example, by placing healthy foods rather than sweets near the checkout or making people opt out of pension fund contributions rather than having them opt in are seen as ways of ‘nudging us’ towards good long-term decisions and away from bad short-term ones.18 It’s an appealing idea.

…

Online at http://doc.teebweb.org/wp-content/uploads/Study%20and%20Reports/Reports/Synthesis%20report/TEEB%20Synthesis%20Report%202010.pdf (accessed 30 December 2015). Teulings, Coen and Richard Baldwin 2014. ‘Secular Stagnation: facts, causes and cures’. London: Centre for Economic Policy Research. Online at www.voxeu.org/sites/default/files/Vox_secular_stagnation.pdf (accessed 17 October 2015). Thaler, Richard H. and Cass Sunstein 2009 Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. London and New York: Penguin. Timmer, Marcel, Mary O’Mahony and Bart van Ark 2007. EU KLEMS growth and productivity accounts: overview, November 200 release. Groningen: University of Groningen. Online at www.euklems.net/data/overview_07ii.pdf.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet
by Roger Scruton
Published 30 Apr 2014

Later he became more ‘Coasey’. 175 Coase’s Theorem is also insensitive to the so-called ‘endowment effect’, according to which the receipt of property is in itself a value to the recipient. See Daniel Kahneman et al., ‘Experimental Test of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem’, in Cass Sunstein, ed., Behavioural Law and Economics, Cambridge, 2000. 176 Cass Sunstein et al., Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide, Chicago, 2002. 177 Tammy Tengs, ‘Optimizing Societal Investments in the Prevention of Premature Death’, Harvard School of Public Health, 1994. 178 The case has been lucidly set out by Roger Bate, Saving Our Streams: The Role of the Anglers’ Conservation Association in Protecting English and Welsh Rivers, London, 2001. 179 [1859] 7 H.L.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

Imagine how Americans would have behaved, he said, if all three major US television news channels had been taken over for five years by the Ku Klux Klan.14 To be sure, the Yugoslav atrocities occurred in the 1990s, when there were still just a few dominant terrestrial television channels and the internet was in its infancy. The internet gives people the capacity to counterbalance systematic distortions by state-controlled or private near-monopoly media. With two clicks of your mouse, you can seek out contrary facts and alternative views. But how many people actually do? The American scholar Cass Sunstein was among the first to suggest that in practice the internet can contribute to what he calls group polarisation.15 Far from being confronted with a diversity of opposing views, as in an ideal liberal public sphere, people seek out and commune online with a like-minded minority. Jihadists read only jihadi websites, which link to each other; far-right extremists listen only to far-right extremists, atheists to atheists, flat-earthers to flat-earthers.

…

As the comedian John Oliver put it on the American satirical TV news programme ‘The Daily Show’: what people really want on the internet is ‘to have their own views pushed back at them for free’.63 A rather pretentious word for this echo-chamber effect is ‘homophily’, although that makes it sound vaguely like a sexual preference.64 Cass Sunstein, the American scholar who has warned most influentially about this danger, acknowledges that the evidence that people actually lust for homophily is far from conclusive.65 In a survey conducted for Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in a number of developed countries in 2013 some two thirds of those asked said they preferred news that has ‘no particular point of view’, while the other third was divided between 11 percent seeking news that ‘challenges your view’ and 23 percent who wanted news that ‘shares your point of view’ (see Figure 13).

…

Emily Steel, ‘Datalogix Leads Path in Online Tracking’, Financial Times, 23 September 2012, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8b9faecc-0584-11e2-9ebd-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3qv6zRoSp 143. Lanier 2011, 198 144. quoted in Pariser 2011, 147 145. see Feuz et al. 2011. Note that this was conducted before Google introduced default personalised search in December 2009 146. a term popularised by Pariser 2011 147. I take the term ‘information cocoon’ from the work of Cass Sunstein. For his definition, see Sunstein 2006, 9. More on the Daily Me under principle 4. On Breivik, see Borchgrevink 2013, 114–44, Seierstad 2015, 155–69, and Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The Internet Nourished Norway’s Killer, but Censorship Would Be Folly’, The Guardian, 29 July 2011, http://perma.cc/R825-99LQ 148.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

Obama the empiricist is not the man who surged from behind to win the 2008 presidential election. That candidate was the Obama of soaring rhetoric, who promised hope and change. But the pragmatist has always been there. Writing in September 2008, several weeks before the presidential elections, Cass Sunstein, who has gone on to serve in the White House, had this to say about his candidate: “Above all, Obama’s form of pragmatism is heavily empirical; he wants to know what will work.” Word crunchers found that the president’s 2009 inaugural address was the first one to use the term “data” and only the second to mention “statistics.”

…

Krueger, “The Rise and Consequences of Inequality in the United States,” remarks prepared for an event at the Center for American Progress, January 12, 2012. But the best explanation See Noam Scheiber, “The Audacity of Data: Barack Obama’s Surprisingly Non-Ideological Policy Shop,” The New Republic, March 12, 2008. “Above all, Obama’s form of pragmatism” Cass Sunstein, “The Empiricist Strikes Back: Obama’s Pragmatism Explained,” The New Republic, September 10, 2008. Word crunchers found that the president’s 2009 inaugural address Justin Wolfers, “The Empiricist-in-Chief,” Freakonomics blog, February 26, 2009. Elizabeth Billington was a diva See Elizabeth Billington’s entry in Philip H.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Rosalind Picard, “Towards Machines That Deny Their Maker—Lecture with Rosalind Picard,” VBG, April 22, 2016, http://www.vbg.net/ueber-uns/agenda/termin/3075.html. 122. Joseph Weizenbaum, “Not Without Us,” SIGCAS Computers and Society 16, nos. 2–3 (1986): 2–7, https://doi.org/10.1145/15483.15484. CHAPTER TEN 1. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2009). 2. Elizabeth J. Lyons et al., “Behavior Change Techniques Implemented in Electronic Lifestyle Activity Monitors: A Systematic Content Analysis,” Journal of Medical Internet Research 16, no. 8 (2014), e192, https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.3469.

…

Strategies that produce economies of action vary according to the methods with which these approaches are combined and the salience of each. “Tuning” occurs in a variety of ways. It may involve subliminal cues designed to subtly shape the flow of behavior at the precise time and place for maximally efficient influence. Another kind of tuning involves what behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call the “nudge,” which they define as “any aspect of a choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way.”1 The term choice architecture refers to the ways in which situations are already structured to channel attention and shape action. In some cases these architectures are intentionally designed to elicit specific behavior, such as a classroom in which all the seats face the teacher or an online business that requires you to click through many obscure pages in order to opt out of its tracking cookies.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
by David Moon , Patrick Ruffini , David Segal , Aaron Swartz , Lawrence Lessig , Cory Doctorow , Zoe Lofgren , Jamie Laurie , Ron Paul , Mike Masnick , Kim Dotcom , Tiffiniy Cheng , Alexis Ohanian , Nicole Powers and Josh Levy
Published 30 Apr 2013

Representative for Texas’ 14th Congressional District) Indeed, important media and political figures in the U.S. (such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) frequently bemoan the Internet’s “lack of a gatekeeper.” University of Chicago law professor and former Obama Administration “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein has suggested that the federal government create an office to debunk “conspiracy” theories on the Internet. Former President Bill Clinton, that champion of honesty, has even suggested the creation of an entirely new cabinet department devoted to “fact checking” the Internet! These proposals are done in the name of preventing the spread of factual errors, misinformation, and “conspiracy theories.”

…

American politicians condemn foreign governments like China for restricting access to the Internet, yet many of those same politicians support increased government control of the Internet here in America. Indeed, important media and political figures in the U.S. (such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) frequently bemoan the Internet’s “lack of a gatekeeper.” University of Chicago law professor and former Obama Administration “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein has suggested that the federal government create an office to debunk “conspiracy” theories on the Internet. Former President Bill Clinton, that champion of honesty, has even suggested the creation of an entirely new cabinet department devoted to “fact checking” the Internet! These proposals are done in the name of preventing the spread of factual errors, misinformation, and “conspiracy theories.”

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 14 Jul 2001

For a list of current legislation proposed, see current information on the status of pending privacy bills, available at http://www.epic.org/privacy/bill_track.html. 22 This is the argument made by Cass Sunstein, in Republic.com (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). As Sunstein argues, how groups are structured—what their composition is, how they deliberate—affects the results that deliberation produces. Cass Sunstein, Republic.com, 65-71. 23 The success rate of advertising is highly controversial. The general consensus is that direct snail mail advertising response rates are generally in the 1-3 percent range.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

As in nature, so, too, on the web: the tourist traps high and low are soon to follow; commercial exploitation is on its way. Such, unfortunately, is the nature of things. * * * * The micro-fragmentation represented by blogging audiences caused panic to some thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Cass Sunstein. Chomsky argued that blogs lacked the power to constrain powerful actors. “There’s plenty to criticize about the mass media, but they are the source of regular information about a wide range of topics. You can’t duplicate that on blogs.” Natasha Lennard, “Noam Chomsky, the Salon Interview: Governments Are Power Systems, Trying to Sustain Power,” Salon, December 29, 2013.

…

“In a Democracy,” wrote Sunstein, “people do not live in echo chambers or information cocoons. They see and hear a wide range of topics and ideas.” This vision of democracy, says Sunstein, “raise[s] serious doubts about certain uses of new technologies, above all the Internet, about the astonishing growth in the power to choose—to screen in and to screen out.” Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Both he and Chomsky preferred an environment where the nation regularly tuned in, together, to something like NBC or CBS or perhaps a public broadcaster. CHAPTER 22 THE RISE OF CLICKBAIT Back in 2001, at MIT’s media laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a former schoolteacher named Jonah Peretti was sitting at his desk and, like so many graduate students, not doing his work.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

The problem impacts the entire world and encourages mankind, hell, forces mankind, to think bigger than the current nation-state paradigm. A world pollution problem deserves a world solution: A One World Government. A New World Order Former Prime Minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, flat out said that a New World Order is needed to deal with the Climate Change crisis. Cass Sunstein, Obama’s former head of the Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs, said that redistribution should occur through climate change policy. Maybe everyone should listen to these people when they tell the world all about their plan? The Club of Rome is just another branch of the Rockefeller Foundation, and if there is one thing to know about the Rockefeller family it is that they are not looking to solve the world’s problems, they are the people creating them.70 That is what the Rockefellers do, they finance many groups that push the globalist agenda.

