Cass Sunstein's nomination to be head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has been approved by the Senate in a 57-40 vote. Sunstein is one of the nation's leading scholars on regulatory issues, and there is no question that he is well-qualified for the job. At the same time, I also think that Sunstein is wrong about a great many important issues, especially in the field of constitutional law.
That said, I believe that the conservative opponents of Sunstein's confirmation are missing the fact that most of his really controversial views have little connection to the office he was nominated for. On the regulatory issues covered by OIRA, Sunstein is actually less statist and relatively more sympathetic to free market approaches than are most other liberal Democrats. For example, in his book Nudge, Sunstein urges policies that are less coercive and paternalistic than those promoted by the existing regulatory state. Sunstein also is aware of the serious public choice problems with regulation, which he has written about in several publications. Obviously, he is still far more supportive of regulation than I am. But the relevant comparison from a libertarian point of view is that between Sunstein and anyone else likely to be appointed to the same position by Obama.
It's also worth pointing out that Sunstein's nomination has been attacked by pro-regulatory groups on the left, and that socialist Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders was among those who voted against confirmation (as did the strongly anti-free market Virgina Senator James Webb). In my view, Sunstein's left-wing opponents had a better grasp of the true significance of his nomination than his conservative ones.
Apart from Sanders, I suspect there weren't actually any no votes from the left, though. It's possible Webb voted against Sunstein due to an opposition to markets, as you imply, but I think it much more likely that he voted no purely to bolster his cultural pro-gun credentials. The same seems likely for Begich, Lincoln, Nelson, and Pryor, all Democrats who make a pro-gun platform a central part of their persona.
Puh-leez.
I'm not particularly pro animal rights, but this seems well within the competence of the States to legislate under their general police powers.
Actually, I have a dog who is an insufferable snob and who thinks she owns us. We are likely to be sued by her for the steak on our plates!
So much for a science based agenda. As I understand it, he would prohibit animals from being used in medical research.
Somehow, I can't drum up much of a feeling that all is well with the world with this loon in power. If this is good because anyone else Obama picks would be even worse, that is scant praise and a true damnation of Obama's personnel policies.
On another note, is there any dumber pejorative than "moonbat"? Insults don't make sense if nobody understands the word except the dregs at freerepublic. For the sake of equivalency, I'll note that "rethuglican" and the like are just also surefire markers that the speaker is a dolt.
If so, I remain skeptical, but I'm down for a test-run.
That is not, however, an endorsement of Sunstein, who I regard as a statist turd only slightly less fragrant than Jack Balkin. I think Ilya is far, far too kind in his assessment of Nudge, which proceeded from the flatly idiotic premise that elites can objectively assess what's best for people, and moved on from there to argue for coating authoritarianism in the chocolate of "choice architecture" to make it go down smoother.
Discuss.
If this is true, Obama has made a disappointing choice, adn those who accuse him of 'more of the same' have a point.
Perhaps if you frame Nudge in that sense. I read it as having the premise that people's brains tend to suffer from systematic flaws, that can be known by demonstrated by data, and that systems should be designed rationally with people's irrationality in mind. Besides, much of the book's thesis concerns how there is no 'null' case, and that there must be SOME form of choice architecture.
To draw from the example in the opening of the book - once you find out that in a school cafeteria, children are likely to reach for food at eye level regardless of what kind of food it is, what do you put on the shelf that stands at eye level? The healthiest food? The most profitable food? Allow the suppliers to bid on premium placement? Random lottery? Once you know that the bias exists, you will have to make a choice on what to do with that information.
You may, of course, argue that we don't know for certain which foods are healthier than which. In fact, what is healthiest for one child is probably not healthiest for another child (imagine 2 children, each with different nutrient deficiencies). However, that doesn't change the fact that we can approach policymaking (shelf placement in this case) with some kind of utilitarian statistical calculus. If I'm 80% confident that carrots are healthier than french fries for 90% of the children in the school, then it will be better for more people if carrots (and not fries) are placed on the eye-level shelf.
It isn't a matter of "elites" knowing what's best for people. It's a matter of policymakers taking the psychology of choice into consideration when making policy. After all, policymakers will make policy regardless.
But that's the point. You yourself concede that they are irrational - they reach for the eye-level food. Someone has to decide what is at eye-level. The only choice we have is who is to make that decision - twinkie sellers or those with some reasonable, albeit imperfect, notion of what foods are healthy.
No, I think he proceeds from the assumption that people are pretty shitty at making decisions and elites are pretty shitty at making decisions but there are some ways to combine them to produce, on the whole, a slightly less shitty decision-making process.
Did you read the entire book? He devotes one chapter to advocating school vouchers, another to allowing freedom of contract in marriage (something that won't go down well with conservatives but will with libertarians) and yet another to allowing patients to sign contracts with their doctors forfeiting their rights to sue for medical malpractice. His position on these issues is pretty much libertarian full-stop, not "libertarian paternalist."
