New Podcast Release: Cass Sunstein
In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we speak with legal scholar, behavioural economist, author, and former White House official, Cass Sunstein.
Cass is widely known for pioneering the concept of “nudges”, subtle policy tools that preserve freedom while helping people make better choices. In this conversation, we explore how nudging can be used ethically, where it crosses the line into manipulation, and why behavioural science still holds promise for improving lives.
We discuss his new book, Climate Justice, the moral and economic arguments for global emissions responsibility, and why wealthy nations owe a debt to those most vulnerable to climate change. Cass also previews his upcoming work on animal welfare, arguing that social cascades and our willingness to face uncomfortable truths can drive meaningful change.
He reflects on his time in government, his belief in pragmatic optimism, and his learning about living well through decades of public service, scholarship – and high-level squash.
Below are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.
On Nudges vs. Manipulation
KASIA: You've argued that nudging can help people make better decisions while preserving their freedom of choice. But as these interventions become more sophisticated, how do we ensure they remain ethically defensible? Who decides what counts as a better decision? And how can we guard against a quiet drift toward manipulation?
CASS: That’s a great question, thank you. There's a lot in it. I think we need a bill of rights for nudging. We elicited from a survey, well over a dozen nations, a kind of human consensus on what nudges are ethical. The human consensus might not survive critical reflection, but it's a good start.
People don't like being nudged in ways that worsen their lives. They are against nudges that are inconsistent with their interests or values. If nudges reflect the nudger's self-interest, people start to get nervous. People don't like them if they are inconsistent with deeply held constitutional norms. That applies to both constitutional capital-C and small-C nations that don't have constitutions.
If nudges are manipulative, people get quite nervous. However, the ordinary understanding of the manipulation of data is narrow. If there’s a quick flash on the screen that you don't know you're seeing that says, “stop smoking,” people don't like that because it doesn’t appeal to your capacity for deliberation. If there are fake projections onto a road to get you to drive in various ways, people get nervous because they’re being tricked. That's maybe a folk understanding of manipulation.
We need an account of manipulation, and I have a book on that topic coming out soon. It’s not clear that there's a unitary definition of manipulation that captures all the cases, but let's say that many cases involve trickery or covert influences that prevent people from exercising deliberative and reflective choice.
Manipulation often occurs when the manipulator doesn’t respect people’s capacity to make a deliberative choice. Now, if we’re utilitarian, like Peter, we might think manipulation is bad when it’s bad because the manipulator is unlikely to have the welfare of the chooser at heart or isn’t likely to have the information that the chooser does. On utilitarian grounds, that’s what’s wrong with coercion and deception.
If we’re Kantians or deontologists who want to respect persons, then manipulation also has the same problem as coercion and deception; it doesn’t treat people as subjects but as objects. So, this is a long way of saying that they are manipulative if nudges fail to respect people’s capacity for deliberative and reflective choice.
A GPS device is the furthest thing from manipulation, unless it's a very unusual, self-conscious GPS device. That would be science fiction, a Stephen King novel. It wouldn’t be terrifying, just absurd science fiction.
KASIA: GPS itself may not, but programs or apps based on it, such as maps, already use information in specific ways. They might get you to certain restaurants, not allowing you to see all of them, and so on.
CASS: That could be. There’s an economist named Ed Glaeser at Harvard. I was once at his house, and for about 18 months, my GPS decided I had to go to Ed Glaeser’s house wherever I went. Now, if I’d gone to his house every time, he’s a good friend, but I think he wouldn’t have appreciated it very much. I think it was a broken GPS device, not a manipulative one.
But you’re right. If a GPS device is designed so that when you say “restaurant,” it chooses one that’s paying for the privilege of being the selected one, regardless of the driver's or passenger's well-being, then the capacity for reflective and deliberative choice is being bypassed.
There’s a category called “dark patterns” that the U.S. government, under President Biden, has been keen to regulate. These are exactly the kinds of things you’re talking about: auto-enrolling people in expensive, unhelpful services or nudging people toward costly outcomes that don’t do any good. I wouldn’t want to call those nudges; I’d call them dark patterns. They don’t fit the normative definition of nudging. But it’s fair to say they’re bad nudges.
On Climate Justice and Moral Responsibility
KASIA: Who is the world’s biggest wrongdoer regarding climate change now?
CASS: On an annual basis, it’s China. In terms of the stock over humanity’s lifetime, it’s the United States. I think the word “wrongdoer” is not terrible, but I prefer a term like “contributor,” because the state of mind, at least of people long ago, wasn’t evil or anything; it wasn’t known what they were doing. But now there’s knowledge.
