Cass Sunstein Quotes

Emotions can get in the way of truth-seeking. People do not process information in a neutral way.

To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with.

...when like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another.

As Joseph Schumpeter remarked, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, but you can fool enough of the people for long enough to do irreversible damage.

Asked to resolve problems in a language that is not their own, people are less likely to depart from standard accounts of rationality.

Star Wars and Star Trek are good in different ways, and in fairness, you can’t really rank them. But Star Wars is better. “YOUR

do not be misled by expert bravado or by an expert’s own sense of how he or she is doing. Evidence is a much better guide than an impressive self-presentation.

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. Love prefers deep to wide, and here to there; the grasp to the reach…. Love is, or should be, indifferent to history, immune to it—a soft and sturdy haven from it: when the day is done, and the lights are out, and there is only this other heart, this other mind, this other face, to assist in repelling one’s demons or in greeting one’s angels, it does not matter who the president is. When one consents to marry, one consents to be truly known, which is an ominous prospect; and so one bets on love to correct for the ordinariness of the impression, and to call forth the forgiveness that is invariably required by an accurate perception of oneself. Marriages are exposures. We may be heroes to our spouses but we may not be idols.

Luckily, scientists have uncovered a few secrets to help make the process of creating habits easier. In their bestselling book Nudge, the economist Richard Thaler and the law professor Cass Sunstein show how to influence other people’s behavior through carefully designed choices, or what they called “choice architecture.” You

Economists suggest that we should assess the value of decisions in terms of two considerations: the costs of decisions and the costs of errors.

Janis believed that groups are especially likely to suffer from groupthink if they are cohesive, have highly directive leadership, and are insulated from experts.

[d]espotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvements, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.

If government is to respect people's autonomy, or to treat them with dignity, it should not deprive them of freedom. It should treat them as adults, rather than children or infants.

We can believe in hierarchy. We can believe the universe was made just for us. Hierarchy and a major sense of entitlement are not insurmountable problems. The problem occurs when we treat those whom we believe lie beneath us as slaves. Religion once sustained human slavery. It was wrong then. When it blindly sanctions the slavery of every nonhuman animal, it is wrong now.

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.” Once the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, “the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.” In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. “Terrorists are made, not born,” Sunstein observed, “and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts.

Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?” the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. “They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders.” Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk. In a study that invited people to compare various causes of death, Slovic found that people tended to believe that accidents cause more deaths than disease and that homicide causes more deaths than suicide, when the opposite is true in both cases. In another study, people significantly overestimated the fatality rates of highly publicized or dramatic dangers like cancer or tornadoes. One could interpret this, as Sunstein does, to mean that most people are just wrong about risk. But risk perception may not be about quantifiable risk so much as it is about immeasurable fear. Our fears are informed by history and economics, by social power and stigma, by myths and nightmares. And as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us. When we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs, as Slovic found in one of his studies, we tend to doubt the information, not ourselves.

Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?” the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. “They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders.” Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk.

Multiple international bodies have specified that the absence of scientific evidence of potential damage is not sufficient justification for taking risks. As the jurist Cass Sunstein points out, the precautionary principle is costly, and when interpreted strictly it can be paralyzing.

If we understand “rights” to be legal protection against harm, then many animals already do have rights, and the idea of animal rights is not terribly controversial.

In the United States both plates and portions have increased dramatically over time. A really good nudge would be to make them smaller.

Our favorite messengers are sometimes wrong and our least favorite messengers are sometimes right.

They suggest that with respect to facts, partisan differences are much less sharp than they seem—and that political polarization is often an artifact of the survey setting.

It might also count as an insult to dignity, and a form of infantilization, if the government constantly reminds people of things that they already know.

The multiple failures of top-down design, and the omnipresence of unintended consequences, can be attributed in large part, to the absence of relevant information.

People are moderately more likely to favor approaches that involve reflection and deliberation.

People are more likely to object to nudges that appeal to unconscious or subconscious processes.

it can be masked with a veneer of legality, it can be cloaked with plausible deniability. It is always possible to justify each incremental step.