…

/Israeli citizens that occupied high-ranking positions, meaning that in addition to being citizens of the United States they are also citizens of Israel. Names one might recognize from the previous administration include Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Tim Geithner, Peter Orszag, Gary Gensler, Richard Holbrooke, Elena Kagan, Larry Summers, Cass Sunstein, Kenneth Feinberg, Ben Bernanke, Paul Volker, Neil Barofsky, Robert Reich, Michael Mukasey, David Frum, Jack Lew, Janet Yellen, and Stanley Fischer. No Russians on this list so far. Congress was and still is filled with dual citizens, not from Iran or Turkey, but from Israel. Certainly, many of these names should ring a bell, like Gabrielle Giffords, Eric Cantor, Barney Frank, Shelley Berkley, Adam Schiff, Henry Waxman, Alan Grayson, Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, Al Franken, Barbara Boxer, Richard Blumenthal, Ron Wyden, convicted pedophile Anthony Weiner, and soon-to-be convicted criminal Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
by Julia Hobsbawm
Published 11 Apr 2022

Allen, 2013) Unerman, Sue, Kathryn Jacobs, and Mark Edwards, Belonging: The Key to Transforming and Maintaining Diversity, Inclusion and Equality at Work (Bloomsbury Business, 2020) Chapter 5: Shift 5: Marzipan Management Ashcroft, Paul, and Garrick Jones, Alive: Digital Humans and their Organizations (Novaro Publishing, 2018) Daisley, Bruce, The Joy of Work: 30 Ways to Fix Your Work Culture and Fall in Love with Your Job Again (Random House Business, 2019) Hamel, Gary, and Michele Zanini, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020) Handy, Charles, Understanding Organizations (Penguin, 1993) Hobsbawm, Julia, The Simplicity Principle: Six Steps Towards Clarity in a Complex World (Kogan Page, 2020) Ibarra, Herminia, Think Like a Leader, Act Like a Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015) Johnson, Elsbeth, Step Up, Step Back: How to Really Deliver Strategic Change in Your Organisation (Bloomsbury Business, 2020) Kellerman, Barbara, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Harvard Business Review Press, 2004) ——, The End of Leadership (Harper Business, 2012) Moyo, Dambisa, How Boards Work and How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World (Bridge Street Press, 2021) Norman, Donald A., Living with Complexity (MIT Press, 2016) Rumelt, Richard, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters (Profile, 2017 [2011]) Stern, Stefan, and Cary Cooper, Myths of Management: What People Get Wrong About Being the Boss (Business Myths) (Kogan Page, 2017) Chapter 6: Shift 6: Social Health and Well-being Aitsi-Selmi, Amina, The Success Trap: Why Good People Stay in Jobs They Don’t Like and How to Break Free (Kogan Page, 2020) Beckett, Samuel, Happy Days (Faber, 2010 [1961]) Cooper, Cary, and Ian Hesketh, Wellbeing at Work: How to Design, Implement and Evaluate an Effective Strategy (Kogan Page, 2019) Draper, Derek, Create Space: How to Manage Time and Find Focus, Productivity and Success (Profile, 2018) Kahneman, Daniel, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement (William Collins, 2021) Laloux, Frederic, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness (Nelson Parker, 2014) Lyons, Dan, Lab Rats: Why Modern Work Makes People Miserable (Atlantic, 2019) Newport, Cal, Digital Minimalism: Living Better with Less Technology (Portfolio/Penguin, 2019) Orbach, Susie, What’s Really Going on Here: Making Sense of our Emotional Lives (Virago, 1994) Russell, Bertrand, The Conquest of Happiness (Routledge Classics, 2006 [1930]) Selye, Hans, The Stress of Life (McGraw Hill, 1956) Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011) Workforce Institute at Kronos, Being Present: A Practical Guide for Transforming the Employee Experience of your Frontline Workforce (Kronos, 2019) Reinventions Kelly, Paul, and Sian Griffiths, Body Clocks: The Biology of Time for Sleep, Education and Work (John Catt, 2018) Note on Further Reading I list below some of the books (fiction and non-fiction) and datasets to help your thinking as a whole.

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
by Joel Bakan
Published 1 Jan 2003

See Jim Carlton, "Alaska Will Increase State Funding for Oversight of Local Oil Industry," The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2001. Chapter 4: Democracy Ltd. 1. Samuel Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Volume Two: The Year of Crisis, 1933 (New York: Random House, 1938), as cited in Cass Sunstein, The Partial Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 57-58. Back Matter Page 15 NOT N S 185 2. The following account of this story is based primarily on Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973). 3. Archer, The Plot, 21. 4. National Archives, "U.S.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

The result has been a pretense of participation that has spread thinly across what is little more than a participatory gloss on traditional top-down, one-way politics. President Obama’s White House website has hardly been any more interactive than anyone else’s, the spirited efforts in his administration of digital advocates like Cass Sunstein and Beth Noveck notwithstanding. And try to communicate with one of those election-year fund-raising websites with more than a “Contribute Now!” link, or write back to a politician asking for your support (and dollars) to explain why you don’t like her pitch . . . well, you can’t. It is once again clear that new technology is used first of all to conduct old business.

…

Baker, former president of WNET, thus speaks of “Google’s Internet grab,” and suggests the issue is monopoly in this “dominant new information medium.” “Google’s Internet Grab,” The Nation, February 11, 2013. 22. Nicholas Kulish, “Twitter Entering New Ground, Blocks Germans’ Access to Neo-Nazi Account,” New York Times, October 19, 2012. 23. Cass Sunstein’s prescient book Republic.com focused on the web’s tendency to separate and isolate rather than bring us together. See Sunstein, Republic.com, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. 24. An important aside: the “cloud” sells itself as a miraculous and invisible nonspace to its users, but for its owners and providers it is an electronic network of linked servers no less real than the personal devices on which it is accessed by ordinary users. 25.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
by Daniel H. Pink
Published 1 Dec 2012

The opposite of clarity is murkiness. And murkiness’s close cousin is mindlessness—the state of being unaware. Wansink shows how mindlessness allows us to fall prey to hidden persuaders that make us overeat without even knowing it. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Two professors harvest the field of behavioral economics to reveal how altering “choice architecture” can nudge people to make better decisions about their lives. Ask the Five Whys. Those of you with toddlers in the house are familiar with, and perhaps annoyed by, the constant why-why-why.

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay
by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
Published 14 Oct 2019

An Essay on the Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States. New York: TY Crowell, 1896. Teles, Steven. The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Thaler, Richard H. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. ———, and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Thorndike, Joseph J. “Historical Perspective: Pecora Hearings Spark Tax Morality, Tax Reform Debate.” Tax Notes 101, November 10, 2003. Toder, Eric. “Explaining the TCJA’s International Reforms.”

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
by Will Larson
Published 19 May 2019

This ensures that each time you push information to a team, it includes important information that they should act on! What’s so powerful about nudges is that simply letting folks know their behavior has changed will typically stir them to action, and it doesn’t require any sort of organizational authority to do so. (For more on this topic, take a look at Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.)21 Baseline: In the best case, you’ll be able to drive the organizational impact you need with contextualized nudges, but in some cases that isn’t quite enough. The next step is to work with the key teams to agree on baseline metrics for their performance. This is useful because it ensures that the baselines are top-of-mind, and it also gives them a powerful tool for negotiating priorities with their stakeholders.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 10 Jun 2012

See discussions of anchoring and framing effects on judgments and preferences in Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, eds., Choices, Values and Frames (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a popular and recent discussion, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 12. See the discussion of framing effects in the case of the introduction of lifecycle funds in U.S. 401(k) plans in Ning Tang, Olivia S. Mitchell, Gary R. Mottola, and Stephen P.

…

The views to which he is exposed have been preselected to conform to his beliefs. The consequence is the risk of further polarization of beliefs. The fact that beliefs about inequality are thus so polarized has obvious implications for the ability of our society to deal with the problem on the basis of a national consensus. For a discussion of these issues, see, e.g., Cass Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), where he suggests that people are trapped in “information cocoons,” shielded from information at odds with their preconceptions. Charles Lord and coauthors carried out important research on belief polarization: they showed research results on the death penalty to two groups of people, pro– and anti–capital punishment.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs
by Andy Kessler
Published 1 Feb 2011

It makes sense. Who has any idea how to confront situations unless there is some anchor of honesty or morality or self-interest or just kindness that influences what we do? Entire wings of psychology departments exist to study this stuff. And now so do businesses and society. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein wrote Nudge, a book about how governments can act with “libertarian paternalism” to influence people’s behavior, to nudge them away from making poor decisions. Of course, who decides what is right or wrong, good or bad? Andrew Ferguson wrote an April 2010 piece in The Weekly Standard aptly titled “Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink,” pointing out that many of the favorite behavioral economics studies are done by grad students observing paid volunteer undergraduates doing trivial tasks, and arguing that this is hardly a basis for making largescale policy recommendations for a better society.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value
by John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen
Published 30 Dec 2014

John Paul DeJoria talks in detail about his early professional experiences working for other companies in the hair industry at http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/24/smallbusiness/paul_mitchell_dejoria.fortune/index.htm. 23. Bloomberg, Bloomberg by Bloomberg. 24. Unless otherwise noted, all details and quotes about T. Boone Pickens come from an in-person interview conducted by the authors on January 24, 2013. 25. Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting to Yes (New York: Penguin Books, 1981). 26. Cass Sunstein, “Stay Alive: Imagine Yourself Decades from Now,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 23, 2012, www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-23/stay-alive-imagine-yourself-decades-from-now.html. 27. Unless otherwise noted, all details and quotes from T. Boone Pickens come from an in-person interview with the authors conducted on January 24, 2013. 28. http://blogmaverick.com/. 29.

Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy
by Gregory Brandon Salsbury
Published 15 Mar 2010

I highly recommend you explore this field in more detail, as the scholars of behavioral finance have put years of sweat equity into fascinating research and study. Notably, I recommend Choices, Values, and Frames by Kahneman and Tversky; Beyond Greed and Fear by Hersh Shefrin; Nudge, written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein; the investor behavior studies on 401(k)s by Shlomo Benartzi; articles, books and research by Meir Statman; Against the Gods, The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter Bernstein, as a keen understanding of risk is more relevant than ever given the current economy; and Investment Madness by John Nofsinger, which is a good introductory book on behavioral finance written for the “lay” reader.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
by Sheryl Sandberg
Published 11 Mar 2013

Gloria Steinem, “In Defense of the ‘Chick-Flick,’ ” Alternet, July 6, 2007, http://​www.​alternet.​org/​story/​56219/​gloria_​steinem%3A_​in_​defense_​of_​the_​‘chick_flick’. 2. Marianne Cooper, “The New F-Word,” Gender News, February 28, 2011, http://​gender.​stanford.​edu/​news/​2011/​new-​f-​word. 3. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown, 1991). 4. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 5. Corinne A. Moss-Racusin et al., “Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109, no. 41 (2012): 16474–79. 6.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets
by Peter Oppenheimer
Published 3 May 2020

Results indicate that the economy is highly driven by human psychologies, a result which is in conformity with the prediction of Keynes (1930) and Akerlof and Shiller (2010).’27 The renewed focus on psychology in understanding responses to and behaviour regarding decisions is also increasingly used in public policy. In 2008, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein published Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which focused on behavioural economics. The book became a bestseller and has had a widespread impact on policy. Mr Thaler went on to win the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2017 for his work in the field. So, despite all the political, economic and social changes that have occurred since the 1980s, and notwithstanding the extreme events and difficulty of predicting human sentiment and responses to conditions, there have been repeated patterns in economies and financial markets.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

The Trump-loving bot’s calls for resegregation and efforts to delegitimize “manspreading” had thousands of people taking time out of their day to argue with “her” online.55 The tech titans also want to keep us on their sites, so they use their algorithms to feed us what they think we want to see. Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor, worries about the polarizing impact this insulation will have on the body politic. He says, “Social media makes it easier for people to surround themselves (virtually) with the opinions of likeminded others and insulate themselves from competing views.” Likening social media to a disease vector, Sunstein surmises that it is “potentially dangerous for democracy and social peace.”56 In these days of filter bubbles and algorithmically generated search results it takes effort to seek out opposing political views.

Antisemitism: Here and Now
by Deborah E. Lipstadt
Published 29 Jan 2019

Daniel Staetsky, Antisemitism in Contemporary Great Britain: A Study of Attitudes towards Jews and Israel (London: Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 2017), pp. 3–5. A DELUSION 1. Chip Berlet and Matthew Nemiroff Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), p. 9. 2. Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories” (working paper, Public Law & Legal Theory Working Paper No. 199, University of Chicago, 2008), pp. 6, 7. A DEFINITION 1. 378 U.S. at 197 (Stewart, J., concurring) (emphasis added). 2. Jane O’Reilly, “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” New York magazine, December 20, 1971 (Ms. originally appeared as a forty-page insert in New York magazine). 3.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

[it is] built on the premise that not only mainstream methods are great, but so too are mainstream economic assumptions.”51 So wherever did the vast bulk of lay commentators derive the unfounded impression that behavioral economics was poised to deliver us from the previous errors of orthodoxy when it came to the economic crisis? Partly, it was the fault of a few high-profile economists such as Shiller, Akerlof, Krugman, and Lo, whose “behavioral” credentials within the community were, shall we say, less than robust. Partly it was due to some political appointees in the Obama administration such as Cass Sunstein who claimed (falsely, as it turned out) that behavioral economics could be used to “nudge” people into behaving more like neoclassical agents.52 Partly, it was the fault of a few bona fide behavioral finance economists (like Andrei Shleifer), who quickly whipped up a couple of toy models after the crisis, purportedly demonstrating that all agents are beset with a peculiar character flaw that causes them to ignore unlikely disastrous events, causing them to whipsaw around the true fundamental determinants of asset prices as defined by the orthodox rational-expectations model, in the face of securitization and tranching.53 But it also emanated from the vast scrum of journalists, primed to believe that once economists would just abjure “rational choice theories,” then all would become revealed.