KASIA: We've had that knowledge for quite a while, right? So that’s why I use that word, because it’s hard to justify.
CASS: The simple point is: if the United States, China, or Australia is emitting greenhouse gases, it's imposing a cost on its people and the world. The moral claim is that the United States' imposition of a cost on the rest of the world is morally wrong. It should be stopped, or reduced, or compensation should be paid.
The social cost of carbon is just a way of saying that we will take fully on board, if it’s the global number, the cost we impose on others in deciding our policies. And that’s the right thing to do. It’s not an act of charity. If you’ve been hurting somebody, you should probably stop and pay them for the damage you caused.
KASIA: In climate justice, you say that the key question is: who owes what to whom? I wanted to ask you about your answer.
CASS SUNSTEIN: If we can stick with the social cost of carbon, I think that’s the easiest way in. Why should a nation consider the harm it does to others when deciding its policy? There are two reasons. One is moral cosmopolitanism. The other is domestic self-interest.
The moral cosmopolitanism view is that how much you count doesn’t depend on where you live. Someone in the Central African Republic isn’t worth less than someone in Paris. An injury done to someone in the Central African Republic is no less of a concern because they live there. So, if someone or a nation does harm through greenhouse gas emissions, it’s morally irrelevant where the affected people live. That’s the moral cosmopolitan argument.
It isn’t necessarily an argument that foreign aid is morally obligatory, though I also think that. It’s the idea that foreign harm is morally prohibited, and that’s a much less contentious view. So, that’s why the global social cost of carbon is the right number, not the domestic one.
The second reason, domestic self-interest, is a little more popular these days in wealthy nations. If the U.S., Canada, or Australia uses only the domestic number, it contributes to a norm from which each country will ultimately lose. We're in big trouble if all countries use only their domestic numbers. China would scale back only to the extent necessary to prevent harm to China. It wouldn’t consider the damage done to the rest of the world. The same goes for Australia, the U.S., Germany, Brazil, you name it.
Then it becomes a horror show. We don’t solve the prisoner’s dilemma. However, a global number can help establish a norm from which all nations benefit. And that’s not just hopeful thinking. When nations use the global number, it creates a cascade effect that others follow. That’s what’s happening now.
You might think we shouldn’t do this unilaterally; we need an agreement. That would be better. But the Paris Agreement shows how hard that is. Yet, in recent years, we’ve seen unilateral use of the global number create a process that feeds on itself. That’s what we often observe.
Hooray for moral and domestic self-interest reasons to use a global social cost of carbon. It benefits people today. Even if we don’t solve climate change, if we dent it even a little, the damage done is reduced. People won’t get sick or die.
The big question, who owes what to whom, is also concerned with the past emission problem. On corrective justice and distributive justice grounds, the contributors owe something to the people suffering now or who are vulnerable to future suffering.
We know the beneficiaries of greenhouse gas emissions: wealthy countries that got wealthy from emissions-heavy activity. We know which nations are particularly vulnerable, and they’re not the wealthy ones. So, it’s a perfect, horrific storm: the wrongdoers, not the worst term, are the beneficiaries, and the innocents are at greatest risk.
The first-order judgment is that wealthy nations, on corrective and distributive justice grounds, owe something to the vulnerable.
On Personal Philosophy and Optimism
PETER: My entire career has assumed that people are sufficiently rational to be influenced by arguments, including moral arguments that might have somewhat demanding implications. But it's only to a limited extent. I think it does have an influence, but not the influence that one would want.
And with climate change, of course, it gets worse constantly. I suppose the same is somewhat true with animal liberation; the number of animals being abused, particularly in factory farms, continues to grow. But regarding climate change, it seems we are headed in a very bad direction if we can’t change course fairly soon.
CASS: A couple of notes. Amos Tversky, one of the founders of modern behavioural science, said, “I’m an optimist, and it’s rational to be an optimist, because if you’re a pessimist, you suffer twice.”
PETER: Right.
CASS: That’s why maybe Kahneman said he’s a pessimist, but never disappointed. I knew Kahneman very well, and he was a hero. But on this issue, I stand with Tversky.
Let me say a few words on this. When I worked for President Obama, sometimes the problems, including climate change, seemed so daunting, and our solutions so partial, that when we would talk to him, his advisors would be a little ashamed of ourselves.
And he did this repeatedly. He’d look around at his less-than-proud team and say, “You know what? Better is good.” He said that repeatedly. I even saw him a few weeks ago, and he said again, “Better is good.”
We can’t solve climate change completely, but we might be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And if we do that, and the social cost of carbon is $200, then we’ve provided the economic equivalent of a pretty big number through a small measure. That number probably lowballs the damage that has been reduced.