If public opinion cannot express itself through political associations, newspapers, and electoral politics, it will be channeled into mob violence

The idea of “great and dangerous offenses” is an excellent shorthand for the views of the ratifiers—at least if we understand such offenses as including egregious abuses or misuses of official authority.

How about 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7? Think about it for a minute. That approach has the advantage of giving you “I am your father,” and of starting with the mysteries of the two best, while treating the prequels as kind of a flashback (as you’re also focused on the cliffhanger ending of 5). Then you get to wrap everything up with the real finale, and the best, before the third trilogy starts. Not a bad idea at all. A

Or consider the fact that after people buy a new car, they often love to read advertisements that speak enthusiastically about the same car that they have just obtained. Those advertisements tend to be comforting because they confirm the wisdom of the decision to purchase that particular car. If you are a member of a particular political party or have strong convictions, you might want support, reinforcement, and ammunition, not criticism.

By itself, partyism is not the most serious threat to democratic self-government. But if it decreases government’s ability to solve serious problems, then it has concrete and potentially catastrophic consequences for people’s lives. I

Worst of all, we might miss the real opportunities for a thoughtful, other-regarding reconciliation of two critical parts of our human nature: the desire to liberate and enable the individual, and the impetus to protect and serve the collective.

We are blind to the fact that what we do to them deprives them of their rights; we do not want to see this because we profit from it, and so we make use of what are really morally irrelevant differences between them and ourselves to justify the difference in treatment.

in the event of an “authoritarian revolution,” authoritarians may seek massive social change in pursuit of greater oneness and sameness, willingly overturning established institutions and practices that their (psychologically) conservative peers would be drawn to defend and preserve.

You can become radicalized in the sense that you come to believe, firmly, a position that is within the political mainstream—for example, that your preferred political candidate is not just the best but immeasurably better than the alternatives, and that any other choice would be catastrophic.

In the long term, Trump, if successful, may be able to replace disloyal appointees with loyal appointees, and may be able to attract loyalists to civil service positions. In the short term, he can threaten to undermine agencies that fail to do his bidding or in any other way pose a threat to his power.

In contrast to status quo conservatism, authoritarianism is primarily driven not by aversion to change (difference over time) but by aversion to complexity (difference across space). In a nutshell, authoritarians are “simple-minded avoiders of complexity more than closed-minded avoiders of change” (Stenner 2009b: 193).

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. There’s valuable information here that the algorithm puts to good use, but the human judges—for all their intelligence, experience, and training—tend to overlook it.

Recent research cited by Cass Sunstein, for example, has shown that people with a particular political orientation who join a like-minded group emerge from that group with stronger political leanings than they started with. “In almost every group,” Sunstein writes, “people ended up with more extreme positions …. The result is group polarization, which occurs when like-minded people interact and end up in a more extreme position in line with their original inclinations.” And with the Internet added to the fundamentalist equation, it is now easier than ever for extremists of all types to find their ideological soul mates and reinforce their radical thinking.

The American constitutional order is meant to create a deliberative democracy, in which debate and discussion accompany accountability. This is not merely a system of majority rule, through which majorities get to do as they like simply because they are majorities. Reason-giving is central, and a deliberative democracy gives reasons.

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. If their employer instead automatically enrolls them, giving them the choice of opting out, participation jumps dramatically

After all, behavioral economists have spent years demonstrating the clear relationship between making something easy to do and getting people to actually do it. My very good friend and longtime collaborator Richard Thaler puts it this way: “My number-one mantra from Nudge [his book, cowritten with Cass Sunstein, on the application of behavioral economic principles to public policy] is, ‘Make it easy.’ When I say make it easy, what I mean is, if you want to get somebody to do something, make it easy. If you want to get people to eat healthier foods, then put healthier foods in the cafeteria, and make them easier to find, and make them taste better. So in every meeting I say, ‘Make it easy.’ It’s kind of obvious, but it’s also easy to miss.”7

There is another problem. Echo chambers can lead people to believe in falsehoods, and it may be difficult or impossible to correct them. Falsehoods take a toll. One illustration is the belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. As falsehoods go, this one is not the most damaging, but it both reflected and contributed to a politics of suspicion, distrust, and sometimes hatred. A

This conception of representation appears throughout The Federalist Papers. No. 57 urges that: “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.

