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

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Nadav Kander for The New York Times
If you think about it — and Sunstein certainly has — you can see a similar problem in one of the fields OIRA deals with often: the environment. The small risks that people or companies take (in adding increments of carbon to the atmosphere or — as in the case of the recent Gulf Coast oil spill — maintaining drilling rigs) sometimes threaten to cascade into a catastrophe. So how can the government change the framework of choices that particular people are faced with so that their own small errors in risk perception don’t expose the whole of society? ∂Part of the reason that Sunstein is so admired as an academic is that he has inherited lessons from everyone, including conservatives. 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.”