Cass Sunstein Interviewed by Tim Harford

One of the US’s leading legal scholars and former official in the Obama White House Professor Cass Sunstein uses behavioural economics, psychology and other disciplines to explain how social change happens and why social movements take off.

Why did women have to endure sexual harassment for so long before the recent rise of a movement against it? And why have white nationalist sentiments come to the fore after largely being kept out of mainstream discourse for so long? Sunstein says social norms can lead people to silence themselves and maintain an unpopular status quo until someone challenges them. He also discusses ‘nudges’ that can help promote change such as automatic enrolment in pension plans and ‘partyism’ where identification with one party can both fuel and block change.

Sunstein is Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. He was administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under the Obama administration. Obama said of him: “It’s an honour to call you a friend, not only because you are a towering intellect, but more importantly because you are a good man.”
Sunstein says he ‘has long been concerned with how to promote enduring constitutional ideals – freedom, dignity, equality, self-government, the rule of law’. He is a winner of the prestigious Holberg Prize for outstanding contributions to research. Here he talks to journalist and writer Tim Harford, who writes the Undercover Economist column for the FT and is a former leader writer for the FT.

‘Sunstein is one of the great intellectuals of our time . . . . His work is rigorous, yet accessible, and marked by an extraordinary concern for human welfare as well as a commitment to an enlightened public discourse’ Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta, chair of the Holberg Committee

Presented by MIT Press