Lawrence Kasdan has this to say about Star Wars: “Force Awakens, New Hope, Empire—these are movies about fulfilling what is inside you. That’s a story that everybody can relate to. Even when you get to be my age, you’re still trying to figure that out. It’s amazing but it’s true. What am I, what am I about, have I fulfilled my potential, and, if not, is there still time? That’s what the Star Wars saga is about.

As the lives of their characters develop, they end up on paths that writers could not possibly have foreseen—and hence give the impression of agency, even to their authors. William Blake wrote of his works “tho I call them Mine I know they are not Mine,” and characterized his process of writing as a kind of dictation, “without Premeditation or even against my Will.” Musicians sometimes speak in exactly the same way.

Do musical preferences predict political inclinations? Not long ago, an official with Pandora said that its predictions about those inclinations, based on zip code as well as musical choices, are between 75 and 80 percent accurate. And with that level of accuracy, it developed an advertising service “that would enable candidates and political organizations to target the majority of its 73 million active monthly Pandora listeners based on its sense of their political leanings.

Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time addressing social problems. People may even find it hard to understand one another. Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by social media, provide a form of social glue. A national holiday is a shared experience. So is a major sports event (the Olympics or the World Cup), or a movie that transcends individual and group differences (Star Wars is a candidate). So

A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions. [T]here are many parallels between choice architecture and more traditional forms of architecture. A crucial parallel is that there is no such thing as a “neutral” design. [A]s good architects know, seemingly arbitrary decisions, such as where to locate the bathrooms, will have subtle influences on how the people who use the building interact. [S]mall and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on people’s behavior. [I]n many cases, the power of these small details comes from focusing the attention of users in a particular direction. Good architects realize that although they can’t build the perfect building, they can make some design choices that will have beneficial effects. And just as a building architect must eventually build some particular building, a choice architect must [for example] choose a particular arrangement of food options at lunch, and by so doing she can influence what people eat. She can nudge.

A lot of people disparage the Star Wars prequels, and understandably so; they’re not nearly as good as the original trilogy. But in their own way, they’re not just beautiful; they’re also awfully clever. Here’s the best part: all of the choices in the first trilogy are precisely mirrored in the prequels. The two trilogies are about freedom of choice under nearly identical conditions. Lucas was entirely aware of this: “Luke is faced with the same issues and practically the same scenes that Anakin is faced with. Anakin says yes and Luke says no.

More recently, Lucas described a visit in Europe, after the release of Revenge of the Sith, “with a dozen reporters, and the Russian correspondents all thought the film was about Russian politics, and the Americans all thought it was about Bush. And I said, ‘Well, it’s really based on Rome. And on the French Revolution and Bonaparte.’” The prequels focus on the rise of tyranny and the collapse of democracies. They explore the kinds of machinations that allow dictators to come to power, and they show how republics fall prey to them. There’s a stylized account of the loss of freedom, which Padmé nicely captures: “So this is how liberty dies . . . with thunderous applause.

What really matters is that in the Star Wars series, as in many works of literature, “I am your father” moments and their accompanying shivers are defining. They involve pivotal transitions and reversals of course, which nonetheless maintain (enough) continuity with the previous story, which now changes and gets more interesting. Vader’s fatherhood also created a significant challenge for Lucas, because it meant that viewers had to reassess past scenes, sometimes in fundamental ways. If the reassessment produced utter incredulity in the audience—not an “OMG” but a “WTF?”—the “I am your father” moment would not work. In fact it would have backfired, ruining the whole series.

