Last year, Mr. Sunstein joined the Harvard faculty, where his wife, Samantha Power, also teaches.
Cass Sunstein, an adviser, has written extensively about which life-saving rules are most cost-effective.
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As important, Mr. Sunstein focuses on final rules, when the regulatory future matters as much.
Halpern and senior policy-making colleagues often reference Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.
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Sunstein argue that a lack of feedback on activities like pollution ensures the continuation of harmful decision-making.
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Mr. Obama believes in "doing law in a way that's realistically based on human behavior, " Mr. Sunstein said.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have made a convincing case about the importance of nudging behavior towards desired ends.
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Even so, many environmental, health and consumer activists inside and outside the administration felt that Sunstein was insufficiently radical.
Cass Sunstein, now heading the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is trying to reduce unnecessary regulations in our economy.
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This means that if Congress tells, say, the Securities and Exchange Commission to write a new rule, it doesn't enter Mr. Sunstein's tally.
The Sunstein proposal might reduce business costs at the margin and could even end up eliminating regulations whose societal costs exceed their benefits.
Thaler and Sunstein maintain that better information and disclosure can strongly motivate consumers to behave in ways better for both themselves and others.
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Backward-looking analyses like Mr. Sunstein's ignore the undefined and discretionary future rules that are convulsing health care or the EPA's industrial planning in energy.
Cass Sunstein, professor of law and political science at the University of Chicago, has read them all, and he joins us from the studio there.
Its regulations tsar, Cass Sunstein, who announced his resignation recently, made an effort to rescind redundant and onerous red tape, especially for the energy industry.
Professor CASS SUNSTEIN (University of Chicago): Thank you so much.
Mr. Sunstein said the Earned Income Tax Credit, which provides money to the working poor, was "a way of lifting people out of poverty" superior to old-style welfare payments.
But Mr. Sunstein's numbers are even more misleading because they only include the rules that his office reviews while excluding the prolific "independent" agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission.
And this builds on the efforts that we have here in the United States, led by Cass Sunstein at OIRA, where we're eliminating billions of dollars in costs from regulations.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year, Mr. Sunstein said Mr. Obama was intrigued by "law and behavioral economics" as an approach to regulation that would avoid ideological extremes.
Overall, however, "Bush had the uphill battle, " says the University of Chicago's Cass Sunstein, because he had to convince the Justices that they have a reason to insert themselves in a state matter.
To encourage people to enjoy the benefits of lunch, we need to change the lunch default rule with the kind of "libertarian paternalism" advocated by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book Nudge.
Mr. Sunstein, a prolific academic with wide-ranging interests, may be best known for advancing a field known as "law and behavioral economics" that seeks to shape law and policy around the way research shows people actually behave.
We have folks like Secretary Napolitano from Department of Homeland Security, and Cass Sunstein, who are going to be heading up our team, and making sure that these things go into effect in a way that benefits both the Canadian people and the American people.
The idea is to "nudge" (Cass Sunstein's catchword) consumers into making healthy choices by either restricting unhealthy ones (Michael Bloomberg's proposed ban on large sodas), mandating disclosure of information (the ObamaCare provision mandating calorie counts on chain-restaurant menus), or mandating the manner of disclosure (for example, requiring a product advertised as "90% fat-free" to be reciprocally labeled "10% fat").
Chief of Staff William Daley, who was brought in to help smooth relations with business, and Cass Sunstein, who heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, are said to have been sympathetic to the industry point of view that the rule was unnecessary and could impose too many costs in the midst of a struggling economy, according to people familiar with the matter.
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