(Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
Cass Sunstein famously loves Star Wars and reading this review of his new book, How Change Happens (affiliate link), made me think a lot about The Phantom Menace. While many — if not most — people deride the cinematic war crime that George Lucas vomited onto the screen to trample whatever goodwill his original films had garnered, I’ve always found a soft spot for it because without that film and its even more atrocious sequels, we would never have gotten Mr. Plinkett’s scathing and obsessively detailed disemboweling of the film. Whatever the merits or demerits of The Phantom Menace, its greatest contribution to the world is the response it produced. And maybe Darth Maul.
Writing in The New Republic, Aaron Timms has some thoughts on Cass Sunstein’s latest book and it’s fair to say his feelings about How Change Happens are not appreciably far off of Mr. Plinkett’s feelings about the prequels. And, in its own way, the review may actually be more important than the underlying book — a scathing antithesis that could prompt a much-needed synthesis. Hegelian dialectics at work, but with more sarcasm.
The thrust of the review is that Sunstein’s latest book is a rehash of his earlier work:
To call it his “new book” you’d have to accept that there is something meaningfully distinguishing it, beyond the physical barrier of its cover and binding, from his previous books—an assumption that in Sunstein’s case is easily disproven. Like an unstuck Mallarmé, Sunstein does not produce books so much as The Book, a single volume of ideas that’s recycled, with only minor variations, from title to title.
The rhetorical brutality is real and consistent throughout the review. He’s really bringing the heat here and it’s pretty hilarious.
He begins with some meandering thoughts on the rapid evolution of social norms on questions such as sexual harassment and smoking, which he attributes to (note the italics) norm entrepreneurs and availability entrepreneurs, a class of individuals the rest of the world might be tempted simply to call “leaders.”
Can we coin a term for this? I’m calling it “Gladwelling” and it’s the process of unnecessarily making up fancy terms for obvious stuff. This is, of course, also Gladwelling on my part.
This is, after all, the man… who followed up his 2008 blockbuster, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, which set out the case for using welfare-oriented behavioral prompts or “nudges” in the design of regulation, with 2014’s Why Nudge?, which valiantly addressed the question already answered six years earlier.
As someone who’s always appreciated Sunstein’s enthusiastic evangelism for technocracy, that stings. I’m a big fan of benevolent managerialism. I’m the sort of guy who legitimately thinks Disneyworld is the happiest place on Earth not because of the rides or parades but because they’ve worked out the most efficient placement of garbage cans to minimize litter. I f**king love that stuff. Timms feels the weakness of Sunstein’s thesis is that “[t]he world Sunstein legislates for is a world of reasonable individuals steeped in the minutiae of food safety regulation and brought to a peak of arousal by the promise of a clean data download.” Hell yeah he does, and I’m totally here for it.
An America concerned about regulating the dangerously bright headlights that every jackass seems to sport these days would be legitimately fantastic. Instead, we have raw milk and anti-vaxxers.
The problem is not that there Sunstein’s wrong but that he’s consistently overplaying his hand in these books. Regulatory incentives to promote the kind of practical governance that no one consciously thinks about but that in reality saves our lives at least 50 times a day really should be the most important stuff facing the country. But it’s not. Instead, we’re systematically stealing children from their families. Sunstein’s prescriptions are invaluable for building a functional bureaucracy and curing minor market failures, but can’t be so easily ported to solving the truly big struggles facing the country. Some of this is the fault of the publishing game — there’s always going to be pressure to stretch the thesis to its breaking point and give the audience a way to solve everything. But internment doesn’t really get solved by nudges.
When he does bother to refresh his research, the results often negate whatever point he’s trying to make. Arming people with information, Sunstein argues in How Change Happens, is the most effective nudge of all…. Among the apps brought to us thanks to this energizing bop of government and enterprise is eRecall…. But eRecall, to judge from its Twitter account and non-responsive website, died some time last year. If you want evidence of the effectiveness of governmental transparency in fostering innovation and promoting individual welfare: Please enjoy the example of this service that no longer exists. Correctives to the Sunstein worldview are rarely more than a Google search away.
But the failure of this program isn’t necessarily because it was a doomed endeavor, it’s that the administration is now managed by sycophants and incompetents who weaseled their way into the halls of power by stumbling to a degree from some warmed over segregation academy. If Sunstein’s problem is in overplaying his theories, the problem Timms brings to table is throwing too much of the blame for technocracy’s failures on the proposals themselves. Managerialism isn’t solving climate change — at least not without more aggressive accompanying policies — but as long as one keeps it in perspective it’s probably doing more practical good than much else.
Timms points to the failings of the Obama years — the way that they “ended with rising inequality, stalled social mobility, a spiraling climate disaster, and the Trumpian revolt against expertise” — and asks simply why Sunstein doesn’t address this legacy while fundamentally doubling down on the bedrock principles of the administration. It’s a pretty compelling question. Expertise is important in a lot of fields, yet the fetishizing of credentialism in the Clinton-Obama era spilled beyond “Ph.D.s drafting food safety regulation” into turning over the bond market to Harvard bros who earned their “expertise” by being lucky enough to have accidentally cashed in before the house of cards crumbled. When every dummy was an “expert” then experts seemed a lot less impressive.
Despite the promise of its title, How Change Happens works neither as narrative history nor as a sociology of change. But it does raise, however unintentionally, a more interesting question: Can liberals change? In recent months several economists and thinkers prominent in the Clinton-Obama years have publicly acknowledged the failings of neoliberalism and the need for a new policy direction on the left. On the evidence in these pages, a hair shirt will not be in Sunstein’s future. What emerges most powerfully here is the refusal of this proud steed of technocratic managerialism to engage with new circumstances, even as many in his own liberal camp reevaluate their priors.
Is it fair to lump Sunstein’s regulatory republic in with broader neo-liberal policy? He may rub elbows with the sort of investment bank liberals who thought letting Lehman Brothers gut the economy for the LOLZ was good policy, but Sunstein’s quest for regulation puts him at odds with many of the villains in this tale. Just because they all boast “market” solutions doesn’t necessarily put them all in the same camp. As much as I agree with Timms that politics requires bolder contestation, I think a political revolution is about as valuable to electrical wiring standards as managerialism is to climate change.
We tossed out Hegel earlier, so let’s come back to it. Whether or not one agrees with all of the charges leveled in this review, it’s the sort of antithesis that Sunstein’s work needs. It’s time for Sunstein to reboot a bit — to make his own personal The Force Awakens — and start explaining how the big ticket items get addressed. In the book, he suggests that managerialism can triumph over partisanship, but there’s not a real story for how the questions that really are profoundly moral get solved technocratically. At some point we have to have it out over child separation and algorithms aren’t going to get that done. How does his brand of managerialism address unintended consequences like the way nudges can be used to blunt support for more ambitious solutions? Is there a balance and where is it? When might the answer be a Shove.
Sunstein’s written a book on conspiracy theories and edited a work on rising authoritarianism. He knows he’s not living in a world of people like me who thoroughly enjoy data-driven regulation. He can produce the kind of nuanced synthesis of where his theory fits into the larger political climate. Hopefully, this New Republic review is that nudge.
The Sameness of Cass Sunstein [The New Republic]
Earlier: Talking About Star Wars With Cass Sunstein
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.