Luke begins as that innocent farm boy, with no particular religious convictions. He is isolated and rootless—an excellent target for extremists. Sure enough, he embarks on what an online commentator describes as a “dark journey into religious fundamentalism and extremism.” A disaffected and somewhat lost young man, in search of something, he comes across Obi-Wan Kenobi, plainly a religious fanatic, who follows self-evidently extremist ideas about the Force. “Within moments of meeting Luke, Obi-Wan tells Luke he must abandon his family and join him, going so far as telling a shocking lie that the Empire killed Luke’s father, hoping to inspire Luke to a life of jihad.” Obi-Wan

Padmé insists: “There’s always a choice.” Does Anakin hear the echo of her voice decades later, when he decides to save their son from the Emperor? I like to think so. “YOU GET MANY OPPORTUNITIES TO KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN” Here’s Leia, speaking of Han’s apparent desertion of the rebellion in A New Hope: “A man must follow his own path. No one can choose it for him.” Here’s Obi-Wan to Luke, again in A New Hope: “Then you must do what you think is right, of course.” Here are Lucas’s own words: “Life sends you down funny paths. And you get many opportunities to keep your eyes open.” He was talking about his own life, but he might as well have been talking about Star Wars and the characters who populate it.

Somewhat more broadly, I will suggest that animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law.

The current administration’s legal “Czar” who goes by the name Cass Sunstein was recently appointed to serve on the “NSA Oversight Panel” despite the fact that two words “NSA” and “oversight” rarely if ever fit together. He also wrote a book called Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas to make sure that the academics and the American public dismiss so-called conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination and other American events of a largely fascist nature. Cass Sunstein claims that this sort of reportage only leads to discontented Americans who turn violent with their distrust.

PM The upshot is that where the law is unclear, long and intense disputes are likely. Both sides would benefit if they could be nudged toward a smaller range of expected outcomes, so that their expectations will have some overlap. ========== Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler, Richard H.;Sunstein, Cass R.)

As usual, the place to start is with people’s actual goals and intentions. If people make explicit promises to one another, the law should generally enforce their promises. ========== Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler, Richard H.;Sunstein, Cass R.) - Your

We can even see the legal institution of marriage as a precommitment strategy, not unlike that of Ulysses in approaching the Sirens, in which people knowingly choose a legal status that will protect them against their own errors. ========== Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler, Richard H.;Sunstein, Cass R.)

Private relationships, intimate and otherwise, might be structured in many different ways, and the simple dichotomy between “single” and “married” does not do justice to what people might choose. ========== Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler, Richard H.;Sunstein, Cass R.)

Those who emphasize animal rights have a more complicated task. They tend to urge that animals should be given rights to the extent that their capacities are akin to those of human beings. The usual emphasis here is on cognitive capacities. The line would be drawn between animals with advanced capacities, such as chimpanzees and dolphins, and those that lack such capacities. Undoubtedly a great deal of work needs to be done on this topic. But at least an emphasis on the capacity to think, and to form plans, seems to provide a foundation for appropriate line drawing by those who believe in animal rights in a strong sense.

Richard Thaler i prawnik Cass Sunstein napisali książkę pt. Nudge

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.

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.

Social scientists emphasize that people use the “availability heuristic,” which means that we assess risks by asking whether a bad (or good) event is cognitively “available.” It

It seems reasonable to say that people make good choices in contexts in which they have experience, god information, and prompt feedback - say, choosing among ice cream flavors. People know whether they like chocolate, vanilla, coffee, licorice, or something else. They do less well in contexts in which they are inexperienced and poorly informed, and in which feedback is slow or infrequent - say, in choosing between fruit and ice cream (where the long-term effects are slow and feedback is poor) or in choosing among medical treatments or investment options. If you are given fifty prescription drug plans, with multiple and varying features, you might benefit from a little help. So long as people are not choosing perfectly, some changes in the choice architecture could make their lives go better (as judged by their own preferences, not those of some bureaucrat).

There is overwhelming evidence that obesity increases risks of heart disease and diabetes, frequently leading to premature death. It would be quite fantastic to suggest that everyone is choosing the right diet, or a diet that is preferable to what might be produced with a few nudges. Of course, sensible people care about the taste of food, not simply about health, and eating is a source of pleasure in and of itself. We do not claim that everyone who is overweight is necessarily failing to act rationally, but we do reject the claim that all or almost all Americans are choosing their diet optimally.

