Quotes from Cass R. Sunstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People are not, of course, perfectly rational. No reader of Shakespeare, Dickens, or Joyce, or observer of daily life, is unaware of this point.

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

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

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

Partyism certainly isn't as horrible as racism; no one is enslaved or turned into a lower caste. But according to some measures, partyism now exceeds racism. In

In 1960, just 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel "displeased" if their child married outside their political party.5 By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 and 33 percent, respectively—far higher than the percentage of people who would be "displeased" if their child married someone with a different skin color.

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

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

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

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