[lbo-talk] CEI welcomes Obama reg freeze

Sean Andrews cultstud76 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 21 21:10:38 PST 2009


On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 22:32, Eubulides <paraconsistent at comcast.net> wrote:


>
>
> While folks are on the right track for pillorying "Nudge", Andie noted a
> few years ago that Sunstein's "Free Markets and Social Justice" was worth a
> read although, imo, it's nowhere near as interesting as Morton Horwitz'
> stuff:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/b2mqj8
>
>
It is a decent book, for sure; what I've read of The Partial Constitution is also worthy, but he's more than made up for that with his recent work. And I have no doubt that he'll fit right in with the NEW IMPROVED "Third Way" of the Obama presidency. This profile a few weeks ago of Sunstein says enough for me. He's like the US version of Anthony Giddens--who had some decent books at one time as well--only Giddens, at least, read and wrote about Marx himself. Judging from his footnotes, Sunstein seems to have gleaned all he knows about the old man and socialist theory from Jon Elster, who is a rational choice Marxist, believing in methodological individualism. thus we really shouldn't even call it the third way: it's just a nudge away from the ONLY way. His statements here make that point completely apparent.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123138051682263203.html

WASHINGTON -- Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who pioneered efforts to design regulation around the ways people behave, will be named the Obama administration's regulatory czar, a transition official said Wednesday.

Mr. Sunstein, a friend of President-elect Barack Obama from their faculty days at the University of Chicago law school, will mark a sharp departure for the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

<snip>

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. The theory builds on earlier approaches developed at the University of Chicago law school that sought to harmonize regulatory law with free-market economics. Although widely embraced by conservatives, critics said it failed to account for the sometimes less-than-rational aspects of human behavior.

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.

Mr. Obama believes in "doing law in a way that's realistically based on human behavior," Mr. Sunstein said. "He's a University of Chicago Democrat, so he's very attuned to the virtue of free markets and the risks of free-market regulation. He's not an old-style Democrat who's excited about regulations" for their own sake.

<snip>

When were people excited about regulations "for their own sake"?

-s

PS: one of Sunstein's favorite "regulatory paradoxes" is the right wing assertion that minimum wage laws raise unemployment. Is there any statistical evidence for this? It's one of the only labor issues he regularly comments on, and IIRC he doesn't really provide any proof for it. In any case, it would seem to be a pretty context specific "paradox."



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