…

This explains why neoliberals tend to diverge from their predecessors: “most nineteenth century liberals were guided by a naïve overconfidence in what mere communication of knowledge could achieve” (p. 377). 147 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, pp. 204–5. 148 Hayek reveled in the tough-minded stance of the scholar who disparaged any recourse to the Third Way, most notoriously in his denunciation of the welfare state as just the slippery “Road to Serfdom.” This sets him apart from his contemporary figures like Walter Lippmann, or Keynes, or their modern epigones like Cass Sunstein or Joseph Stiglitz. 149 Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p. 377, 112, 110, 22. 150 Schneider, “The Role of the Category of Ignorance in Sociological Theory,” p. 498. 151 Ibid., p. 500. 152 Hayek entertained the possibility of blaming “the engineers” for the frustration of the neoliberal project in his Counterrevolution of Science (1952), but subsequently came around to the position that it was politically unwise to demonize such a powerful constituency in the twentieth-century economy.

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted
by Nick Bilton
Published 13 Sep 2010

Shapiro published in April 2010 through the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business argued that the Internet is not only breaking down barriers to different viewpoints but also driving us to see things that we never would have seen otherwise.6 This is a stark contrast to previous thinking. In 2001, Cass Sunstein, an American legal scholar, penned an article in the Boston Review, arguing that our communications were moving rapidly toward a world where “people restrict themselves to their own points of view—liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; Neo-Nazis, Neo-Nazis.”

A Manual for Creating Atheists
by Peter Boghossian
Published 1 Nov 2013

If a famous archeologist announced that he’d discovered the bones of Christ, what evidence would you need to believe that he was telling the truth? (End of the conversation) DIG DEEPER Articles Brock and Balloun, “Behavioral Receptivity to Dissonant Information” (Brock & Balloun, 1967) David Gal and Derek Rucker, “When in Doubt, Shout! Paradoxical Influences of Doubt on Proselytizing” (Gal & Rucker, 2010) Book Cass Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (Sunstein, 2009) Videos Peter Boghossian, “Walking the Talk” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ARwO9jNyjA Peter Boghossian, “Critical Thinking Crash Course” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7zbEiNnY5M NOTES The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard writes that anxiety is a key human experience.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
by Glenn Greenwald
Published 12 May 2014

Under the title “Magic Techniques & Experiment,” the document references “Legitimisation of violence,” “Constructing experience in mind of targets which should be accepted so they don’t realize,” and “Optimising deception channels.” Such government plans to monitor and influence Internet communications and disseminate false information online have long been a source of speculation. Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser, the White House’s former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and an appointee to the White House panel to review NSA activities, wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-“independent” advocates for “cognitive infiltration” of online groups, chat rooms, social networks, and websites, as well as off-line activist groups.

People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams
by Jono Bacon
Published 12 Nov 2019

Behavioral Economics Homework If you are interested in learning more about behavioral economics, the following books are a great start: •Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, rev. and expanded ed. (HarperCollins, 2009). •Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (HarperCollins, 2010). •Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011). •Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin Books, 2009). The SCARF Model Behavioral economics provides an enormously valuable blueprint for one of the most challenging elements of building communities and teams: Why do people behave the way they do, and how can we tune our work to map well to those automatic behaviors?

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 3 Mar 2020

Another finding of behavioural economics is that imperfect information, complexity, uncertainty, and limited calculating capacity force agents to use of rules of thumb, or heuristics, rather than ‘pure’ optimising behaviour. Widespread use of heuristics – short-cuts – produces systematic behavioural biases. These mean that it might be both possible and desirable for government to ‘nudge’ (aka incentivise) people to act more rationally. Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler (b.1945) and Cass Sunstein (b.1954) argue people might be ‘nudged’ to eat more healthily by taxing sugar or to save more by making wage increases conditional on savings commitments.15 How successful this last ‘nudge’ would be is open to question. Saving for the future implies a belief that money will hold its value, and that government will honour its commitment to keep savings for retirement tax-free or tax-deferred.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

In 1997, Eric Brynjolfsson and Marshall Van Alstyne, of MIT and Boston University respectively, coined the term ‘cyberbalkanization’ to describe an alternative vision for the internet in which users retreat into narrow and isolated subcommunities, screening out contact with people who are not like them.17 Cass Sunstein of Harvard built upon this idea when he described how the self-selection of contacts and sources on the internet could lead to the creation of ‘information cocoons’ that would continuously reinforce users’ pre-existing beliefs.18 Both predictions have proved to be prescient. As British poet and musician Kae Tempest has aptly put it, ‘The internet makes it possible for like people to find each other, and this is extremely important, but it makes it difficult for unalike people to contact each other without their defences up.’19 It is important to acknowledge the nuances in the evidence around the impact of social media on society.

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
by Andrew Lih
Published 5 Jul 2010

What was once only done top-down is now being viewed bottom-up. Books and essays have addressed the impact of projects freely driven by communities of scattered individuals: The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Infotopia by Cass R. Sun-stein, and Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. This book, however, goes in with a deeper focus on Wikipedia, explaining how it evolved to become the phenomenon it is today, and showing the fascinating community behind the articles and the unique online culture the site has fostered. While most people experience Wikipedia in their mother tongue, the impact of the site in other languages reveals a fascinating world of diverse online cultural norms.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (Henry Holt, 1999). Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds (Anchor Books, 2005). Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Portfolio, 2008). Thackara, John. In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (MIT Press, 2006). Thaler, Richard, and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin, 2009). Tomasello, Michael. Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009). Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

How Democracies Die
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Published 16 Jan 2018

Whereas the path to national name recognition: Ibid., pp. 703–4. “conservative entertainment complex”: David Frum, “The Great Republican Revolt,” The Atlantic, September 9, 2015. radicalized conservative voters: See Matthew Levendusky, How Partisan Media Polarize America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Cass R. Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Although many factors contributed: See John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 8 May 2017

If a substantial number of Stormfront members get their news from nytimes.com, it means our conventional wisdom about white nationalists is wrong. It also means our conventional wisdom about how the internet works is wrong. THE TRUTH ABOUT THE INTERNET The internet, most everybody agrees, is driving Americans apart, causing most people to hole up in sites geared toward people like them. Here’s how Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School described the situation: “Our communications market is rapidly moving [toward a situation where] people restrict themselves to their own points of view—liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; Neo-Nazis, Neo-Nazis.”

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Sep 2013

So what? Haven’t thousands of articles from psychology and behavioral economics outlined major weaknesses in human perception and decision-making abilities? There are the works of Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, and many others. Haven’t we all heard about “nudge,” the concept so eloquently outlined by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler? In that worldview, experts know the biases of other decision makers and design the choice architecture to manipulate better human choices, such as changing the default options for which pension plan you will enroll in. Yes, but the chess result differs. Computer chess is pointing out some imperfections in the world’s experts, or you might say it is pointing out imperfections in those who, in other contexts, might be nudgers themselves.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
by Michael Specter
Published 14 Apr 2009

See particularly her report, last updated in 2007, Biomass, Food & Sustainability: Is There a Dilemma? (www.rabobank.com/content/images/Biomass_food_and_sustainability_tcm43-38549.pdf). There are many discussions of the “precautionary principle,” fear, and the idea of risk. Four stand out to me: Cass Sunstein’s Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Lars Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Fear (Reaktion Books, 2008); Peter L. Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (Wiley, 1996); and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Pantheon, 2008). 4.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

A quick sample of Snopes.com “top 25” Internet rumors turns up provably false gems including that Starbucks has refused to send product to active duty Marines in Iraq, entering your PIN in reverse at any ATM will summon the police, and the spurious claim that automobile components emit cancer-causing benzene fumes. Weinberger has summarized Cass Sunstein’s impression of such rumors as “information cascades of false and harmful ideas … that not only gain velocity from the ease with which they can be forwarded but gain credibility by how frequently they are forwarded.”38 Individuals and groups on the Internet might believe in evolution, but they might also decide that Barack Obama is a Muslim, born outside the United States, and thus an illegitimate president.

Stuffocation
by James Wallman
Published 6 Dec 2013

Source: Taos Ski Valley Chamber of Commerce. “The way to make sense of this is, as behavioural psychologists have showed time and again, that people do not necessarily behave in a rational, logical way.” To understand this, read Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Penguin, 2011), and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge (New York: Penguin, 2008). For the best visualization of how the two parts of the brain work together, read about the elephant and its rider in Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (London: Arrow, 2007). Not Simple, but Simpler Living To read a more complete account of how LeVally and Harris came down from the mountain, and struggled with that decision, read www.cagefreefamily.com.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

Some of those used to being in power now feel embattled, and are beginning to collapse into the same logic. This is not unusual. As Emma Jane and Chris Fleming’s analysis of conspiracy theories shows, the debunkers tend to share ‘the epistemological orientations and rhetorical armoury’ of those they critique.49 The performative contradictions become absurd, as when the behavioural economists Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule recommended to the White House that it should take stringent measures against conspiracy theories – such as covert ‘cognitive infiltration’ of online communities, so as to plant doubts and undermine these groups from within. Rather than emulate the paranoid style, the displaced centre needs to look deeper, because the collapse in sense that they are just now encountering goes back a long way.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Giles Slade
Published 14 Apr 2006

House, “Living Room Styles and Social Attributes: The Patterning of Material Artifacts in a Modern Urban Community,”in H. H.Kassarjaian and T. S.Robertson, eds., Perspectives in Consumer Behavior (Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1973), pp. 430–440. 12. Campbell, “The Desire for the New,” p. 56. 13. Ibid., pp. 56–57. 14. Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 10–11. 15. Ling, Mobile Connection, p. 6, n.8. 16. Ibid., pp. 11, 14–15,86. 17. Ibid., p. 96. 18. Ibid., p. 104. 19. Ibid., pp. 97, 15. 20. Paul Levinson, Cellphone: The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 127.

Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough
by Sendhil Mullainathan
Published 3 Sep 2014

do not undo hard work: Some of this argument can be made without resort to the psychology of scarcity. Much of policy design makes the presumption of rationality. Simply allowing for people to have natural psychological limitations already can improve policy making. This view has recently been wonderfully articulated by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). See also Eldar Shafir, ed., The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012). We have previously used this logic to argue that we can better understand poverty just by understanding that the poor can have the same psychological quirks that affect everyone else: Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir, “A Behavioral-Economics View of Poverty,” American Economic Review (2004): 419–23.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
by Frank Partnoy
Published 15 Jan 2012

The psychologist Piers Steel says this kind of planning can be helpful: “Impulsive people find it difficult to plan work ahead of time and even after they start, they are easily distracted. Procrastination inevitably follows.” Steel, The Procrastination Equation, p. 14. 54. Bertrand and Morse, Information Disclosure, Cognitive Biases, and Payday Borrowing. 55. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008). 56. See Henri C. Schouwenburg, Clarry H. Lay, and Timothy A. Pychyl, Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings (American Psychological Association, 2004); Henri C. Schouwenburg and JanTjeerd Groenewoud, “Study Motivation Under Social Temptation: Effects of Trait Procrastination,” Personality and Individual Differences 30(2, 2001): 299–340.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
by Rory Sutherland
Published 6 May 2019

‘. . . offered a possible evolutionary explanation.’, Colin Barras, ‘Evolution could explain the placebo effect’, New Scientist (6 September 2012). ‘. . . and more by our perception of it’, ‘The Vodka-Red-Bull Placebo Effect’, Atlantic (8 June 2017). ‘. . . the father of ‘Nudge Theory’, Richard Thaler’ Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008). ‘. . . often outdone by the taste of the latter’.’, Lucas Derks and Jaap Hollander, Essenties van NLP (1996). ‘. . . for leather car seats than for books on tape.”, Daniel Kahneman, ‘Focusing Illusion’, Edge (2011). About the Author RORY SUTHERLAND is vice chairman of Ogilvy.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

Translation our own. 89 Julia Cagé, The Price of Democracy: How Money Shapes Politics and What to Do About It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 90 Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 91 Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 131, no. 2 (2016): 519–78. 92 Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 93 Point made by David Eaves in Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, “Many Tech Experts Say Digital Disruption Will Hurt Democracy,” Pew Research Center, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/21/many-tech-experts-say-digital-disruption-will-hurt-democracy/. 94 Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj, The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 95 See Cass R. Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Jacob L. Nelson and Harsh Taneja, “The Small, Disloyal Fake News Audience: The Role of Audience Availability in Fake News Consumption,” New Media & Society 20, no. 10 (2018): 3720–37; and for a review of the nuanced literature on social media and democracy: Joshua A.