Even though things aren’t great concerning climate, if you look at what the world has done in the past 25 years, it’s incredible. The people who wanted more aren't celebrating, of course, but if you look at what’s been done, energy efficiency requirements in Europe and the U.S., the movement away from coal in North America, the rise of electric cars, the reduction in business-as-usual contributions, it’s amazing.
That happened through voluntary actions, consumer pressure, and government mandates, which we now take for granted. But they’re staggering achievements. Because of the magnitude of the climate problem, celebrating might seem premature or ridiculous. But still, there’s a lot to celebrate.
I compare this with the Montreal Protocol, which succeeded in tackling depletion of the ozone layer. That global problem was solved through similar means: consumer pressure, perceived moral requirements, companies taking action, innovation, and governments. And the people who did it were Thatcher and Reagan, environmental heroes.
We don’t have a Thatcher and Reagan for climate today. But we’ll see about tomorrow.
On Government vs. Academia
PETER: I wanted to ask you how you compare life working in the administration with life as a law professor. You did work briefly in the Justice Department when you were younger, right? So, you were a practising lawyer, in that sense.
Do you think the variety and diversity contribute to how well your life has been lived? Or do you think that because you suggested it wasn’t quite so enjoyable being in the Obama administration, perhaps, as being a law professor, although you might have done a lot of good for the world, was it personally better not to do that? How do you think about those things?
CASS: A couple of things. The experience of working for President Obama was one of the greatest of my life. I wasn’t skipping to work daily, the hours were long, and some of the work was management. But I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. It was incredibly meaningful, even if not as delightful.
Here’s a story. There was a professor in the Obama administration. I asked him the question you asked. He was a very high-level economist in the White House. He said, “Cass, here’s the difference: at Yale, where I taught, people would come into my office and ask for the solution to an economic problem. I’d give them the solution, and they’d say, ‘Thank you very much, that was helpful.’”
“In government, people ask me for the solution to an economic problem. I do my best. And they look at me and say, ‘You’re an asshole.’”
That captures part of it. In academic life, the goal is to have an original idea, to move the ball forward. In government, the goal is to solve a problem. There’s no premium on originality. What are you doing if it’s original and interesting but not usable?
I worked for four years in the Biden administration at the Department of Homeland Security. Climate change resilience was part of my remit. Reducing sludge and administrative burdens was something I spent almost every day on. That was great. It was good fortune that I got to do that.
As you said, it has been meaningful to switch between trying to be creative, which I find the best but also hard, and trying to solve a problem, which is less interesting but super important.
On Animal Welfare Cascades
PETER: You've mentioned my work about animals, but you also told me before we got online that your next book will be about non-human animals. I'm curious, and I'm sure many of our listeners will be curious about what you will write about. What do you have to say in that area?
CASS: Thank you for that and for the inspiration over many years. The current plan is to write a book whose subtitle is The Rise and Rise of Animal Welfare Cascades. The title might be Animals Matter.
We’re seeing cascades of focus on animal welfare, and they’re rising and rising. The reasons are identifiable. One is that whenever one person comes out of the closet and says, “I care about animal welfare,” they amplify a signal by which they are influenced, and the volume rises. Just as we've seen an attack on affirmative action in the United States and the rise of #MeToo all over the world, we’re seeing something similar happening in place after place with respect to animal welfare.
The second point is that as it becomes easier to act based on one's moral convictions, people do it more. It's increasingly easy not to eat meat or engage in activities conducive to animal welfare. That needs to be amplified and made visible. It’s connected with a bunch of behavioural strategies for change.
The third point is that, as you’ve done more than anyone to clarify, if people see something off-screen, their moral convictions get triggered. We have data on information seeking and avoidance generally. People don’t want information about whether it will make them sad or make their lives less pleasant. This applies to animal suffering.
I have a law professor colleague who hates course evaluation day. He never wants to see his course evaluations. I celebrate, not because mine are good, but because I want to learn how I did. He said, “Why do you care about that? They’re just going to make me mad at my students.”
People often avoid learning about animal suffering and cruelty because it will distress them and maybe make them change their behaviour. However, we have some very cool data suggesting that the people who least want the information are often the most likely to change when they get it. That’s a real opportunity.
I want to start the book by providing some moral bedrock and ideas about welfare that will familiarise you. Then, I will discuss cascade effects and their inevitability.
PETER: Well, thank you. I look forward to that, and I’m sure your voice will amplify that critical mass we need to build of people who think like that and, of course, who are prepared to listen to the information and act on it. As you say, everybody who joins in makes it easier for the next one.
CASS: That’s certainly true.