Cass Sunstein

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pages: 399 words: 155,913

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, housing crisis, independent contractor, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, minimum wage unemployment, positional goods, price stability, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wealth creators

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.


pages: 256 words: 60,620

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

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.


pages: 434 words: 117,327

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

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?


pages: 654 words: 191,864

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book value, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demand response, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, index card, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, nudge unit, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Shai Danziger, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, union organizing, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

“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.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

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.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey

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?


pages: 500 words: 145,005

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

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.”

., 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

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deliberate practice, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, smart grid, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy

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.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

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

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

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.


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The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World by Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Paul Slovic

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, experimental economics, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kenneth Arrow, Loma Prieta earthquake, London Interbank Offered Rate, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Oklahoma City bombing, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, social discount rate, source of truth, statistical model, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

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.


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

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

, 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.”


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Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

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).


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The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

_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.


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Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

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.


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They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

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.


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

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

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.”


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Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

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.


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

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

“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.


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The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives by Lisa Servon

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, do well by doing good, employer provided health coverage, financial exclusion, financial independence, financial innovation, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, precariat, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

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.


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The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy by Tyler Cowen

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Flynn Effect, folksonomy, framing effect, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, informal economy, Isaac Newton, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, Naomi Klein, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tyler Cowen

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.


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The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

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?


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

airport security, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital Maoism, Google Glasses, hive mind, index card, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, large denomination, new economy, new new economy, Norman Mailer, online collectivism, Plato's cave, plutocrats, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

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.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

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.


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The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

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.


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Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

, 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.


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The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

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.”


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The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, complexity theory, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, endowment effect, feminist movement, framing effect, hindsight bias, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, the new new thing, Thomas Bayes, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

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.


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

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

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).


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

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

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.


pages: 350 words: 103,270

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

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delayed gratification, diversification, Edmond Halley, facts on the ground, fear index, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 240 words: 65,363

Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fail fast, food miles, gamification, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, information security, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, medical residency, Metcalfe’s law, microbiome, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sunk-cost fallacy, Tony Hsieh, transatlantic slave trade, Wayback Machine, éminence grise

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?


pages: 487 words: 151,810

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

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 by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

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.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

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, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

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 . . .


pages: 461 words: 128,421

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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

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.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

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.”


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

,” 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.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 316 words: 94,886

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

behavioural economics, billion-dollar mistake, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, loss aversion, Max Levchin, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, young professional

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.


pages: 168 words: 46,194

Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism by Cass R. Sunstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, energy security, framing effect, invisible hand, late fees, libertarian paternalism, loss aversion, nudge unit, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler

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.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

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.


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

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.


pages: 420 words: 100,811

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

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

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.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

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

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

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.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

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

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 383 words: 105,021

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

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.


pages: 370 words: 112,602

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cass Sunstein, charter city, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, experimental subject, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, land tenure, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, microcredit, moral hazard, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, tontine, urban planning

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.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

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

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

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.

., 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.


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

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

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.


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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

“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?


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

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey

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.


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

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

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.


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

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

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.

., 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).


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

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, continuous integration, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, endowment effect, equity premium, feminist movement, financial engineering, fixed income, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, index fund, invisible hand, late fees, libertarian paternalism, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, medical malpractice, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, pension reform, presumed consent, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Zipcar

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.


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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

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

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.


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Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

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.


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The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

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

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

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.


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

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

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.


pages: 542 words: 132,010

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

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.


pages: 281 words: 95,852

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

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

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

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.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

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

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

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.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

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

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

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.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

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.


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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

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.


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Money Moments: Simple Steps to Financial Well-Being by Jason Butler

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, happiness index / gross national happiness, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Steve Jobs, time value of money, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

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

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Columbine, content marketing, deskilling, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, game design, George Gilder, global village, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, no-fly zone, profit motive, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SimCity, slashdot, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, the market place, Y Combinator

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.


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Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

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.