瓦特．夸特羅喬奇（Walter Quattrociocchi）、安東尼奧．史卡拉（Antonio Scala）與凱斯．桑斯坦（Cass R. Sunstein）最近合著的文章〈臉書同溫層〉（Echo Chambers on Facebook）提出某些很強的論據，證明這個問題是真實存在且棘手的。

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Terrible events produce outrage, and when people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumors that justify their emotional states, and also to attribute those events to intentional action.

Some rumors simultaneously relieve "a primary emotional urge" and offer an explanation, to those who accept them, of why they feel as they do; the rumor "rationalizes while it relieves.

too much dystopianism, too frequently or easily deployed, has its own costs. It’s important to distinguish policies we don’t like from policies that attempt a fundamental transformation of political institutions. That’s true for purposes of conserving critical resources. But it’s also true for purposes of drawing public attention and debate.

En años siguientes, diversos escépticos, desde Evgeny Morozov hasta Cass Sunstein, ahondaron en aquella vertiente crítica insinuada por Diamond. Los mayores defensores de Twitter y Facebook, argumentó Morozov, creían que estas nuevas tecnologías reformarían el contexto local, conectarían a antiguos enemigos y permitirían superar odios del pasado. Pero, en realidad, la posibilidad inversa parecía aproximarse más a la verdad: los diferentes contextos locales serían los que condicionarían y darían una nueva forma a herramientas como Facebook, que podrían ser emancipadoras en ciertos contextos, pero reforzarían el poder autocrático —o incitarían al odio racial— en otros.16

This would happen in any time period, but in an electronic age these processes are likely to occur much faster and have more profound effects. As trust levels continue to plummet, people stop trusting mainstream politicians and mainstream newspapers, a process we are already observing. They will begin to assume – as a matter of course – that these people and news sources are deceiving them and, as we have seen, on many key matters they will be correct. They will turn to alternative news sources and vote for alternative political figures. As jurist Cass Sunstein (2018) has explored, this will create an echo chamber effect whereby people will increasingly only be hearing the viewpoints which they already accept. This will help to further cement a divided, Balkanized, and untrusting society. Concomitantly, we will expect Finnish society – like all European societies – to become increasingly diverse in terms of worldview, as the ‘spiteful mutants’ spread their views which, through a virtue-signalling arms race to appear ever more caring, will become more and more extreme.

Instead of calls to action, the most innovative user experiences may be calls to inaction. (Design of default options is exceedingly important and superbly discussed in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s excellent Nudge.21) Web usability guru Steve Krug provocatively articulates this design sensibility in his heuristic, “Don’t Make Me Think.” Often the best way to get customers to appreciate an innovation experience is by not making demands on them. Don’t get in the way by offering to help. Engagement sometimes undermines a quality user experience. Eliminating choice frequently proves to be the best possible design choice. Because customers often prefer “mindless choices,” says Krug, minimalism is a virtue.

There is widespread support for nudges that are taken to have legitimate ends and to be consistent with the interests and the values of most choosers.

If manipulation really does increase welfare, then it would seem to be justified and even mandatory on ethical grounds.

Centuries later, John Rawls wrote of the same possibility: “The benefits from discussion lie in the fact that even representative legislators are limited in knowledge and the ability to reason. No one of them knows everything the others know, or can make all the same inferences that they can draw in concert. Discussion is a way of combining information and enlarging the range of arguments.

Any heterogeneous society faces a risk of fragmentation. This

Brandeis can be taken to have offered a conception of the social role of the idealized citizen. For such a citizen, active engagement in politics, at least some of the time, is a responsibility, not just an entitlement. If citizens are “inert,” freedom itself is at risk. If

Covertly influencing decision processes such as that the resulting decision is aligned with higher-order desires may actually enhance autonomy.

