Words matter. These are the best Cass Sunstein Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Catholicism is a wide tent in terms of political and legal positions. We could have nine Catholics on the Supreme Court and a great deal of diversity toward the law.
The only answer to the question ‘Which is the worst of the ‘Star Wars’ movies?’ is, there is no worst ‘Star Wars’ movie. There – one might be the least amazing and fantastic, but there’s none that is the worst of the ‘Star Wars’ movies.
Liberals are sometimes defined as people who can’t take their own side in an argument.
I think it’s a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you’ll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.
Employers, like most people, tend to trust their intuitions. But when employers decide whom to hire, they trust those intuitions far more than they should.
Every human being has an assortment of diverse identities, and it greatly matters which one is triggered by social situations, which hold up different kinds of mirrors. The same is true for nations.
If a company has acted badly, people want to punish it – not in order to deter future misconduct, but simply because they’re outraged. And the more outraged they are, the more punishment they want to inflict.
Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms – the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault.
The U.S. is an optimistic nation. No candidate has ever won the American presidency by speaking primarily to people’s deepest fears and by manufacturing a sense of apocalypse – that our leaders ‘can’t do anything right,’ that things are utterly falling apart.
For business, government, and education, the lesson is clear: People ought to be relying far more on objective information and far less on interviews. They might even want to think about scaling back or cancelling interviews altogether. They’ll save a lot of time – and make better decisions.
Voters like to fall in love with presidential candidates, at least a little bit.
If you like dark movies or light movies, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ is one of the great movies of all time. It’s probably the greatest movie of all time. ‘A New Hope’ is a superb movie. It’s probably the second-greatest movie of all time, but ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ is better.
For any child, boy or girl, a father is both Jedi and Sith: Obi-Wan Kenobi – gentle and calming and good – and Vader, fierce and terrifying.
If you have an architecture of control, let’s say, where you select in advance everything that’s going to affect your life, then you’re going to live in a very small world that will have an echo chamber feature… Pandora, which I love, actually feeds into that.
For consumers, the lesson is simple: Genetically modified foods are safe to eat.
As an academic, a great deal of my time is spent writing, with very little in meetings. In government, the premium is placed on figuring things out through discussing them with other people.
I think President Obama has been an extraordinarily successful president, and that this period will record that with a bunch of exclamation points. But obviously, not everybody thinks that.
What unites Sanders, McCarthy, McGovern and Reagan is the unmistakable clarity of their moral convictions, their tendency to outrage, and their insistence that the United States needs to embark on a whole new path.
Many Americans abhor paternalism. They think that people should be able to go their own way, even if they end up in a ditch. When they run risks, even foolish ones, it isn’t anybody’s business that they do.
At least since 1947, the historical record seems to support a simple conclusion: If you want the American economy to grow, you ought to put a Democrat in the Oval Office.
Whatever your gender, you can be a ‘Star Wars’ fan.
When government programs fail, it is often because public officials are clueless about how human beings think and act.
Donald Trump promises to impose, soon after his inauguration, a new requirement on federal agencies: If they want to issue a new regulation, they have to rescind two regulations that are now on the books. The idea of ‘one in, two out’ has rhetorical appeal, but it’s going to be extremely hard to pull off.
I would think that to say ‘regulations cost jobs’ or ‘regulations create jobs’ is too simple, and we need to look at the regulation.
Top 1 Percent progressivism emphasizes the idea of fairness – but it’s nevertheless a politics of outrage, animated by at least a trace of envy. It’s as if ‘millionaires and billionaires’ were the principal problem facing America today.
There is no proportional representation requirement in the Equal Protection Clause.
Humility is of central importance; I think it’s an underappreciated virtue in the contemporary discussion of law and politics.
There are some lawyers who think of themselves as basically instruments of whoever their clients are, and they pride themselves on their professional craft.
By their innocence and goodness, by their boundless capacity for forgiveness, and by the sheer power of their faith and hope, children redeem their parents, bringing out their best selves.
On some issues, Republicans and Democrats disagree so sharply that compromise is nearly impossible. Republicans are not going to support a cap-and-trade program to limit greenhouse gases, and Democrats won’t support a 1,000-mile wall on the border with Mexico.
From the standpoint of democratic legitimacy, it’s a problem if half the electorate, or close to it, declines to vote, not least because they may not feel much of a stake in the whole process.
Here’s a more controversial idea: In general, Democrats and progressives ought to allow Trump considerable room to choose his own employees – far more room than Republicans allowed during the Obama administration. Tit-for-tat is a dangerous game.
Today’s uses of the Second Amendment may invoke James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, but they have a lot more to do with interest-group politics.
Having a constant productive anxiety doesn’t mean that people are miserable and wailing but that people know they will be held accountable if things do not go right.
In psychology and behavioral economics, people have shown that if you just describe options in a certain way, or make some features of a situation salient, you can get people to do and even see what you want. You don’t have to be a Jedi to manipulate people’s attention.
In recent years, Republicans have argued that Congress is a more responsible policymaker than the executive branch. But when it comes to regulation, Congress is often much worse, and for just one reason: Executive agencies almost always focus on both costs and benefits, and Congress usually doesn’t.
In government, you’re not a writer, you’re an administrator.
A few weeks ago, I was at the gym, talking to a friend about politics. Overhearing the conversation, a young man – maybe 25 years old – interrupted to say, ‘Obama? He hasn’t done a single thing!’
I am a huge Red Sox fan.
Research shows that if people are talking and listening to like-minded others, they become more dogmatic, more unified, and more extreme. Personalized Facebook experiences are a breeding ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication across political lines and, ultimately, for extremism.
Masterful politicians and effective agents of change tend to succeed by singling out and making salient some aspect of a nation’s self-understanding, sparking a sense of recognition – and ultimately moving voters in their favor. Obama made it into an art form.
I would reject the distinction between a Keynesian moment and a behavioral moment.
When government programs aren’t working, those on the Left tend to support more funding, while those on the Right want to scrap them altogether. It is better to ask whether the problem is complexity and poor design. We can solve those problems – sometimes without spending a penny.
I love Richard Thaler’s ‘Quasi Rational Economics.’ A collection of some of his most interesting and inventive essays, the real foundation of behavioral economics.