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The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

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].


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Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

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.


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The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Chelsea Manning, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deskilling, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Minsky moment, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, performance metric, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Salesforce, school choice, scientific management, Second Machine Age, selection bias, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, WikiLeaks

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.


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Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

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.


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

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

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.

., 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.”


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Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

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).


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Data for the Public Good by Alex Howard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, Kickstarter, lifelogging, machine readable, Network effects, openstreetmap, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, social software, social web, web application

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.


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The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

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.


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Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

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.


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Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

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

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, crony capitalism, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Stephen Fry, Suez crisis 1956, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

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).


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Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

., (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, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

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.


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The Road to Character by David Brooks

Cass Sunstein, coherent worldview, David Brooks, desegregation, digital rights, Donald Trump, follow your passion, George Santayana, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, New Journalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, you are the product

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.


pages: 1,380 words: 190,710

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

air gap, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, bash_history, behavioural economics, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, continuous integration, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, DevOps, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, fear of failure, general-purpose programming language, Google Chrome, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, information security, Internet of things, Kubernetes, load shedding, margin call, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, NSO Group, nudge theory, operational security, performance metric, pull request, ransomware, reproducible builds, revision control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, self-driving car, single source of truth, Skype, slashdot, software as a service, source of truth, SQL injection, Stuxnet, the long tail, Turing test, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Valgrind, web application, Y2K, zero day

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.


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

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Mechanical Turk, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, Firefox, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, Internet of things, John von Neumann, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patient HM, prediction markets, RFID, sharing economy, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

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.


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Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty by Peter Singer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, Cass Sunstein, clean water, do well by doing good, end world poverty, experimental economics, Garrett Hardin, illegal immigration, Larry Ellison, Martin Wolf, microcredit, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Peter Singer: altruism, pre–internet, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, union organizing

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.


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Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

., 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.


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

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

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.


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The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, attribution theory, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, income per capita, job satisfaction, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, peak-end rule, positional goods, price anchoring, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, science of happiness, search costs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

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.


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The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

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?


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Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

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.


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Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

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.


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Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society by Cordelia Fine

"World Economic Forum" Davos, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, confounding variable, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, experimental economics, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Jeremy Corbyn, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, publication bias, risk tolerance, seminal paper

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.


The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

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.


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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, conceptual framework, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, Greenspan put, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Northern Rock, operational security, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, seigniorage, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

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).


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

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

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.


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Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

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.

., 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.


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The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

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.


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

Airbnb, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, David Brooks, Dunbar number, information retrieval, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, mirror neurons, planetary scale, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, sentiment analysis, social web, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, white flight

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.


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The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

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

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

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.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 426 words: 118,913

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet by Roger Scruton

An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, corporate social responsibility, demand response, Easter island, edge city, endowment effect, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, food miles, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, hobby farmer, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, market friction, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 409 words: 112,055

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

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.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

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.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

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.


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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

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.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

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.


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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, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

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.”


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The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

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.


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The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

., 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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, business logic, Cass Sunstein, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, IBM and the Holocaust, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, new economy, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl

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.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 243 words: 61,237

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

always be closing, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, Elisha Otis, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, out of africa, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 232 words: 70,361

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

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

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.”


pages: 227 words: 63,186

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson

Ben Horowitz, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, data science, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, functional programming, Google Earth, hive mind, Innovator's Dilemma, iterative process, Kanban, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no silver bullet, pull request, Richard Thaler, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, statistical model, systems thinking, the long tail, web application

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.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

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

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

., 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.


pages: 261 words: 70,584

Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy by Gregory Brandon Salsbury

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, buy and hold, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, hindsight bias, housing crisis, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mass affluent, Maui Hawaii, mental accounting, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, National Debt Clock, negative equity, new economy, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, Yogi Berra

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.


pages: 252 words: 70,424

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

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.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

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.


pages: 276 words: 71,950

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Cass Sunstein, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fixed income, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, Oklahoma City bombing, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 241 words: 78,508