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Doto Get More of It
by Kelly McGonigal
Published 1 Dec 2011

Rather than hope that we as a nation develop more willpower in order to meet our biggest challenges, our best bet might be to take self-control out of the equation whenever possible—or at least reduce the self-control demands of doing the right thing. Behavioral economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein have argued persuasively for “choice architecture,” systems that make it easier for people to make good decisions consistent with their values and goals. For example, asking people to become organ donors when they renew a driver’s license or register to vote. Or having health insurance companies automatically schedule annual check-ups for their members.

The Knowledge Illusion
by Steven Sloman
Published 10 Feb 2017

We think it is inevitable that people will continue to make decisions—even very consequential decisions—without deep understanding. So how can we help people to make wiser choices? Nudging Better Decisions The University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and the Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein have developed a philosophy that they call libertarian paternalism. Although the name is a mouthful, the idea is simple and compelling. The main observation is that people don’t always make the best possible decisions; they don’t always choose the option that makes it most likely that they will achieve their own goals.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
by Guy Standing
Published 27 Feb 2011

This is an illusion of empowerment that degrades responsibility and professionalism. Soon, everybody will be rating everybody else. The state as libertarian paternalist A new perspective on social and economic policy is behavioural economics, which has produced libertarian paternalism. Nudge, an influential book by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (2008), two Chicago-based advisers and friends of Barack Obama, was premised on the idea that people have too much information and so make irrational decisions. People must be steered, or nudged, to make A POLITICS OF INFERNO 139 the decisions that are in their best interest.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

Emphasis added. 2.The tenacity of the gendered division of society is amply demonstrated in Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed, 1999). 3.Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 216. 4.Robert J. Van Der Veen and Philippe Van Parijs, ‘A Capitalist Road to Communism’, Theory and Society 15: 5 (1986), p. 637. 5.Gregory N. Mandel and James Thuo Gathii, ‘Cost-Benefit Analysis Versus the Precautionary Principle: Beyond Cass Sunstein’s Laws of Fear’, University of Illinois Law Review 5 (2006). 6.For an essential meditation on this, see Benedict Singleton, ‘Maximum Jailbreak’, in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, eds, #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014). 7.Paul Mason, ‘What Would Keynes Do?’

Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want
by Nicholas Epley
Published 11 Feb 2014

Try to raise awareness about the dangers of obesity so that they’ll be more motivated to lose weight. Common sense suggests targeting people’s minds to change their actions, but many of these solutions are useless because they misunderstand the cause of the problems. As my colleagues Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein point out in their book Nudge, much more effective for changing behavior is targeting the broader context rather than individual minds, making it easier for people to do the things they already want to do.29 Consider four examples: • ENCOURAGING ENVIRONMENTALISM. Convincing people not to litter is hard, and most already know that they’re not supposed to simply toss their garbage on the ground.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 10 Feb 2010

Our favorite book of Kotter’s, this book will be useful if you are trying to change a big organization. Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink [Dieting]. Do you want to lose a few pounds, or are you just curious about why everyone else is getting fatter? This book is filled with clever research like the popcorn study we described in the first chapter. Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein [Decision making and public policy]. The authors argue that people can be “nudged” to make better decisions, and they propose some great Path solutions. One Small Step Can Change Your Life, by Robert Maurer [Individual and organizational change]. If you liked the chapter on shrinking the change, this is your book.

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back
by Jacob Ward
Published 25 Jan 2022

Thaler won the Nobel Prize for carrying Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory forward into new domains, formulating along the way notions like the endowment effect, the theory that when evaluating two identical items, the one that belongs to me is magically endowed with greater value in my estimation. Thaler originated, with the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, the notion of “nudges,” small design features within a system that can gently guide us toward choices that benefit us. For instance, whereas a decade ago it was common practice to ask new employees to opt in to their 401(k), Thaler’s work helped inspire a new standard: it’s now common practice at most major companies to enroll employees automatically, which has hugely increased the numbers of people saving for retirement.

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

To understand why the Department of Work and Pensions had become so excited by psycho-compulsion courses, and the positive psychology and behaviourist teachings that underpinned them, we must go back to the summer of 2010, when David Cameron asked his entire Cabinet to read the same book over the August recess. The book was called Nudge, and was written by the famous behavioural economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Its central message was that through ‘nudging’ people (i.e. subjecting them to small and low-cost behavioural interventions), you could reshape their behaviour in desired ways. Classic examples of this included putting green arrows on shop floors that pointed towards the fruit and veg counters (increasing the amount of veg purchases); making recycling bins larger than regular bins (prompting people to recycle more due to limited space for general waste); or, more quirkily, putting an image of a fly at the centre of public urinals (leading men to aim their pee at the fly, reducing splashing).

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 10 Nov 2011

Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2009. ———. Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World. New York: Norton, 2007. Temin, Peter. Lessons from the Great Depression. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York: Penguin, 2009. Thompson, J.M.T., and H. B. Stewart. Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, 2nd ed. New York: Wiley, 2002. Tilden, Freeman. A World in Debt. Toronto: Friedberg Commodity Management, 1983. Von Mises, Ludwig. The Theory of Money and Credit.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011

Overlapping Experiment Infrastructure: More, Better, Faster Experimentation. 16th ACMSIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery abd Data Mining, Washington, DC. ACM Press. Taylor, Carl C. 1947. “Sociology and Common Sense.” American Sociological Review 12 (1):1–9. Tetlock, Philip E. 2005. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thompson, Clive. 2010. “What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?” New York Times Magazine (June 20):30–45. Thorndike, Edward L. 1920. “A Constant Error on Psychological Rating.” Journal of Applied Psychology 4:25–9.

Portfolios of the poor: how the world's poor live on $2 a day
by Daryl Collins , Jonathan Morduch and Stuart Rutherford
Published 15 Jan 2009

New York: Norton. Swibel, Matthew, and Forbes Staff. 2007. “The world’s top 50 microfinance institutions.” Forbes, December 20. Available at www.forbes.com. Thaler, Richard H. 1990. “Anomalies: Saving, fungibility and mental accounts.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 4 (1): 193–205. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press. Thomas, Duncan. 1990. “Intra-household resource allocation: An inferential approach.” Journal of Human Resources 25 (4): 635–64. Thomas, Duncan. 1994. “Like father, like son or like mother, like daughter: Parental education and child health.”

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

O’Reilly and Jennifer A. Chatman, “Culture as Social Control: Corporations, Cults, and Commitment,” Research in Organizational Behavior 18 (1996): 157–200. Had Kennedy’s advisers: Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973); Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2003). problem with the cohesion theory: Sally Riggs Fuller and Ramon J. Aldag, “Organizational Tonypandy: Lessons from a Quarter Century of the Groupthink Phenomenon,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 73 (1998): 163–84; Roderick M.

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
by Adam L. Alter
Published 15 Feb 2017

We know this works: Vanessa M. Patrick and Henrik Hagtvedt, “‘I Don’t’ versus ‘I Can’t’: When Empowered Refusal Motivates Goal-Directed Behavior,” Journal of Consumer Research 39 (2011), 371–81. That’s the idea behind the: The term “behavioral architecture” is from: Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). When World War II: This section contains excerpts from a piece I wrote for 99u: Adam L. Alter, “How to Build a Collaborative Office Space Like Pixar and Google,” n.d., 99u.com/articles/16408/how-to-build-a-collaborative-office-space-like-pixar-and-google; Leon Festinger, Kurt W.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

Some individuals might severely understate asset values and try to hide or degrade them to avoid forced sales, but such antisocial strategies could and should be socially sanctioned, just as tax avoidance is; see below in the text. 19. Gary Becker, The Economics of Discrimination (University of Chicago Press, 2d ed., 2010). 20. See Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin, 2009). Epilogue. After Markets? 1. F. A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, 35 American Economic Review 519 (1945). 2. Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth 19–23 (S. Adler trans., Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1990) (1920). 3.

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds
by Kevin Dutton
Published 3 Feb 2011

Group processes, 142–158 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 2 This is something you can demonstrate … Wallach, Michael A., Kogan, Nathan., and Bem, Daryl J., ‘Group Influence on Individual Risk Taking.’ Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 65 (1962): 75–86. 3 The effects of group polarisation … For a more detailed look at how the decision-making process varies between individuals and groups, see Cass R. Sunstein, Going to extremes: How like minds unite and divide (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009). 4 Research has shown … Myers, David G. and Bishop, George D., ‘Discussion Effects on Racial Attitudes.’ Science 169 (1970): 778–779. 5 These, laboratory studies have shown … For a review of the factors that both increase and reduce conformity, see Elliot Aronson.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

Similar reservations apply to the hope some attach to 3-D printing: why assume that the opportunity for the personalized, bespoke making of stuff will only be used to prolong the life of objects and that people will stop wanting novelty and variety? 20. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness (London, 2009). For a short overview, see Cass Sunstein, ‘Behavioural economics, consumption and environmental protection’ in Reisch and Thøgersen (eds), Handbook of Research on Sustainable Consumption, pp. 313–27. Index The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made.

Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 15 Nov 2004

[38] Interview with Daley and Barish. [39] Ibid. [40] See, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, bk. 1, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), ch. 16. [41] Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin, "Deliberation Day," Journal of Political Philosophy 10 (2) (2002): 129. [42] Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 65-80, 175, 182, 183, 192. [43] Noah Shachtman, "With Incessant Postings, a Pundit Stirs the Pot," New York Times, 16 January 2003, G5. [44] Telephone interview with David Winer, 16 April 2003. [45] John Schwartz, "Loss of the Shuttle: The Internet; A Wealth of Information Online," New York Times, 2 February 2003, A28; Staci D.

Why We're Polarized
by Ezra Klein
Published 28 Jan 2020

Chapter 8—When Bipartisanship Becomes Irrational 1 “Constitution a ‘Dead, Dead, Dead’ Document, Scalia Tells SMU Audience,” Dallas Morning News, January 28, 2013, dallasnews.com/news/highland-park/2013/01/28/constitution-a-dead-dead-dead-document-scalia-tells-smu-audience. 2 Scalia was often criticized for abandoning originalism when politically convenient. Cass Sunstein, “Antonin Scalia, Living Constitutionalist,” Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 16-15, Harvard Law Review, dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2759938. 3 Antonin Scalia, “In Conversation: Antonin Scalia,” interview by Jennifer Senior, New York, October 4, 2013, nymag.com/news/features/antonin-scalia-2013-10. 4 Thomas Ferraro, “Republican Would Back Garland for Supreme Court,” Reuters, May 6, 2010, reuters.com/article/us-usa-courthatch/republican-would-back-garland-for-supreme-court-idUSTRE6456QY20100506. 5 Robin Bradley Kar and Jason Mazzone, “The Garland Affair: What History and the Constitution Really Say About President Obama’s Powers to Appoint a Replacement for Justice Scalia,” NYU Law Review 91 (2016): nyulawreview.org/online-features/the-garland-affair-what-history-and-the-constitution-really-say-about-president-obamas-powers-to-appoint-a-replacement-for-justice-scalia. 6 Mike DeBonis, “Will Hillary Clinton Stick with Merrick Garland If She Wins the White House?”

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation
by Frank Furedi
Published 6 Sep 2021

In recent decades the practice of moral engineering has extended from the domain of socialising of youth to the re-socialising of adults. This reorientation is sometimes promoted through what is referred to by its advocates as ‘liberal paternalism’. The most prominent advocate of this project, Cass Sunstein, coined the term ‘nudge’ to describe the policy of using paternalistic psychologically informed measures to protect people from themselves. His objective is to replace with what he perceives as unreliably formed moral judgments with the wisdom of behavioural science.9 With nudging, the ideologically informed paternalism implicit in the practice of scientism becomes far more explicit than in previous times.

