Profile of Professor Pragmatist

The details of President Obama's time as a law professor never fully came out during the campaign, as far as I saw. Perhaps now that he has been elected, more of his former students and colleagues are willing to talk, as evidenced by this fascinating article in the New York Times, "As a Professor, a Pragmatist About the Supreme Court."

It is an admiring piece, digging into Mr. Obama's views on the Supreme Court and Constitutional law, as well as how his thinking and past decision making might influence the choice he has now: to make a nomination for the soon-to-be vacant seat on the Court. It is this detailed look at his temperament and thought process that is illuminating.

This may be his distinguishing quality as a legal thinker: an unwillingness to deal in abstraction, a constant desire to know how court decisions affect people’s lives.

“The University of Chicago was and is full of eminent theorizers who wrap up huge areas of the law by applying some magic key,” said David Franklin, a former student. “He didn’t do any of that; he wasn’t interested in high theory at all.” [bold added]

By the rules of pragmatism, this is the perfect attitude. Why deal in "high theory" if there are no priniciples, no objective facts of reality? It is only the impact on people, the thoughts and feelings of others, that is real.

Former students say that Mr. Obama does not particularly prize consistency or broad principle. Adam Bonin arrived in Mr. Obama’s class with the firm belief that drawing districts to ensure minority representation should be illegal. “It struck me as wrong that the legislature should pick and choose what interests should be represented in the legislature,” Mr. Bonin said.

“What I took from the class and the reading materials was the reality that unless these voices are physically present in a legislature, they won’t be heard,” he said. “As long as everyone is grabbing for power, members of racial minority groups ought to do the same.” [bold added]

Principle: 0. Power-grabbing: 1. True to the second-handedness of his views, political power -- inevitably, the ability of one group to impose its views on another -- is more important than anything else. The important thing is that the process is democratic. One can presume, based on everything else we know about the man, that individual rights are not the key concern, but the deliberative nature of democracy, and that everyone feels like they have a say.

“He sees the political process as the place that a lot of these large, difficult public policy questions ought to be resolved,” said Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University law school whom Mr. Obama met through their mutual interest in election law.

Even as law review president, Mr. Obama de-emphasized his own views and instead made himself a channel for those of others. His decision making was “about the group sentiment and what the group majority might agree to,” said Nancy McCullough, a fellow editor. [bold added]

What if, after the majority rules, it's not what he thinks represents social justice?

Mr. Obama often expressed concern that “democracy could be dangerous,” Mr. Stone said, that the majority can be “unempathetic — that’s a word that Barack has used — about the concerns of outsiders and minorities.”

This is why the behavioral economist brain trust of Cass Sunstein, Dan Ariely and others, is so valued by Mr. Obama. By nudging, he and his administration can ensure that his deeply held progressive ideas can be implemented without hurting anyone's feelings, or his having to come out and say anything definitive. With the Democratic majorities in the Congress, he has less to be concerned with in terms of righting social wrongs imposed by elected officials, but I'm sure it's a nice cushion to have. He can even nudge in support of the progressive policies enacted by Congress, a perfect one-two punch, knocking out liberties in favor of entitlements to the oppressed.

I highly recommend reading the full NYTimes piece. During the Bush years, it was important to understand his thought process or lack thereof; it's hard to call "having a personal conversation with Jesus" actual thought. It is similarly important to understand Mr. Obama's thought process, and this article is quite informative in that regard.

Obama's Dream Team, Our Nightmare

In "How Obama Is Using The Science of Change" at Time.com, Michael Grunwald exposes something which shouldn't surprise, and yet it does. We know that Obama has appointed Cass Sunstein as "regulatory czar," and I have long observed the interplay between Sunstein's "libertarian paternalism" (Nudge) and the work of behavioral economist Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), but Grunwald today tells us something we didn't know (as far as I'm aware, anyway):

Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama's campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. "BUT, BUT, BUT," deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama's GOTV operatives nationwide, "What if I told you a world-famous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scripting?!?! Would you be interested in at least taking a look? Of course you would!!"

Moffo then passed along guidelines and a sample script from the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation's leading behaviorists. ...