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

affirmative action, business process, Cass Sunstein, constrained optimization, experimental economics, fear of failure, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, old-boy network, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social graph, Susan Wojcicki, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

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.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

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

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

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.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

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

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

[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.


pages: 257 words: 77,030

A Manual for Creating Atheists by Peter Boghossian

Cass Sunstein, Easter island, Filter Bubble, Henri Poincaré, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, selection bias, Socratic dialogue, stem cell, the scientific method

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.


pages: 236 words: 77,098

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

3D printing, 4chan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Cass Sunstein, death of newspapers, en.wikipedia.org, Internet of things, Joan Didion, John Gruber, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Carr, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The future is already here

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.”


pages: 253 words: 75,772

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

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

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.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 302 words: 73,946

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

Airbnb, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bounce rate, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, content marketing, Debian, Firefox, gamification, if you build it, they will come, IKEA effect, imposter syndrome, Internet Archive, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, lateral thinking, Mark Shuttleworth, Minecraft, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, planetary scale, pull request, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Scaled Composites, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Virgin Galactic, Y Combinator

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?


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

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.


pages: 398 words: 86,023

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

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

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.


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

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).


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

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).


pages: 337 words: 86,320

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

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

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.”


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

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.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

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.


pages: 296 words: 82,501

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

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.


pages: 281 words: 79,958

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

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

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.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

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.


pages: 305 words: 89,103

Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough by Sendhil Mullainathan

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive load, computer vision, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, happiness index / gross national happiness, impulse control, indoor plumbing, inventory management, knowledge worker, late fees, linear programming, mental accounting, microcredit, p-value, payday loans, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

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.


pages: 401 words: 93,256

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

‘. . . 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.


pages: 384 words: 89,250

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

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.


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

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.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

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?’


pages: 369 words: 90,630

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

affirmative action, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, drone strike, friendly fire, invisible hand, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, pirate software, Richard Thaler, school choice, social intelligence, the scientific method, theory of mind

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.


pages: 354 words: 91,875

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

banking crisis, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, delayed gratification, Dunning–Kruger effect, Easter island, game design, impulse control, lifelogging, loss aversion, low interest rates, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, phenotype, Richard Thaler, social contagion, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Tragedy of the Commons, Walter Mischel

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.


pages: 307 words: 94,069

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate social responsibility, en.wikipedia.org, fundamental attribution error, impulse control, Jeff Hawkins, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Piper Alpha, placebo effect, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

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.


pages: 209 words: 89,619

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

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.


pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

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.


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

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

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.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

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

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

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.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

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.


pages: 381 words: 101,559

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

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.


pages: 338 words: 100,477

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

availability heuristic, Bernie Madoff, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, credit crunch, different worldview, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, equity premium, fundamental attribution error, haute couture, job satisfaction, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Milgram experiment, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile

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.


pages: 296 words: 87,299

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

behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, clean water, failed state, financial innovation, financial intermediation, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, M-Pesa, mental accounting, microcredit, moral hazard, profit motive, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, transaction costs

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.”


pages: 331 words: 96,989

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, death from overwork, drug harm reduction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch

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.


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

Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, content marketing, creative destruction, digital divide, Free Software Foundation, future of journalism, George Akerlof, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Louis Daguerre, machine readable, new economy, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, software patent, synthetic biology, transaction costs

[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.


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Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climategate, collapse of Lehman Brothers, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, immigration reform, microaggression, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, obamacare, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, source of truth, systems thinking

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?”


pages: 535 words: 103,761

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation by Frank Furedi

1960s counterculture, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, behavioural economics, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, lockdown, New Urbanism, nocebo, nudge theory, nudge unit, scientific management, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, work culture

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.


pages: 383 words: 108,266

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

air freight, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, computer vision, corporate governance, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, endowment effect, financial innovation, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, IKEA effect, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Murray Gell-Mann, payday loans, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair

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).


pages: 316 words: 105,384

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Cass Sunstein, high batting average, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, placebo effect, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, systematic trading, the new new thing, the scientific method, upwardly mobile

—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.”