Moneyball
by Michael Lewis
Published 1 Jan 2003

—Mark Emmons, San Jose Mercury News “Anyone who cares about baseball must read it.” —Cathleen McGuigan, Newsweek “Michael Lewis has written what might be the best book ever about baseball.” —Steve Weinberg, Orlando Sentinel “Lewis has a wonderful story to tell, and he tells it wonderfully.” —Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, The New Republic “[Lewis’s] descriptive writing allows Beane and the others in the lively cast of baseball characters to come alive.” —Publishers Weekly “Lewis’s book is a thoroughly modern, entertaining…even revolutionary look at the way the game has changed and is changing…guaranteed to ruffle a lot of feathers.”

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely
Published 19 Feb 2007

Chapter 2: The Fallacy of Supply and Demand BASED ON Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein, and Drazen Prelec, “Coherent Arbitrariness: Stable Demand Curves without Stable Preferences,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (2003). Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein, and Drazen Prelec, “Tom Sawyer and the Construction of Value,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2006). RELATED READINGS Cass R. Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade, and Ilana Ritov, “Predictably Incoherent Judgments,” Stanford Law Review (2002). Uri Simonsohn, “New Yorkers Commute More Everywhere: Contrast Effects in the Field,” Review of Economics and Statistics (2006). Uri Simonsohn and George Loewenstein, “Mistake #37: The Impact of Previously Faced Prices on Housing Demand,” Economic Journal (2006).

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

This point was hammered home to me over a world-saving coffee (I had an espresso; he had a soya cappuccino) with the environmental economist Prashant Vaze, author of The Economic Environmentalist. Vaze was waxing lyrical about the concept of the ‘nudge’, proposed by the behavioural economist Richard Thaler and polymath legal scholar Cass Sunstein. The idea is that subtle influences could be used to direct thoughtless behaviour, while preserving individual rights consciously to choose. For example, incandescent light bulbs – which are a very wasteful way to produce light, but preferred by people with partial sight and certain light-sensitive skin conditions – could be removed from open shelves, but available from storage on request.

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking
by Richard E. Nisbett
Published 17 Aug 2015

Right now I’m in the middle of X (watering the garden, making a list of what to buy at the hardware store, getting organized to write a paper). Canceling the newsletters means ceasing to do something that I value. So I’ll do it tomorrow when I have nothing much else to do. (Ha!) The economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein have shown numerous ways we can make the status quo bias work in our favor. 7 Some of the most important work rests on a single concept, namely “default option.” Only 12 percent of Germans allow the government to harvest their organs, but 99 percent of Austrians do. Who would have thought the Austrians were so much more humanitarian than the Germans?

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 2 Jan 2009

Through a suite of tools called Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon enables developers to build products that integrate directly into Amazon’s database. For example, a developer named Jim Biancolo used AWS to build a free Web tool to track the price difference between new products and used products (plus shipping). And a company called TouchGraph used AWS to build a product browser that would show the links between related products. Enter Cass Sunstein’s, for example, and you’ll see all the books in Amazon that relate to Sunstein’s books in subject and citation. Amazon sells some of these AWS services. Some it leaves free. But it develops these services if it believes such development will drive the sales of its products, and perhaps even teach Amazon something about how to better offer its products.

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
by Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Jan 2016

Making More Wikipedias http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/morewikipedias September 14, 2006 Age 19 Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like everywhere you look people are trying to get a piece of Wikipedia. Wiki sites have been started in every field from the Muppets to the law. The domain Wiki.com recently was sold for 3 million dollars. Professor Cass Sunstein, previously seen arguing the Internet could tear apart the republic, just published a new book arguing tools like wikis will lead us to “Infotopia.” So is it possible to replicate Wikipedia’s success? What’s the key that made it work? Unfortunately, this question hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry
by Helaine Olen
Published 27 Dec 2012

“Fee transparency could create”: Robert Powell, “401(k) Changes Give Savers a Brighter Future,” MarketWatch, December 16, 2010, http://articles.marketwatch.com/2010-12-16/finance/30737091_1_fee-disclosure-plan-sponsors-fees-and-expenses. As a remedy: “Should Policies Nudge People to Save?” Wall Street Journal Econblog (Richard Thaler comments), May 25, 2007, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117977357721809835.html; Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); African Americans: Diversity and Defined Contribution Plans, The Role of Automatic Plan Features, Vanguard study, September 12, 2011, https://institutional.vanguard.com/VGApp/iip/site/institutional/researchcommentary/article/RetResDiversity; take-up increased: Regina Lewis, “The Pros and Cons of Automatic 401(k) Enrollment,” DailyFinance, July 11, 2011, http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/07/11/401k-automatic-enrollment-pros-cons/.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Consider the world we could live in if all of our local and global leaders, if all of our personal and professional friends and foes, recognized the defeasibility of their beliefs and acted accordingly. That sure sounds like progress to me. But of course I could be wrong. Aether Richard Thaler Economist; director, Center for Decision Research, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago; coauthor (with Cass Sunstein), Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness I recently posted a question on Edge asking people to name their favorite example of a wrong scientific belief. One of my prized answers came from Clay Shirky. Here is an excerpt: The existence of ether, the medium through which light (was thought to) travel.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization
by K. Eric Drexler
Published 6 May 2013

From the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “National Military Strategy” (2011): “Preventing wars is as important as winning them, and far less costly,” a view that concurs with opinions throughout most of the world and its history. Chapter 18: Changing Our Conversation About the Future 283the first response . . . often sets the direction for the next: This is an example of a “social cascade,” discussed (together with a range of other successes and pathologies of group decision-making) in Cass Sunstein’s brief and readable book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006). INDEX Actin, 69 Additive manufacturing, 76–77 Agriculturalists, hunter-gatherers vs., 41–42 Agricultural Revolution, 39, 40–42 APM Revolution and, 50, 54 Industrial Revolution and, 44 nature and human impacts of, 54 Agriculture, atomically precise manufacturing and, 231–232, 248, 250 American Chemical Society, 181 Angewandte Chemie (journal), 20n APM.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell
Published 7 Oct 2019

The idea that there are acceptable routes to preference modification seems related to the idea that there are acceptable methods of behavior modification whereby, for example, an employer engineers the choice situation so that people make “better” choices about saving for retirement. Often this can be done by manipulating the “non-rational” factors that influence choice, rather than by restricting choices or taxing “bad” choices. Nudge, a book by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, lays out a wide range of supposedly acceptable methods and opportunities to “influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better.” It’s unclear whether behavior modification methods are really just modifying behavior. If, when the nudge is removed, the modified behavior persists—which is presumably the desired outcome of such interventions—then something has changed in the individual’s cognitive architecture (the thing that turns underlying preferences into behavior) or in the individual’s underlying preferences.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

Facebook allows Groups on just about anything, including hobbies, entertainment, teams, communities, churches, and celebrities. There are many Groups devoted to politics, across the full spectrum. Facebook loves Groups because they enable easy targeting by advertisers. Bad actors like them for the same reason. Research by Cass Sunstein, who was the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for the first Obama administration, indicates that when like-minded people discuss issues, their views tend to get more extreme over time. Groups of politically engaged users who share a common set of beliefs reinforce each other, provoking shared outrage at perceived enemies, which, as I previously noted, makes them vulnerable to manipulation.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Published 10 Jul 2023

An absence of noise, of the human tendency to make occasional blunders in complex situations, is a critical signal.14 COME ON, FEEL THE NOISE Most people and organizations think of noise in human behavior as a problem to eliminate. That’s the meaning of noise popularized by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein in their book Noise: problematic, unpredictable, or unjustified variability in performance between decisionmakers. But if we’re trying to avoid being cheated, noise is our friend. There is no simple, universal rule of thumb for how much noise to expect. But we suggest three principles to help us evaluate whether someone’s results are too noiseless to be true.15 First, real human performance is usually noisier than we expect it to be.

Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and the Truth About Dieting
by Giles Yeo
Published 3 Jun 2019

It ended up working a treat and lowering cleaning bills, so much so that the fly (or flying saucer, or skull and crossbones, or flower) in the urinal is now much mimicked throughout the world. It was a theory first mooted by Richard Thaler in the book Nudge – Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, which he published with Cass Sunstein in 2008. In it they write: ‘A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid.

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
by Jill Leovy
Published 27 Jan 2015

Main Street runs north-south behind Seventy-seventh Street Station. 7 moonshiners who intimidated people and killed snitches Frank, pp. 124, 126; Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, p. 9; Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, p. 73; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 23. 8 “sown in the nature of man” Quoted from the Federalist Papers in Cass R. Sunstein, “The Enlarged Republic—Then and Now,” The New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009. 9 so few gang homicides stemmed from drug deals Later, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study would confirm what LAPD homicide detectives already knew—that very few street homicides directly involve drug deals.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

” • The precautionary principle has been so widely recognized as a barrier to progress that, according to England’s Prospect magazine, in 2006, the House of Commons select committee on science and technology recommended that the term “should not be used and should ‘cease to be included in policy guidance.’ ” Various attempts have been made to draft a substitute—the proactive principle (Max More and Kevin Kelly), the precautionary approach (Nuffield Council on Bioethics), the reversibility principle (Jamais Cascio), and the anti-catastrophe principle—that one from an excellent book, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), by behavioral economist Cass Sunstein, who now heads Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. I would not replace the precautionary principle. Its name and founding idea are too good to lose. But I would shift its bias away from inaction and toward action with a supplement—the vigilance principle, whose entire text is: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time
by Maria Konnikova
Published 28 Jan 2016

But the order effect—what Russo was demonstrating—is but one of the many elements of decision architecture—how information is presented to us—that can get us to make decisions in a very precise way, and not necessarily in a way that corresponds to our stated preferences. There’s the positive side of decision architecture, the nudge, popularized by behavioral economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein in their 2008 book by the same name. The idea behind the nudge, in its positive guise, is a simple one. In many cases, our choices aren’t based on some innate preference. Instead, they are constructed at any given moment by a combination of situational factors. I may not have thought about drinking wine with dinner, for instance, but if the wine list is right in front of me, I may find myself ordering a glass all the same.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

There are many more. Indeed one Wikipedia page lists over 160 cognitive biases, like a jumbo-size game of spot-the-difference between rational economic man and his fallible human equivalent.36 What to do in the face of such irrational shortcomings? Introduce nudge policies, say Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which they define as ‘any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives’.37 Thanks to Edward Bernays, brands and retailers have been nudging us for almost a century in the implicit messaging of advertisements, in the placements of products in shops and TV shows, and in the psychology of sales.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 21 Feb 2011

“Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1 (spring), pp. 1–102. Stoker, Gerry. 2006. Why Politics Matters. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sunstein, Cass R. 2007. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. New York: Penguin. Trajtenberg, Manuel. 1989. “Welfare Analysis of Product Innovations, with an Application to Computed Tomography Scanners.” Journal of Political Economy 97:2, pp. 444–79. Trivers, Robert L. 1971. “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.”