Regarding the first half of the book, do you have empirical evidence to dispute the claims they make about how people make choices? For instance, there is the evidence that if presented with two mutual funds for investment, people will tend to split their money between the two regardless of what those funds are. The list of choices you provide people therefore weighs very heavily on what people actually invest in. Do you dispute that investment professionals have a better idea of how to achieve a diversified investment portfolio than the average person?
Neurodoc, as I explained, investment professionals "have a better idea of how to achieve a diversified investment portfolio than the average person." I didn't say anything about active management versus passive management. It was about professional management versus no management. Commenters on this blog may have trouble understanding that many ordinary people really do need to be actively persuaded by a professional not to invest their entire life savings in Google stock or in T-bills.
Again, my point was extremely simple. Suppose you present an ordinary investor with the following options:
A. S&P 500 index fund
B. 50/50 bond and stock index fund
Many people will allocate half of their money to A and half to B. If you change option B to a pure bond fund, many of those same people will still allocate half their money to A and half to B. No investment professional would make this mistake but the evidence (as recounted in Nudge based on experimental and quasi-experimental settings) is that most ordinary people simply do not understand portfolio diversification. The same person will achieve either a 75% equity/25% bond mix or a 50% equity/50% bond mix based purely on the choices they are presented.
Instead of looking at the constituents of each fund and deciding what portfolio is right for them, most people just follow a simple rule of thumb of splitting their money equally among the options. This strategy can be disastrous depending on what options are presented.
Fourteen Bush executive nomimations were filibustered:
Congress, Year, Name, Position, Cloture Invoked/Withdrawn, Outcome
107th, 2002 Richard H. Carmona Surgeon General invoked confirmed
108th, 2003 Michael O. Leavitt Admin. EPA withdrawn confirmed
108th, 2003 Thomas C. Dorr Undersecy. of Agriculture for Rural Development and Board Member, Commodity Credit Corporation rejected no final vote
109th, 2005 Thomas C. Dorr Undersecy of Agriculture for Rural Development withdrawn confirmed
109th, 2005 John R. Bolton U.N. Representative rejected no final vote
109th, 2005 Stephen L. Johnson EPA Admin.invoked confirmed
109th, 2005 Robert J. Portman U.S. Trade Rep. vitiated confirmed
109th, 2006 Gordon England Deputy Secretary of
Defense withdrawn confirmed
109th, 2006 Eric S. Edelman Under Secy. of Defense
for Policy withdrawn confirmed
109th, 2006 Benjamin A. Powell General Counsel, Office of
the Director of National Intelligence withdrawn confirmed
109th, 2006 Richard Stickler Assistant Secretary of Labor
for Mine Safety and Health withdrawn no final vote
109th, 2006 Dorrance Smith Assistant Secretary of
Defense withdrawn confirmed
109th, 2006 Andrew von Eschenbach FDA Commissioner invoked confirmed
109th, 2006 Dirk Kempthorne Secy. Interior invoked confirmed
Source: Cloture Attempts on Nominations, CRS Report RL32878, March 30, 2009, Table 4.
This completely misses the point. The real question is whether this decision making should be decentalized or centralized. Should the eye-level foods be Twinkies in one store, "high end appetizers" in another, "nachos" in a third, etc., or should it be "raw carrots" in EVERY store, by legal mandate?
Can you point out where exactly Cass Sunstein says he favors a legal mandate to micromanage the placement of food products within stores throughout the U.S.? He and Richard Thaler have said quite clearly that the empirical evidence shows the relative placement of products affects people's consumption and that an in-house cafeteria or convenience store at a company or government office should consider this if they want to promote individual health.
I haven't seen where they say there should be a centralized legal mandate but if they did in fact say this somewhere, please provide a reference.
Sorry. I believe all references to a centralized system to manage the placement of pigs-in-blankets in the Poughkeepsie corner store were only placed at eye-level of tvk, and not the rest of us unwashed masses.
There was concern above about "elites" making decisions for everyone else. The elite consensus on investing is very clear, though: ordinary investors should have a mix of no-load, low fee international equity index funds and -- depending on their cash flow needs, tolerance for risk and marginal tax rates -- bond funds of some kind or another. The point of Nudge is not to take these decisions away from people but simply to ensure that people don't get taken to the cleaners or make foolish decisions based on not fully understanding the decisions they are supposed to make.
Nudges are being used all the time by people who don't necessarily have the best interests of their targets in mind. Putting a check on that in some situations doesn't strike me as all that sinister.
For what it's worth, private for-profit industry uses the same principles in marketing and advertising. I don't have a big problem with McDonald's figuring out a way to increase the average amount of fries sold per customer, if their goal is to increase profits.
Similarly, if my goal is to reduce car accidents, or reduce pollution, or reduce crime, or increase health, then it wouldn't be very smart to completely ignore the literature on consumer psychology.