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

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.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

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

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

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?


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

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.


pages: 375 words: 105,067

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, game design, greed is good, high net worth, impulse control, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, Kevin Roose, London Whale, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, éminence grise

“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/.


pages: 445 words: 105,255

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

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 416 words: 112,268

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 351 words: 112,079

Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and the Truth About Dieting by Giles Yeo

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, delayed gratification, Drosophila, Easter island, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, nudge theory, post-truth, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, twin studies, Wall-E, zoonotic diseases

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.


pages: 338 words: 104,815

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

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

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.


pages: 388 words: 119,492

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, Cass Sunstein, correlation does not imply causation, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, mass incarceration

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.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

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.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

” • 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.”


pages: 393 words: 115,217

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

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

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.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

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

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

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.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

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

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

“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.”


pages: 384 words: 118,572

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

Abraham Maslow, attribution theory, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, endowment effect, epigenetics, Higgs boson, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, lake wobegon effect, lateral thinking, libertarian paternalism, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, post-work, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, seminal paper, side project, Skype, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method, tulip mania, Walter Mischel

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.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

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

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

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?


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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, clean water, commoditize, computer age, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, fail fast, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, hype cycle, informal economy, Internet of things, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Minecraft, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, SimCity, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Hackers Conference, Travis Kalanick

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.


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

., 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.


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

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

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.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

. ## 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.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

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.


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Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

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.


pages: 443 words: 125,510

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities by John J. Mearsheimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, Clive Stafford Smith, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal world order, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs

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.


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The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

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.


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Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

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.


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The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

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.


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The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

“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.


pages: 602 words: 120,848

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

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

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.


pages: 465 words: 124,074

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda by John Mueller

airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, classic study, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Doomsday Clock, energy security, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, side project, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Timothy McVeigh, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

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.


pages: 533 words: 125,495

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

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

active measures, asset allocation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, information asymmetry, it's over 9,000, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market friction, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, p-value, payday loans, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, search costs, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked

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.


pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

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?


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 444 words: 138,781

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

affirmative action, Cass Sunstein, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, dumpster diving, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, housing justice, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jobless men, Kickstarter, late fees, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, payday loans, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, statistical model, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, working poor, young professional

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.


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

(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.


pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

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.


pages: 420 words: 130,503

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards by Yu-Kai Chou

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, functional fixedness, game design, gamification, growth hacking, IKEA effect, Internet of things, Kickstarter, late fees, lifelogging, loss aversion, Maui Hawaii, Minecraft, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, software as a service, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

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.”


pages: 460 words: 131,579

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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

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.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

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

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

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?


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 562 words: 153,825

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

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.


pages: 577 words: 149,554

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

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

‘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.


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

“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.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

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.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

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

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

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?


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

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.”


pages: 523 words: 154,042

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

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

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.


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

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.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

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

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

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.


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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

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.


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The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

“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.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

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

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

” —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.’


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

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?


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Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

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.


pages: 741 words: 199,502

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, correlation coefficient, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, emotional labour, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, meritocracy, meta-analysis, nudge theory, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, public intellectual, publication bias, quantitative hedge fund, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, school vouchers, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, universal basic income, working-age population

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 Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

banks create money, barriers to entry, book value, British Empire, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, cotton gin, creative destruction, desegregation, double helix, financial innovation, Joseph Schumpeter, manufacturing employment, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration

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.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

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.


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The Irrational Bundle by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business process, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, compensation consultant, computer vision, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, end world poverty, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, first-price auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, name-letter effect, new economy, operational security, Pepsi Challenge, Peter Singer: altruism, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, second-price auction, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, social contagion, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, young professional

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).


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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

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.