Author Archives: Cass Sunstein

An initial thanks for the many excellent comments and emails, which I’m trying to absorb. We’ve been discussing several methods for aggregating views: markets a la Hayek, group deliberation, and wikis (with a brief mention of open source software). One emphasis has been on problems with group deliberation, because like-minded people usually end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before. In his fun and illuminating book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki emphasizes another method of aggregating opinions: ask a lot of people and take the average answer. In many cases, this method seems to work… Continue reading →

In case anyone hasn’t heard by now: The President plans to announce his nominee to the Supreme Court tonight…. Continue reading →

Hayek’s big claim about the price system was that it aggregates widely dispersed information and tastes. For this reason, he said that it was a “marvel.” We’ve been discussing other ways of aggregating information, and it might be useful to start with Wikipedia, if only because Jimbo Wales refers to Hayek in his comments. Wikipedia does aggregate dispersed information — amazingly so. In a general way, it’s definitely a Hayekian process. But there are at least two differences between Wikipedia and the price system. First, Wikipedia doesn’t rest on economic incentives. People aren’t participating because they’re getting a commodity or… Continue reading →

As recently reported, Republican-appointed court of appeals judges get significantly more conservative, and Democratic-appointed court of appeals judges get significantly more liberal, when they are sitting with judges appointed by a president of the same political party. But there are two areas where this does NOT happen — where Republican appointees differ from Democratic appointees, but where judges’ voting patterns are unaffected by the composition of the panel. Any guesses? Affirmative action? No. Environmental protection? No. Gay rights? No. Campaign finance or commercial advertising or obscenity? No. Race and sex discrimination? No. The two areas are: Abortion and capital punishment…. Continue reading →

Here at the University of Chicago, we have something called the Chicago Judges Project, by which we tabulate and analyze thousands of votes of judges on federal courts of appeals. One of our key findings thus far is this: In many controversial areas (eg, affirmative action, campaign finance, sex discrimination, disability discrimination, environmental regulation, and more), Republican appointees show especially conservative voting patterns when they’re sitting on 3-judge panels that consist only of Republican appointees. So too for Democratic appointees: They’re far more liberal, in their voting patterns, when sitting with two fellow Democratic appointees, than when sitting on a… Continue reading →

This is from Cass Sunstein; I’m most grateful to Larry for inviting me to post on his blog for a bit. His kind invitation is a result of a naive and ignorant inquiry I sent him in the recent past, about information aggregation and its possible limits. Background: A few years ago, a book of mine, Republic.com, emphasized the risks associated with echo chambers and self-insulation. I’m doing a new book, still inchoate, that continues to explore those risks, but that also stresses the excitingly general possibility that the Internet can allow widely dispersed “bits” of human information to be… Continue reading →