Title: Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us - The New York Times
Headings: Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us
Climate and Environment
Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us
By BENJAMIN WALLACE-WELLS

Content: When we spoke, he made a point of emphasizing the influence of icons of the right, like the libertarian economist Friedrich von Hayek and the originalist legal scholars. As a young academic, Sunstein found himself deeply moved by the society Franklin D. Roosevelt envisioned — he wrote a book championing F.D.R.’s idea of a “second bill of rights” that would guarantee Americans a job, an education and a home — but he accepts that much of the New Deal amounted to “morals without technique.” “ In 2010 there’s so much more knowledge about economics than there was in the ’30s,” Sunstein told me. “ A lot of what I’ve tried to do is hold on to some of these moral commitments of the Roosevelt administration and figure out how we might actually get them.” In “Nudge,” a popular book that he wrote with the influential behavioral economist Richard Thaler, Sunstein elaborated a philosophy called “libertarian paternalism.” Conservative economists have long stressed that because people are rational, the best way for government to serve the public is to guarantee a fair market and to otherwise get out of the way. But in the real world, Sunstein and Thaler argue, people are subject to all sorts of biases and quirks. They also argue that this human quality, which some would call irrationality, can be predicted and — this is the controversial part — that if the social environment can be changed, people might be nudged into more rational behavior. Libertarian paternalists would have school cafeterias put the fruit before the fried chicken, because students are more likely to grab the first food they see. They support a change in Illinois law that asks drivers renewing their licenses to choose whether they want to be organ donors.