The existence of this behavioral dream team — which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals — among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama — came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. "It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it," Moffo tells TIME. "These guys really know what makes people tick." [bold added]

I have previously addressed some of Cass Sunstein's and Dan Ariely's ideas, and upon reflection, it isn't a shock to see that they worked together in the Obama campaign's Consortium of Behavioral Scientists. In a perverse way, it's reassuring to see such terrible ideas coalesce like this, because it reinforces that ideas have great importance, and that there is a definite right and wrong. It reasserts the primacy of existence and the law of identity. These fellows belong together.

The threat, however, is that the bad ideas are the ones whispered in the ear of power, and power is eager to listen.

To revisit briefly, Sunstein's idea of nudging is to set up "choice architecture" to default to the way the government wants things to go, but to toss a bone to freedom by allowing people to opt-out. I suppose that doesn't sound too terrible on the face of it, so let's continue with Grunwald:

The first sign of the behavioralist takeover surfaced on April 1, when Americans began receiving $116 billion worth of payroll-tax cuts from the stimulus package. Obama isn't sending us one-time rebate checks. Reason: his goal is to jump-start consumer spending, and research has shown we're more likely to save money rather than spend it when we get it in a big chunk. Instead, Obama made sure the tax cuts will be paid out through decreased withholding, so our regular paychecks will grow a bit and we'll be less likely to notice the windfall. The idea, an aide explains, is to manipulate us into spending the extra cash.

Obama's efforts to change us carry a clear political risk. Republicans already portray him as a nanny-state scold, an élitist Big Brother lecturing us about inflating our tires and reading to our kids. We elected a President, not a life coach, and we might not like elected officials' challenging our right to be couch potatoes. Obama's aides seem to favor nudges that preserve free choice over heavy-handed regulation, an approach Thaler and Sunstein, the co-authors of Nudge, call "libertarian paternalism." But it's still paternalism, and Sunstein will have the power to put it into action. The idea of public officials, even well-meaning ones, trying to engineer our private behavior to produce change can seem a bit creepy.

But face it: Obama is right. Our emissions are boiling the planet, and most of our energy use is unnecessary. Our health expenditures are bankrupting the Treasury, and most of our visits to the doctor can be traced to unhealthy behavior. We do need to change, and we know it.

So why don't we? And how can we? The behaviorists have ideas, and the Administration is listening. [bold added]

Grunwald's ideas are clear: he agrees with Ariely that people are irrevocably irrational and need to be led to the "right" decisions by a supposedly benevolent government. And yet, he still gets something right... this is creepy. And not just creepy, but Orwellian and profoundly disturbing.

If I were prone to believing in conspiracies, I would think that Kant and Marx set the philosophical and economic ideas in motion, transmitted special coded tea leaf signals to Keynes to continue the work to attack the free market, and to Dewey to destroy classical education, and then watched the dominoes fall throughout the 20th century as American students were bathed in nihilism and pragmatism to a point where they really are predictably irrational, by design.

But I don't believe in conspiracies like this. I do, however, respect the power of ideas, and know that while there were no grand plans in place, the transmission of the terrible ideas of the historical figures above led to the situation we're in now—where a group of "behavioral economists" (I use quotes on purpose) are positioned to experiment on the citizens of America—while citizens like Grunwald seem to revel in it. Grunwald acknowledges as much, though likely without realizing it, when he writes:

Obama has pledged that his bank-regulation overhaul would be based "not on abstract models ... but on actual data on how actual people make financial decisions." That's a plain-English way of saying it will be guided by behavioral economics, not neoclassical economics.

Neoclassical economics—another University of Chicago specialty—has ruled our world for decades. It's the doctrine that markets know best: when government keeps its hands off free enterprise, capital migrates to its most productive uses and society prospers. But its elegant models rely on a bold assumption: rational decisions by self-interested individuals create efficient markets. Behavioral economics challenged this assumption, and the financial meltdown has just about shattered it; even former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan confessed his Chicago School worldview has been shaken. [bold added]

Behavioral economics, relying on the pragmatism and altruism that the sad majority of Americans hold as an unquestioned guide to life, is replacing the last vestiges of Enlightenment thought that, only because of its veracity and the American sense-of-life, still lingers in America to this day. In reference to the "opportunity" afforded by the financial crisis, Grunwald quotes Ariely, in what seems the disgusting relish of a cannibal looking up from its meal:

"We couldn't have planned a better marketing campaign for behavioral economics," MIT's Ariely quips.