Burke writes: We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers… . The science of government being therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution than any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree, for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes. Thus

The first paragraph of The Federalist, No. 1 offers the following contrast: “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

We can see here why many groups fall prey to what is known as “collective conservatism”: the tendency of groups to stick to established patterns even as new needs arise. Once a practice (like wearing ties) has become established, it is likely to be perpetuated, even if there is no particular basis for it.

planning fallacy.

Small and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on people's behavior. A good rule of thumb is to assume that "everything matters.

Libertarian paternalists want to make it easy for people to go their own way; they do not want to burden those who want to exercise their freedom. The paternalistic aspect lies in the claim that it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better.

To understand why sludge matters, let’s begin with the assumption that people are fully rational and that in deciding whether to wade through sludge, they make some calculation about costs and benefits. Even if the benefits of that wading are high, the costs might prove overwhelming.

With this lesson in mind, Mullainathan and Shafir insist that certain characteristics that we attribute to individual personality (lack of motivation, inability to focus) may actually be a problem of limited bandwidth. The problem is scarcity, not the person.

In political, moral, and legal theory, many of the largest debates pit consequentialists against deontologists. Recall that consequentialists believe that the rightness of actions turns on their consequences, which are to be measured, aggregated, and ranked. (Utilitarianism is a species of consequentialism.) By contrast, deontologists believe that some actions are wrong even if they have good consequences. Many deontologists think that it is wrong to torture people or to kill them even if the consequences of doing so would be good. Many deontologists also think that you should not throw someone in the way of a speeding train even if that action would save lives on balance; that you should not torture someone even if doing so would produce information that would save lives; that slavery is a moral wrong regardless of the outcome of any utilitarian calculus; that the protection of free speech does not depend on any such calculus; that the strongest arguments for and against capital punishment turn on what is right, independent of the consequences of capital punishment.

The disagreements between deontologists and consequentialists bear directly on many issues in law and policy. Consequentialists believe that constitutional rights, including the right to free speech, must be defended and interpreted by reference to the consequences; deontologists disagree. Consequentialists are favorably disposed to cost-benefit analysis in regulatory policy, but that form of analysis has been vigorously challenged on broadly deontological grounds. Consequentialists favor theories of punishment that are based on deterrence, and they firmly reject retributivism, which some deontologists endorse.

But it is true that in its usual forms, consequentialism seems to conflict with some of our deepest intuitions, certainly in new or unfamiliar situations.2 For example, human beings appear to be intuitive retributivists; they want wrongdoers to suffer. With respect to punishment, efforts to encourage people to think in consequentialist terms do not fare at all well.3

It is important to acknowledge, however, that, in practice, people’s judgments about the authority of the executive are greatly and even decisively affected by their approval or disapproval of the incumbent president. Under a Republican president, Democrats do not approve of the idea of a discretion-wielding chief executive, enabled by deferential courts. Under a Democratic president, Republicans tend to have, and even to voice, the same cautions and concerns.

In 1960, just 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter married outside their political party.8 By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent.9 Interestingly, comparable increases cannot be found in the relevant period in the United Kingdom.10

The Empire Strikes Back (grade: A+) A New Hope (grade: A+) Return of the Jedi (grade: A) Rogue One (grade: A) Revenge of the Sith (grade: A-) The Force Awakens (grade: A-) The Last Jedi (grade: B+) Attack of the Clones (grade: B+) The Phantom Menace (grade: B) Solo (grade: C)

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.

In the case of “pure” solidarity goods, people care about the sheer number of consumers, and in the case of partnership goods, people care about who the consumers are.

My own evidence attests to the importance of both hedonic and instrumental value.

Strikingly, 71 percent want to know if there is life on other planets. Perhaps surprisingly, only a bare majority (53 percent) want to know if heaven really exists. Those who did not want to know probably fell within various categories: (1) those who are sure that heaven does exist, so the information would be worthless; (2) those who are sure that heaven does not exist, so the information would be worthless; (3) those who think that they will not get into heaven, so learning of its existence could only make them sad or upset; or (4) those who think that it is best to have a degree of uncertainty. A smaller number (44 percent) want to know if hell exists – which is probably testimony to the fact that if hell exists, a lot of people think that they will be in big trouble.