And yes, I strongly feel that in many cases elites have better decisionmaking abilities than average people. Like I said before, advertising and marketing depend heavily on this premise.
For another example, I think that the average health care provider has the responsibility to nudge his patients into healthier behavior. We can recognize that there must be some doctors who are more effective than others at convincing their patients to quit smoking. Are their patients who quit some kind of victim, in that they were nudged into something that they might not have otherwise done had their doctor been a less effective communicator? It seems that some people in this thread would say yes, and I think that position is absurd. They are still choosing to quit smoking. They understand why, and the doctor genuinely is looking out for the patients' best interests.
This is a pretty shoddy little passing swipe. I'm not sure it helps your case for Sunstein all that much (see Mark N.'s comment), and it's unsourced. Are we all just supposed to *know* that Webb is an evil anti-free-marketer? Or is it a reference to his support for card check legislation?
I guess even very intelligent law professors are not immune to easy shortcuts in their thinking and argument.
I spot checked your list, and ones I checked were not filibustered. Cloture is used to end debate, not just in the case of filibusters. For example, Richard Carmona's cloture vote was 98-0. Care to point out who filibustered him?
Hence why I agree with Ilya that he's immeasurably better for OIRA than anybody else Obama was likely to appoint.
Ricardo:
No. I dispute that investment professionals are qualified to determine whether a diversified investment portfolio is appropriate for any given individual without actually speaking to that individual and understanding his priorities, preferences, and goals.
Moreover, there's a pretty basic difference between investment professionals making assumptions about value to devise default options for customers who can go elsewhere, and government functionaries making assumptions about value to devise default options for citizens who can't.
Indeed. Which is why government functionaries should never be nudging anybody.
Also, most of the Reps who filibustered were either on the record as saying filibusters of nominations were unconstitutional or were part of the Gang of 14. So, this is quite the turnabout for someone so eminently qualified.
It takes a peculiar view of the world to conclude that inclining children to eat carrots rather than Twinkies is a point for objection (or even indifference) rather than applause.
Of course. It is a point for objection when a democrat says it. I hear Sunstein is injecting these carrots with Marxist juice.
And compared to some things they may actually qualify as health food.
Fixed that for you. Regardless of which side of the political spectrum presumes to tell me how I should live my life, my answer is the same: Fuck off.
Well, if I'm following the discussion correctly, isn't that exactly what it is?
You're utilizing consumer psychology principles to organize the placement of food items in order to achieve some agenda that the consumers themselves (or their relevant guardians) may or may not share.
If that's not directly telling people how to live their lives, it's certainly presuming that you know better than they do what's good for them, and subtly urging them to alter their behavior. And, again, my response is: Fuck off.
This is what I meant when I said above that Nudge is a recipe for coating authoritarianism in the chocolate of "choice architecture" to make it go down easier. It's a manifesto for self-righteous busybodies who think that their assumptions about value somehow deserve to be privileged.
Get it through your head that there is no objectively "correct" way to live; that people are going to make life choices of which you disapprove; and that when they do it's none of your goddamn business.
In fact, by your logic, we should celebrate the cafeteria administrator's "life choice" to ban twinkies from his cafeteria regardless and impose a regimented diet. How dare you assert that the cafeteria administrator's officious meddling is an "objectively incorrect way to live" or that we should somehow privilege your (libertarian) values about his (authoritarian) values.
[ Not that I don't generally agree with maximal freedom and libertarianism in general, but I must admit that letting individuals make value judgments for themselves is, itself, a value judgment about how others should live -- to wit, that they should not interfere in the decisions of others. Of course, in doing so, I insist in my right to interfere with the decisions of others insofar as their chosen course of actions involves interference in the rights of others.]
SOMETHING must be put at eye level - how should the school administrator decide what to put there, knowing that it will introduce a subtle pressure to choose that item. Are you proposing a lottery?
These decisions must be made - what to buy, how much to buy, and where to place it. "I will buy nothing" or "roll the dice" are still decisions. Fuck Off isn't a policy-making strategy, and a policy must be made (if even to make the decision that there will be no policy).
The employer has to set a default 401(k) enrollment plan, or place checkboxes in a certain order on the form for new employees. There is no way around this. Might as well do what the literature says is best without restricting choice. And yes, I specifically chose the example of the employer because most policies that affect our lives are made by non-government decisionmakers.
They have never done well in my personal experience. They are NOT experts in finance, they are salespeople. Period. They give you a false feeling of confidence in their advice which is much more harmful than if they just told you that they have no better idea of what is going to happen than your dog.
A question. With the possible exception of Middle School, and that does not apply across the board, whose eye level? There is a vast difference in the eye level of a first grader and a fifth grader. I should think that eye level is the bottom shelf for a first grader and the middle to top shelf for a fifth grader.
Who decides that and what impact does the disparate eye levels have on the ability to "nudge". Does it not render it meaningless in the end?
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