Showing results by author "Cass R. Sunstein" in All Categories

It's hard to imagine our world without its stars and celebrity geniuses—they become a part of our culture and history, seeming permanent and preordained. But as Cass Sunstein shows in this startling book, that is far from the case. Focusing on both famous and forgotten (or simply overlooked) artists and luminaries in music, literature, business, science, politics, and other fields, he explores why some individuals become famous and others don't, and offers a new understanding of the role of greatness, luck, and contingency in the achievement of fame.

From the best-selling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, the co-author of Nudge, and the author of You Are About to Make a Terrible Mistake! comes Noise, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments, and how to control both noise and cognitive bias.

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.

A deeply original celebration of George Lucas' masterpiece as it relates to history, presidential politics, law, economics, fatherhood, and culture by a Harvard legal scholar and former White House advisor.

Have you ever noticed that what is thrilling on Monday tends to become boring on Friday? Even exciting relationships, stimulating jobs, and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. People stop noticing what is most wonderful in their own lives. They also stop noticing what is terrible. They get used to dirty air. People grow to accept authoritarianism and take foolish risks. They become unconcerned by their own misconduct, blind to inequality, and are more liable to believe misinformation than ever before. But what if we could find a way to see everything anew?

Since the original publication of Nudge more than a decade ago, the title has entered the vocabulary of businesspeople, policy makers, engaged citizens, and consumers everywhere. The book has given rise to more than 200 "nudge units" in governments around the world and countless groups of behavioral scientists in every part of the economy. It has taught us how to use thoughtful "choice architecture" - a concept the authors invented - to help us make better decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society.

The different ways that social change happens, from unleashing to nudging to social cascades. How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely kept out of mainstream discourse; now there is no shortage of media outlets for them. In this book, with the help of behavioral economics, psychology and other fields, Cass Sunstein casts a bright new light on how change happens.

We've all had to fight our way through administrative sludge-filling out complicated online forms, mailing in paperwork, standing in line at the motor vehicle registry. This kind of red tape is a nuisance, but, as Cass Sunstein shows in Sludge, it can also also impair health, reduce growth, entrench poverty, and exacerbate inequality.

How much information is too much? Do we need to know how many calories are in the giant vat of popcorn that we bought at the movie theater? Do we want to know if we are genetically predisposed to a certain disease? Can we do anything useful with next week's weather forecast for Paris if we are not in Paris? In Too Much Information, Cass Sunstein examines the effects of information on our lives. Policymakers emphasize "the right to know", but Sunstein takes a different perspective, arguing that the focus should be on human well-being and what information contributes to it.

Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime.

We live in an era of tribalism, polarization, and intense social division - separating people along lines of religion, political conviction, race, ethnicity, and sometimes gender. How did this happen? In Conformity, Cass R. Sunstein argues that the key to making sense of living in this fractured world lies in understanding the idea of conformity - what it is and how it works - as well as the countervailing force of dissent.

The U.S. Supreme Court has eliminated the right to abortion and is revisiting other fundamental questions today—about voting rights, affirmative action, gun laws, and much more. Once-arcane theories of constitutional interpretation are profoundly affecting the lives of all Americans. In this brief and urgent book, Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein provides a lively introduction to competing approaches to interpreting the Constitution—and argues that the only way to choose one is to ask whether it would change American life for the better or worse.

We like to think we make decisions based on good reasoning–and that our doctors, judges, politicians, economic forecasters and employers do too. In this groundbreaking book, three world-leading behavioural scientists come together to assess the last great fault in our collective decision-making: noise. We all make bad judgements more than we think. Noise shows us what we can do to make better ones.

Have you ever noticed that what is thrilling on Monday tends to become boring on Friday? Even exciting relationships, stimulating jobs, and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. People stop noticing what is most wonderful in their own lives. They also stop noticing what is terrible. They stay in abusive relationships. People grow to accept authoritarianism and take foolish risks. They become unconcerned by their own misconduct, blind to inequality, and are more liable to believe misinformation than ever before. But what if we could find a way to see everything anew?

Dos médicos en la misma ciudad pueden dar diagnósticos diferentes a pacientes idénticos; dos jueces pueden dictar sentencias distintas ante delitos similares; nosotros mismos podemos decidir una cosa u otra según sea por la mañana o por la tarde, o según se acerque o no la hora de comer. Estos son ejemplos de ruido: el sesgo que conlleva variabilidad en juicios que deberían ser iguales.

En Un pequeño empujón, considerado ya un clásico y uno de los mejores libros sobre economía y política de las últimas décadas, Cass R. Sunstein y Richard H. Thaler, premio Nobel de Economía, observan cómo nuestras percepciones y decisiones dependen del modo en que se organizan ante nosotros las diferentes opciones. Gobiernos y empresas, pero también padres, profesores y médicos, se convierten así en una especie de «arquitectos de la elección».

In Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, the authors provide information on how the configuration of the places in which we make decisions influences our choices. The quantity that we eat depends on the size of our plate, the foods we pick in the cafeteria depends on where they are placed at an eye level. However, the same tendency also affects decisions with more significant consequences.

In this pathbreaking book, New York Times best-selling author Cass Sunstein asks us to rethink freedom. He reveals that freedom of choice isn't nearly enough. To be free, we must also be able to navigate life. Accessible and lively and drawing on perspectives from the humanities, religion, and the arts, as well as social science and the law, On Freedom explores a crucial dimension of the human condition that philosophers and economists have long missed - and reveals what it would take to make freedom real.

This sharp and engaging collection of essays by leading governmental scholar Cass R. Sunstein examines shifting understandings of what's normal and how those shifts account for the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the rise of gun rights, the response to COVID-19, and changing understandings of liberty. Prevailing norms include the principle of equal dignity, the idea of not treating the press as an enemy of the people, and the social unacceptability of open expressions of racial discrimination.

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes can make us poor and unhealthy. We often make bad decisions about education, personal finance, health care, family, and the environment.