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall
Published 19 Mar 2019

Requiring equal pay for both C-sections and vaginal births does not tell physicians and patients which treatment to choose, unlike, for example, a seat-belt law, which tells you to put on your seat belt. But it eliminates a perverse incentive. Simple changes that encourage, but don’t mandate, behaviors we would like to see have been called “nudges.” In their book with that title, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler offer a handful of policy examples, ranging from the serious (a plan that improves employee retirement-savings rates) to the less serious but equally effective (painting a fly on urinals has been shown to reduce urinal spillage by 80 percent). For his work in helping launch the field of behavioral economics, Thaler was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
by David E. Sanger
Published 18 Jun 2018

the agency developed the “Clipper chip”: Steven Levy, “Battle of the Clipper Chip,” New York Times, June 12, 1994, www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/magazine/battle-of-the-clipper-chip.html. the Clinton administration retreated: Susan Landau, Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 84. Morell and his colleagues sided with Big Tech: Richard A. Clarke, Michael J. Morell, Geoffrey R. Stone, Cass Sunstein, Peter Swire, Report and Recommendations of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, December 12, 2013, lawfare.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/staging/s3fs-public/uploads/2013/12/Final-Report-RG.pdf. Comey predicted there would be a moment: David E. Sanger and Brian Chen, “Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A.,” New York Times, September 27, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/technology/iphone-locks-out-the-nsa-signaling-a-post-snowden-era-.html.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

There are also, to underline again, some deep trends that are already nudging rich countries in this direction: technology’s elimination of so many middling cognitive jobs and the end of the golden age of mass higher education; the aging of society and the rising visibility of care functions of many kinds, especially in the light of the pandemic; the greater concern for place, ecology, and belonging—thanks to those odd bedfellows, the green movement and the populist revolt. And we also know just how swiftly social norms can change. As Cass Sunstein has pointed out, neither the French nor the Russian nor the Iranian revolutions were expected. Norms and expectations can shift very fast when people discover that many others share their views. If it is possible for new norms on gender equality, homosexuality, smoking, animal rights—even voting Conservative in former Labour constituencies—to be established in relatively short periods of time then why not new assumptions about Head, Hand, and Heart?

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child
by Morgan G. Ames
Published 19 Nov 2019

The relentless utopianism of Being Digital captured the excitement that many felt about the “electronic frontier,” the burgeoning online world of the 1990s.3 It became a best seller and was translated into some forty languages. Negroponte largely shrugged off the sharp criticism his book and columns drew from some scholars, such as legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who has decried the echo chambers of Negroponte’s customized “Daily Me” newsfeed idea for polarizing the US political landscape, and cultural historian Fred Turner, who has linked Negroponte’s digital boosterism to the commodification of “New Communalist” utopianism in the 1970s and beyond.4 A decade later, in January 2005, Negroponte seemed to receive a relatively cool reception in Davos.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 13 Nov 2007

Mauboussin, More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (New York / Chichester, 2006). 12 Mark Buchanan, The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You (New York, 2007), p. 54. 13 For an introduction, see Andrei Shleifer, Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance (Oxford, 2000). For some practical applications see Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, 2008). 14 See Peter Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving (New York, 2007). 15 See for example James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York, 2005); Ian Ayres, Supercrunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted (London, 2007). 16 Daniel Gross, ‘The Forecast for Forecasters is Dismal’, New York Times, 4 March 2007. 17 The classic work, first published in 1841, is Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York, 2003 [1841]). 18 Yudkowsky, ‘Cognitive Biases’, pp. 110f. 19 For an introduction to Lo’s work, see Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving , ch. 4.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

. ## In fact, in one experiment, psychologist Sebastian Bobadilla-Suarez and his colleagues found that people were willing to pay in order to retain the ability to make a decision about allocating money, even though they knew they would receive more money overall if they let the decision be made automatically. People like having the power to decide. Sebastian Bobadilla-Suarez, Cass R. Sunstein, and Tali Sharot, “The Intrinsic Value of Control: The Propensity to Under-delegate in the Face of Potential Gains and Losses,” SSRN, February 17, 2016, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2733142. *** “The Fox and the Hedgehog” was also the title of an essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin that divided thinkers throughout history into two categories: those who pursue a single big idea throughout their careers, and those who pursue many different ones.

Innovation and Its Enemies
by Calestous Juma
Published 20 Mar 2017

Herkert, eds., The Growing Gap between Emerging Technologies and Legal-Ethical Oversight: The Pacing Problem (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011). 58. Nick von Tunzelmann, “Historical Coevolution of Governance and Technology in the Industrial Revolutions,” Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 14 (2003): 365–384. 59. Cass R. Sunstein, “Empirically Informed Regulation,” University of Chicago Law Review 78, no. 4 (2011): 1350. 60. Nathan Cortez, “Regulating Disruptive Innovations,” Berkeley Technology Law Review 29, no. 1 (2014: 277. 61. Anne Lewis, “The Legality of 3D Printing: How Technology Is Moving Faster Than the Law,” Tulane Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property 17 (2014): 303–318. 62.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Published 5 Sep 2016

and Other Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012 [1983]). 633 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered “yes” Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 3 (2014): 45; Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes, “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76, no. 3: 405–31. 6partyism, as some call it, now beats race Cass R. Sunstein, “‘Partyism’ Now Trumps Racism,” BloombergView, September 22, 2014, http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-22/partyism-now-trumps-racism; Jonathan Chait, “Confessions of a ‘Partyist’: Yes, I Judge Your Politics,” New York Magazine, October 30, 2014, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/im-a-partyist-and-yes-i-judge-your-politics.html.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

Journal of Personality 72(2):271–324, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-3506.2004.00263.x/abstract. Taylor, Chris. (2011). Why not call it a Facebook Revolution? CNN, Feb. 24, 2011, www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/02/24/facebook.revolution/. Taylor, William C. (1999). Inspired by work. Fast Company, Nov. 1999, www.fastcompany.com/38466/inspired-work. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press. Thiel, Peter. (2012). Technology and regulation 3-3-12. The Federalist Society, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDSO36mzBss. Thompson, John B. (2010). Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century.

Finance and the Good Society
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2012

New York: McClure, Phillips. Tarlow, Steve. 2010. “Estate Tax Sends Elderly Racing to the Grave.” newsytype.com, November 2, http://www.newsytype.com/3257-estate-tax/. Tetlock, Philip E. 2006. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thomsen, Jens, and Verner Anderson. 2007. “Longevity Bonds: A Financial Market Instrument to Manage Longevity Risk.” Monetary Review 46(4):29–44. Thoreau, Henry David. 2008 [1863]. Life without Principle.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

Here’s how we can prepare,” Washington Post, September 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/10/deepfakes-are-coming-american-democracy-heres-how-we-can-prepare/. 111 “Analyzing the First Years of the Ticket or Click It Mobilizations,” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, January 2010, https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/pdf/811232.pdf. 112 David Salvo, “How to Respond to Russia’s Attacks on Democracy,” Alliance for Securing Democracy, January 12, 2018, https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/how-to-respond-to-russias-attacks-on-democracy/. 113 Joseph Marks, Eloise Copland, Eleanor Loh, Cass R. Sunstein, and Tali Sharot, “Epistemic spillovers: Learning others’ political views reduces the ability to assess and use their expertise in nonpolitical domains,” Science Direct, October 19, 2018, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027718302609. 114 John Ratcliffe, “China Is National Security Threat No. 1,” Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-is-national-security-threat-no-1-11607019599. 115 Warren P.

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities
by John J. Mearsheimer
Published 24 Sep 2018

Daniel Kahneman maintains that there are two systems that influence the way we think: System 1, which involves fast thinking and relies mainly on intuition; and System 2, where thinking is slower and relies on careful reasoning. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), especially part I. Also see Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2009), which distinguishes between the Automatic and Reflective Systems. This distinction between these two cognitive processes is widely reflected in the psychology literature. 32. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). 33.

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
by Tony Fadell
Published 2 May 2022

Reading List Here are some of the books and articles that have helped me, my friends, and mentors, in no particular order: Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, Adam Grant In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki The Monk and the Riddle, Randy Komisar Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Matthew Walker The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture, Scott Belsky The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness, Steven Levy Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All, David Kelley and Tom Kelley Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, Ben Horowitz Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups, Ali Tamaseb Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning, Tom Vanderbilt Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices, Annie Duke The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, Robert I.

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
by Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker
Published 14 Sep 2010

Nordic Journal of Political Economy 31 (2005): 111–125. 10 Quoted in Steve Fraser, Wall Street: A Cultural History (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 158. 11 Michael Waldman, ed., My Fellow Americans: The Most Important Speeches of America’s Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2003), 72–73. 12 Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), 326. 13 Quoted in Ibid., 320. 14 Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 20–25. 15 Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Peter Brown, 1827), 277, 279. 16 Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 36–37. 17 Ibid., 100. 18 Frances E.

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda
by John Mueller
Published 1 Nov 2009

Yet the risk that this potential (and fully possible) calamity might take place evokes little concern; essentially, it is “accepted.” Meanwhile, Russia, with whom the United States enjoys a rather strained relationship, could at any time do vastly more damage with its nuclear weapons, a fully imaginable calamity that goes substantially ignored. In constructing what he calls “a case for fear,” Cass Sunstein notes that if there is a yearly probability of one in 100,000 that terrorists could launch a nuclear or massive biological attack, the risk would cumulate to one in 10,000 over 10 years and to one in 5,000 over 20 years. These odds, he suggests, are “not the most comforting.”34 Comfort, of course, lies in the viscera of those to be comforted, and, as he suggests, many would probably have difficulty settling down with odds like that.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

“The reflex is to first look at a new product’s risks as opposed to its benefits,” making “technological progress almost impossible,” says one industry leader.5 The precautionary principle shifts the burden of proof by demanding that it is up to a producer to show that a product is not causing harm. Harvard professor Cass Sunstein calls it “literally paralyzing.”6 Science writer Ronald Bailey has summed it up: “Anything new is guilty until proven innocent.”7 Proving a negative is not just a philosophical challenge. The precautionary principle prompts a regulatory culture that is unpredictable. It is difficult to know what needs to be done in order to be on the safe side of regulation and approval processes.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

Before being faced with that temptation, we might allow our employers to make the choice for us (and other choices that benefit us in the long run) by enrolling us in mandatory savings by default: we would have to take steps to opt out of the plan rather than to opt in. This is the basis for the philosophy of governance whimsically called libertarian paternalism by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein and the behavioral economist Richard Thaler in their book Nudge. They argue that it is rational for us to empower governments and businesses to fasten us to the mast, albeit with loose ropes rather than tight ones. Informed by research on human judgment, experts would engineer the “choice architecture” of our environments to make it difficult for us to do tempting harmful things, like consumption, waste, and theft.

No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans
by Michael S. Barr
Published 20 Mar 2012

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 12, no. 3: 183–206 (doi:10.1002/(SICI)1099-0771(199909)12:3<183::AID-BDM318>3.0.CO;2-F). Thaler, Richard H., and Shlomo Benartzi. 2004. “Save More Tomorrow: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Saving.” In “Papers in Honor of Sherwin Rosen,” supplement, Journal of Political Economy 112, no. S1: S164–S187 (doi:10.1086/380085). Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press. Tversky, Amos, and Eldar Shafir. 1992. “Choice under Conflict: The Dynamics of Deferred Decision.” Psychological Science 3:358–61 (www.jstor.org/stable/40062808). White, James J., and Robert S. Summers. 2006.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi
Published 14 May 2020

Thaler, The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life (New York: Free Press, 1992), 21–25; Werner Güth, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze, “An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3, no. 4 (December 1982): 367, 371–74, 375, tables 4–5, https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-2681(82)90011-7; Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler, “Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics,” Journal of Business 59, no. 4 (November 1986): S285, S291, table 2, Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jnlbus:v:59:y:1986:i:4:p:s285-300. 39.Maurice E. Stucke, “Behavioral Economists at the Gate: Antitrust in the Twenty-First Century,” Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 38, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 513, 530 n.79, https://ssrn.com/abstract=981530. 40.Christine Jolls, Cass R. Sunstein, and Richard Thaler, “A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics,” Stanford Law Review 50, no. 3 (May 1998): 1471, 1492, https://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/236.pdf. Even when the game is repeated ten times to allow for learning, the results are similar. 41.Joseph Henrich et al., “In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies,” American Economic Review 91, no. 2 (May 2001): 73, 73–76, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Published 11 Mar 2015

McKenzie, “Duration Neglect by Numbers and Its Elimination by Graphs,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 108, no. 2 (2009): 303–314. 19. Sebastian Serfas, Cognitive Biases in the Capital Investment Context: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Experiments on Violations of Normative Rationality (Springer, 2010). 20. Zhuangzi and Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi (Columbia University Press, 1968). 21. Cass R. Sunstein, “Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law,” Yale Law Journal (2002): 61–107. 22. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (HarperCollins, 2008). 23. Boaz Keysar and Dale J. Barr, “Self-Anchoring in Conversation: Why Language Users Do Not Do What They ‘Should,’” in Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, ed.

