Author
Cass R. Sunstein
The legal scholar who took nudges from the seminar room into governments around the world.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Cass Sunstein is a professor at Harvard Law School and one of the most cited legal scholars in the United States, with books on constitutional law, free speech, and the psychology of judgement. He co-wrote Nudge with Richard Thaler in 2008.
From 2009 to 2012 he ran the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, where he applied the book's ideas to federal rules, and nudge units modelled on the approach followed in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. His later books include Noise, with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony, on the unwanted variability in human judgement.
The signature
Sunstein supplies the policy half of Nudge: how a default should be set when it must be set, and the argument he and Thaler call libertarian paternalism, keeping every option while choosing the default in the chooser's interest.