…

,” except lower numbers mean more positive feelings, and then they also tack “years” on the end. But if these “time estimates” represent anything other than attitude expressions on an unbounded scale with no modulus, I have been unable to determine it. * 1. Daniel Kahneman, David A. Schkade, and Cass R. Sunstein, “Shared Outrage and Erratic Awards: The Psychology of Punitive Damages,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 16 (1 1998): 48–86, doi:10.1023/A:1007710408413; Daniel Kahneman, Ilana Ritov, and David Schkade, “Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions?: An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 19, nos. 1–3 (1999): 203–235, doi:10.1023/A:1007835629236. 103 The Halo Effect The affect heuristic is how an overall feeling of goodness or badness contributes to many other judgments, whether it’s logical or not, whether you’re aware of it or not.

…

Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1986. http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/eerm.nsf/vwAN/EE-0280B-04.pdf/$file/EE-0280B-04.pdf. Kahneman, Daniel, Ilana Ritov, and David Schkade. “Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions?: An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 19, nos. 1–3 (1999): 203–235. doi:10.1023/A:1007835629236. Kahneman, Daniel, David A. Schkade, and Cass R. Sunstein. “Shared Outrage and Erratic Awards: The Psychology of Punitive Damages.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 16 (1 1998): 48–86. doi:10.1023/A:1007710408413. Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk.” Econometrica 47 (1979): 263–292. Keats, John.

That Used to Be Us
by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Published 1 Sep 2011

The title came from an assessment by then vice president Dick Cheney, who, in the face of concerns that a Pakistani scientist was offering nuclear-weapons expertise to al-Qaeda, reportedly declared: “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” Cheney contended that the United States had to confront a very new type of threat: a “low-probability, high-impact event.” Soon after Suskind’s book was published, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, then at the University of Chicago, pointed out that Cheney seemed to be endorsing the same “precautionary principle” that animated environmentalists. Sunstein wrote in his blog: “According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events—such as climate change.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy
by Mervyn King
Published 3 Mar 2016

Taylor, John B. (2014), ‘The Federal Reserve in a Globalized World Economy’, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Conference, September 2014, mimeo. Temin, Peter (2014), ‘The Cambridge History of “Capitalism”’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 20658, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thaler, Richard (1991), Quasi Rational Economics, Russell Sage Foundation, New York. Thaler, Richard and Cass Sunstein (2008), Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, Yale University Press, New Haven. Thornton, Henry (1802), An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain, J. Hatchard, London. Tobin, James (1985), ‘Financial Innovation and Deregulation in Perspective’, Bank of Japan Monetary and Economic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 19–29.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
Published 24 Aug 2015

(2008), p. 59. 86 International Telecommunications Union, ‘The World in 2014: ICT Fact and Figures’ at <http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2014-e.pdf> (accessed 29 March 2015). 87 Sara Radicati, ‘Email Statistics Report, 2014–2018’, at <http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Email-Statistics-Report-2014-2018-Executive-Summary.pdf> (accessed 19 March 2015). 88 On sites such as <https://www.flickr.com>, <http://www.slideshare.net>, <https://www.youtube.com> (accessed 23 March 2015). 89 <http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html> (accessed 23 March 2015). 90 <http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2012/buzz-in-the-blogosphere-millions-more-bloggers-and-blog-readers.html> (accessed 23 March 2015). 91 <https://about.twitter.com/company> (accessed 19 March 2015). 92 <http://www.statista.com/statistics/274050/quarterly-numbers-of-linkedin-members/> (accessed 19 March 2015). 93 <http://wikipedia.org> (accessed 23 March 2015). 94 A important literature on mass collaboration emerged in the mid-2000s. See e.g. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006), Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics (2006), Charles Leadbetter, We-Think (2008), and Cass Sunstein, Infotopia (2006). For a more critical view of the subject at that time, see Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur (2007). 95 Greg Kroath-Hartman, Jonathan Corbet, and Amanda McPherson, ‘Linux Kernel Development: How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring it’, Sept. 2013 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publication/linux-foundation/who-writes-linux-2013> (accessed 24 March 2015). 96 Daren Brabham, Crowdsourcing (2013). 97 Yochai Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan (2011), 23. 98 Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan, 182. 99 See <http://www.retailresearch.org/onlineretailing.php> (accessed 24 March 2015). 100 <http://www.ebay.com>. 101 Trefis Team, ‘eBay: The Year 2013 In Review’, 26 December 2013, at <http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/12/26/ebay-the-year-2013-in-review/> (accessed 24 March 2015). 102 See Dov Seidman, How (2007), 39; original emphasis. 103 Some popular texts of that era were Patrick Winston, Artificial Intelligence (1984), Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck, The Fifth Generation (1983), Donald Michie and Rory Johnston, The Creative Computer (1984), and Edward Feigenbaum, Pamela McCorduck, and Penney Nii, The Rise of Expert Company (1988). 104 Richard Susskind, Expert Systems in Law (1987). 105 Phillip Capper and Richard Susskind, Latent Damage Law—The Expert System (1988). 106 Richard Susskind and Chris Tindall, ‘VATIA: Ernst & Whinney’s VAT Expert System’, in Proceedings of the Fourth International Expert Systems Conference (1988). 107 We have answered this question at length in Richard Susskind, ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Law Revisited’, in Jon Bing: A Tribute, ed.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
by Matthew Desmond
Published 1 Mar 2016

Martha Davis, “Participation, Equality, and the Civil Right to Counsel: Lessons from Domestic and International Law,” Yale Law Journal 122 (2013): 2260–81; Raven Lidman, “Civil Gideon as a Human Right: Is the U.S. Going to Join Step with the Rest of the Developed World?,” Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review 15 (2006): 769–800. 40. Quoted in Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 3. 41. Quoted in Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 215. 42.

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards
by Yu-Kai Chou
Published 13 Apr 2015

Not everyone knows the rules of poker, but hopefully the text within is descriptive enough. For the full rules of Texas Hold’em Poker, visit: http://www.yukaichou.com/PokerRules↩ Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Econometrica, 47:263-91.* “Prospect Theory: an analysis of decision under risk”. 1979.↩ Richard Thaler, and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 02/24/2009.↩ Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich. Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes - and How to Correct Them. Simon & Schuster, New York. 01/12/2010.↩ Daniel Kahneman. *Thinking, Fast and Slow.”

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

Advocates of this approach would no doubt argue that this is a matter of encouraging people to listen to their better angels. But in reality it preserves the mindset of old-fashioned paternalism, in which people need to be guided from on high to follow their own best interests. The most prominent advocate of this position is Cass Sunstein, one of America’s leading legal scholars and a long-standing professor at the University of Chicago. Sunstein is the author of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008), which he co-wrote with Richard Thaler, a behavioral economist. The argument of Nudge, in a nutshell, is that people frequently make poor choices that they look back on with a mixture of regret and bafflement.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

Forbes, 27 June 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessicabaron/2019/06/27/plastic-surgeons-ask-if-selfie-editing-is-related-to-a-desire-for-plastic-surgery/#87499d11e021; see also Susruthi Rajanala, Mayra B.C. Maymone, and Neelam A. Vashi, ‘Selfies–Living In the Era of Filtered Photographs’, JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery 20, no. 6 (November 2018), 443–44. 104 Cass Sunstein, ‘Nudging Smokers’, New England Journal of Medicine 372, no. 22 (May 2015), 2150–51, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMe1503200. 105 Michael Zelenko, ‘The High Hopes of the Low-Tech Phone’, The Verge, 4 September 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/4/20847717/light-phone-2-minimalist-features-design-keyboard-crowdfunding. 106 See Jonathan Haidt and Nick Allen, ‘Scrutinizing the effects of digital technology on mental health’, Nature, News and Views Forum, 10 February 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00296-x?

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State
by Barton Gellman
Published 20 May 2020

The June story, which did not mention Amir, was Barton Gellman, “Jewish Settlers Grab Land as Arab Self-Rule Nears; Israel Does Little to Halt West Bank Moves,” Washington Post, June 26, 1995. Top Secret reference site: The CIA disclosed the existence of a Top Secret “Intellipedia,” shared by other agencies, in 2006. See Cass R. Sunstein, “A Brave New Wiki World,” Washington Post, February 24, 2007, http://wapo.st/1oKv9IF. The online “IT Law Wiki” first posted a description of NSANet in 2011, at http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/NSANet, according to this date-based Google search: https://goo.gl/j0Jc8y. short film on another NSA critic: Laura Poitras, “The Program,” New York Times, August 23, 2012, http://nyti.ms/1TBmnJp, was a profile of the whistleblower William Binney for the newspaper’s “Op-Docs” series.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

So his method misses a large amount of assets hidden from tax authorities. For further discussion of ‘missing’ data see Nicholas Shaxson, ‘How to Crack Down on Tax Havens: Start With the Banks’, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2018 issue, as well as John Christensen and James Henry, ‘The Offshore Trillions’, New York Review of Books, 10 March 2016, letter in reply to Cass R. Sunstein, ‘Parking the Big Money’, 14 January 2016. 7. E. Van der Does de Willebois, E. M. Halter, R. A. Harrison, J. W. Park and J. C. Sharman, ‘The Puppet Masters – How the Corrupt Use Legal Structures to Hide Stolen Assets and What to Do About It’, Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative, World Bank, UNDOC, 2011, pp.45–6: ‘Investigators and prosecutors tend not to bring charges against trusts, because of the difficulty in proving their role in the crime … Even if trusts holding illicit assets may well have been used in a given case, they may not actually be mentioned in formal charges and court documents, and consequently their misuse goes unreported.’ 8.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

the Internet you see: Joseph Turow (2013), The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth, Yale University Press, http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300165012. the “filter bubble”: Eli Pariser (2011), The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Penguin Books, http://www.thefilterbubble.com. on a large scale it’s harmful: Cass Sunstein (2009), Republic.com 2.0, Princeton University Press, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8468.html. We don’t want to live: To be fair, this trend is older and more general than the Internet. Robert D. Putnam (2000), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon and Schuster, http://bowlingalone.com.

The Fissured Workplace
by David Weil
Published 17 Feb 2014

“Who Has Benefited from the Post–Great Recession Recovery?” Working paper, Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University (July). Sunstein, Cass, Daniel Kahnemann, David Schkade, and Ilana Ritov. “Predictably Incoherent Judgments.” Stanford Law Review 54: 1153–1215. Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press. Theodore, Nik. 2010. “Realigning Labor: Toward a Framework for Collaboration between Labor Unions and Day Labor Worker Centers.” Special report, Neighborhood Funders Group. Theodore, Nik, Edwin Melendez, Abel Valenzuela Jr., and Ana Luz Gonzalez. 2008.

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
by Michael Huemer
Published 29 Oct 2012

‘To Have and To Hold on To’, Forbes, November 7, www.forbes.com/2006/11/07/divorce-costs-legal-biz-cx_lh_1107legaldivorce.html. Accessed May 3, 2011. Holguin, Jaime. 2002. ‘A Murder a Minute’, CBS News, October 3, www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/03/health/main524231.shtml. Accessed March 21, 2011. Holmes, Stephen, and Cass Sunstein. 1999. The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes. New York: Norton. Honoré, Tony. 1981. ‘Must We Obey? Necessity as a Ground of Obligation’, Virginia Law Review 67: 39–61. Hopkinson, Michael. 2002. The Irish War of Independence. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Hornberger, Jacob G. 2006.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

There is a need to distinguish between biases insofar as the policy responses to the underlying explanations for behaviour point in very different directions. 16 John Sterman (2000) Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World, Irwin McGraw-Hill. 17 Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008) Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, Yale University Press, esp. Part V. See also Jack Fuller (2009) ‘Heads, You Die: Bad Decisions, Choice Architecture, and How to Mitigate Predictable Irrationality’, Per Capita, at http://www.percapita.org.au/01_cms/details.asp?

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

The following day he made his magical thinking more explicit— “It’s going to disappear, one day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”—and twenty-four hours after that, he held one of his big rallies, in South Carolina, where he said warnings of a viral epidemic spreading to America amounted to the Democrats’ “new hoax” to make him look bad. Co-opt liberals. On that same day, alas, a college classmate of mine, the superrational Harvard law professor and former Obama official Cass Sunstein, made himself a useful idiot for the president and the right. “One thing is clear,” Sunstein wrote in his Bloomberg News column just as Americans had definitely started dying from COVID-19, “people are more scared than they have any reason to be,” because “most people in North America and Europe do not need to worry much about the risk of contracting the disease.”

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro

Fancy Bear did so by triggering a set of heuristics—Representative, Availability, Affect—that all gave the same answer: your email account has been hacked, click the link, change your password. Add in the time pressure for good measure, and it’s easy to see why System 2 gladly capitulated to System 1’s suggestions. Hackers, we might say, do the opposite of what the economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein have called nudging. A nudge alters the choice situation to avoid triggering heuristics that lead to irrational behavior. For example, when the standard default on employee retirement plans is “no contribution,” employees tend not to save for their retirements. They act imprudently because their choice is framed to trigger loss aversion: the “no contribution” default is treated as part of their endowment and any change—any contribution—is treated as a certain loss.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
by Adam Winkler
Published 27 Feb 2018

Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010); Richard McGregor, “Obama Launches Re-Election Campaign,” Financial Times, May 6, 2012; Greg Stohr, “Bloomberg Poll: Americans Want Supreme Court to Turn Off Political Spending Spigot,” Bloomberg News, September 28, 2015, available at https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-09-28/bloomberg-poll-americans-want-supreme-court-to-turn-off-political-spending-spigot; Allegra Pocinki, “16 States Call to Overturn ‘Citizens United,’ ” July 8, 2013, available at http://www.publicampaign.org/blog/2013/07/08/16-states-call-overturn-%E2%80%98citizens-united%E2%80%99. 3. See Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 134 S.Ct. 2751 (2014). 4. Cass R. Sunstein, “The Supreme Court Follows Public Opinion,” in Legal Change: Lessons From America’s Social Movements, ed. Jennifer Weiss-Wolf and Jeanine Plant-Chirlin (2015), 21. On social movements and the Constitution, see Jack M. Balkin and Reva B. Siegel, “Principles, Practices, and Social Movements,” 154 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 927 (2006); William N.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
Published 14 Sep 2021

Journal of Urban Economics 67, no. 3 (May 2010): 404–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2009.11.006. Glaeser, Edward L., Sari Pekkala Kerr, and William R. Kerr. “Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines.” Review of Economics and Statistics 97, no. 2 (May 2015): 498–520. https://doi.org/ doi:10.1162/REST_a_00456. Glaeser, Edward, and Cass R. Sunstein. “Regulatory Review for the States.” National Affairs, Summer 2014. www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/regulatory-review-for-the-states. Glaeser, Edward, and Brandon Tan. “Why Do Cities Increase Productivity but Decrease Opportunity?” Harvard University Working Paper, 2020. Glaeser, Edward L., Ginger Zhe Jin, Benjamin T.

From Peoples into Nations
by John Connelly
Published 11 Nov 2019

If the author were not almost entirely ignorant about the history of Albania and the Albanians, they would fit very much within the subject of the book, though as outsiders to the Soviet Bloc for much of its existence, they are less central to the history of East Central Europe than the countries farther north. Greece likewise would merit inclusion for much of its history up to 1945. 32. The lament that one has become a stranger in one’s own land is a complaint of voters for right-wing populism in our days. See Stephen Holmes, “How Democracies Perish,” in Cass Sunstein, Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America (New York, 2018), 327–428. Lucian Boia has written that the “past is more often invoked, and invoked in the most imperative terms, by those who want to break away from it.” History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness (Budapest, 2001), 44. Chapter 1: Peoples of East Central Europe 1.

…

Florian Kührer-Wielach, Siebenbürgen ohne Siebenbürger? Zentralstaatliche Integration und politischer Regionalismus nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2014), 241–249. 48. Banac, National Question, 233. 49. This is a complaint of voters for right-wing populists in our day as well. See Stephen Holmes, “How Democracies Perish,” in Cass Sunstein, Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America (New York, 2018), 327–428. 50. Sherman Spector, Rumania at the Paris Peace Conference (New York, 1962), 234. 51. John Maynard Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York, 1920), 52, 249. 52. Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ, 2002), 157. 53.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
by Brian Christian
Published 5 Oct 2020

“I don’t care where your tattoo is.”36 Despite the doctors’ uncertainty over the patient’s wishes, they did know one thing: one course of action was irreversible. Here the “principle of not choosing an irreversible path when faced with uncertainty” seems like a useful guide. In other domains, though, it’s not so clear cut what something like “irreversibility” means. Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein, for instance, notes that the legal system has a similar “precautionary principle”: sometimes the court needs to issue a preliminary injunction to prevent “irreparable harm” that could happen before a case is heard and a verdict is issued. Notions like “irreparable harm” feel intuitive, Sunstein argues, but on closer inspection they teem with puzzles.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Monopsony power is reinforced by the inherently ‘thin’ nature of most labour markets, by which it is meant that transactions occur relatively infrequently. Economists explain this thinness in terms of so-called matching frictions: only when both employers’ preferences and potential employees’ requirements ‘match’ will a hire be made. One important such friction pertains, writes Cass Sunstein, to job search: ‘Workers have to spend time and effort to find new jobs. For many low-income workers in particular, those costs can be high or even prohibitive, especially when they need to find suitable transportation and a new place to live.’62 As Suresh Naidu and his colleagues point out in an influential recent paper on labour market power, matching frictions ‘both cause and reinforce the typically long-term nature of employment relationships compared to most product purchases, leading to significant lock-in within employment relationships’.63 Many observers had anticipated that increasing digitization of the economy would thicken labour markets by loosening the frictions associated specifically with geographical constraints.

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
by Vito Tanzi
Published 28 Dec 2017

Zee, 2011, Recent Developments in Public Finance Volume I: Resouce Allocation and Distribution (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited). 424 Bibliography 2011, Recent Developments in Public Finance, Volume II, Stabilization and Growth (Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited). Taylor, Alan, 2016, American Revolutions, 1750–1804 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company). Taylor, John B., 2009, Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged and Worsened the Financial Crisis (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press). Thaler, Richard H. and Cass R. Sunstein, 2008, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Thomas, Jean-Paul, 1994, Les politiques economiques au XXe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin). Tobin, James and W. Allen Wallis, 1968, Welfare Programs: An Economic Appraisal (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute).

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 26 Mar 2019

” —Jonathan Haidt, coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind “A magnificent achievement. If you think you understand human nature, think again; Christakis will open your eyes and make you gasp. A special bonus: his book is inspiring and deeply optimistic. The perfect book for our time.” —Cass R. Sunstein, coauthor of Nudge “As a historian, I probably tend to overemphasize the darker side of human nature—our remarkable capacity as a species for generating war and revolution, manias, and panics. As a physician and a social scientist, Christakis is here to tell me to lighten up. ‘There is more that unites us than divides us,’ he argues in this deeply erudite and engaging book, ‘and society is basically good.’

The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World
by Anu Bradford
Published 14 Sep 2020

No. 12,866, 3 C.F.R. 638 (1994); Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995, Pub. L. No. 104-4, §§ 201-202 109 Stat. 48 (codified at 2 U.S.C. §§ 15031–32 (2014)). 107.See, e.g., Indus. Union Dep’t, AFL-CIO v. Am. Petroleum Inst. (The Benzene Case), 448 U.S. 607, 642–46 (1980); see also Exec. Order No. 13,563, 3 C.F.R. 215, 215 (2011). See also Cass R. Sunstein, The Cost Benefit Revolution 4 (2018). 108.Communication from the Commission on Impact Assessment, COM (2002) 276 final (June 5, 2002). 109.Commission Staff Working Document, Better Regulation Guidelines, at 15, SWD (2017) 350 (July 7, 2017), https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/better-regulation-guidelines.pdf [https://perma.cc/Q8TL-ENG2]. 110.See Richard Parker & Alberto Alemanno, Comparative Overview of EU and US Legislative and Regulatory Systems: Implications for Domestic Governance & the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, 22 Colum.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Published 31 Dec 2018

But European trends in recent years also suggest that talk of a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ is probably unduly alarmist. What is to be done? The concluding chapter recapitulates our core theory, summarizes this book’s main findings, and considers the strategic options to fight back. Notes 1. See, for example, Brian Klass. 2017. The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy. New York: Hot Books; Cass R. Sunstein. Ed. 2018.Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America. New York: Dey Street Books; David Frumm. 2018. Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. New York: Harper. 2. Cas Mudde and C.R. Kaltwasser. Eds. 2012. Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or corrective for democracy?

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
by William N. Goetzmann
Published 11 Apr 2016

Thaler and Benartzi suggested establishing programs that have a default allocation or savings contribution percentage that is good for the average person. One could always override the default, but the no-decision decision is designed to be good for you. Richard Thaler and another co-author of his, Cass Sunstein, coined a term for this: a “nudge.”6 Do you want the government thinking for you—nudging and cajoling you to save or put 50% of your savings into equities? I guess I wouldn’t mind too much, given that the government already sets all kinds of norms and standards based on welfare considerations.

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
by Charles Murray
Published 28 Jan 2020

In almost half (18 of the 39), the major topic of the article directly involved sex, ethnicity, or class.[31] Economics and political science. The role of psychological factors in economics goes back to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The work of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Paul Slovic on decision making under conditions of uncertainty and, more recently, the work of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler on “nudge” theory, are both rich fields of study that will be informed by genomic data.32 They are only part of the growing field of behavioral economics. Similarly, questions about how humans act as political agents are at the core of political science. Genomic information is just as relevant to voting decisions as it is to economic decisions.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler
Published 14 May 2006

A point originally raised by Eli Noam is that in this explosively large universe, getting attention will be as difficult as getting your initial message out in the mass-media context, if not more so. The same means that dominated the capacity to speak in the mass-media environment--money--will dominate the capacity to be heard on the Internet, even if it no longer controls the capacity to speak. 421 Fragmentation of attention and discourse. A point raised most explicitly by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com is that the ubiquity of information and the absence of the mass media as condensation points will impoverish public discourse by fragmenting it. There will be no public sphere. [pg 235] Individuals will view the world through millions of personally customized windows that will offer no common ground for political discourse or action, except among groups of highly similar individuals who customize their windows to see similar things. 422 Polarization.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
by Edward E. Baptist
Published 24 Oct 2016

Story tried to limit the scope of his decision to fugitive slave cases, but he concurred that constitutional protection of the property rights of enslavers was a bargain without which “the Union could never have been formed.” For a pro-Lochner take on the later use of substantive due process, see David E. Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform (Chicago, 2011); for a critical view, see Cass Sunstein, “Lochner’s Legacy,” Columbia Law Review 87 (1987): 873–919. 32. Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 533–539. 33. Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years’ View, Or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850 (New York, 1854–1856), 2:695–696. 34. CG, February 19, 1847, 453–455. 35.

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

Chapter 2: The Fallacy of Supply and Demand BASED ON Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein, and Drazen Prelec, “Coherent Arbitrariness: Stable Demand Curves without Stable Preferences,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (2003). Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein, and Drazen Prelec, “Tom Sawyer and the Construction of Value,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2006). RELATED READINGS Cass R. Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade, and Ilana Ritov, “Predictably Incoherent Judgments,” Stanford Law Review (2002). Uri Simonsohn, “New Yorkers Commute More Everywhere: Contrast Effects in the Field,” Review of Economics and Statistics (2006). Uri Simonsohn and George Loewenstein, “Mistake #37: The Impact of Previously Faced Prices on Housing Demand,” Economic Journal (2006).

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

Much of what looks like a lack of self-control in the modern world may consist of using a discounting rate that was wired into our nervous systems in the iffy world of our pre-state ancestors, when people died much younger and had no institutions that could parlay savings now into returns years later.76 Economists have noted that when people are left to their own devices, they save far too little for their retirement, as if they expect to die in a few years.77 That is the basis for the “libertarian paternalism” of Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein, and other behavioral economists, in which the government would, with people’s consent, tilt the playing field between their current and future selves.78 One example is setting an optimal retirement savings plan as the default, which employees would have to opt out of, rather than as a selection they would have to opt into.