Prepare to be nudged, America.

Cass Sunstein's Bogeyman -- The Internet as a Threat to Democracy

I recently watched a short speech by a young British Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Daniel Hannan, in which he ripped into the statist policies of the Prime Minister. Mr. Hannan has a blog, and in the following day's post, he describes his sudden Internet celebrity. (The video is spreading like wildfire.) He writes:

The internet has changed politics - changed it utterly and forever. Twenty-four hours ago, I made a three-minute speech in the European Parliament, aimed at Gordon Brown. I tipped off the BBC and some of the newspaper correspondents but, unsurprisingly, they ignored me: I am, after all, simply a backbench MEP.

When I woke up this morning, my phone was clogged with texts, my email inbox with messages. Overnight, the YouTube clip of my remarks had attracted over 36,000 hits. By today, it was the most watched video in Britain.

How did it happen, in the absence of any media coverage? The answer is that political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. [bold added]

This is an interesting perspective from someone who has something to say, but is regularly ignored by the mainstream media.

Switching tracks for the moment, I have been intrigued lately by a particular pet issue of Cass Sunstein, legal scholar, professor, author, and soon-to-be "regulatory czar" in the Obama administration. I recently read a short article in Harvard Magazine, called "The Internet: Foe of Democracy?" which was about a talk Sunstein gave. A quick Google search will show that Sunstein has written at least 3 books on the topic, perhaps a dozen journal articles, and countless other articles and essays. I point you to this summary article because it's a good encapsulation of nearly a decade of his work.

Click here for more on Cass Sunstein, libertarian paternalism, and behavioral economics

In all seriousness, thousands of pages of his writing boil down to the following: "The Internet is good, giving people more information than they've ever had, but it could also be really really bad because it lets them pick what they want to read." Now, I suppose you need some context for this to make sense.

Sunstein holds that our country is at core a democracy (not a republic -- a defense of individual rights is not something you'll find in his work) and that one of the most important functions of government, and presumably private institutions as well, is to make sure that "democracy runs well." This seems to have a vague, hard-to-pin-down meaning, but hopfully you'll get the picture. The opening to an interview of Sunstein on Salon.com sets the stage for this whole thing rather well:

Freedom of choice is not always good for democracy. This observation is at the heart of University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein's book "Republic.com 2.0" (an update of "Republic.com" in 2001), which argues that our country's political discourse is fracturing in the information age. Sure, the Internet has been a boon to democracy in all sorts of ways, Sunstein acknowledges -- but if new technology gives us unprecedented access to information, it also gives us more ways to avoid information we don't like. Conservatives are increasingly seeking only conservative views, liberals are seeking only liberal views, and never the twain shall meet.

What gets lost in these polarized times, Sunstein writes, are traditional civic virtues like civility, self-criticism and open-mindedness. ... A central problem, Sunstein argues, is that Americans now think of themselves more as consumers than as citizens. When it comes to the Internet, we demand the right to reinforce our own beliefs without embracing the responsibility to challenge them. [bold added]

So, the Internet is good, but maybe too good, and therefore bad, he argues. Maybe. Note the last phrase in the quote, "the responsiblity to challenge" our beliefs. Key to understanding Sunstein's conception of democracy is that we have a duty, as members of the society, to seek out competing views and challenge our ideas.

If only everyone would deliberate with everyone, making sure to have "unplanned encounters" with competing viewpoints, our democracy would be great. He even calls on the Founding Fathers for support (from the Harvard piece):

The Internet, argues Cass Sunstein, has had a polarizing effect on democracies. Although it has the capacity to bring people together, too often the associations formed online comprise self-selecting groups with little diversity of opinion, explains the Frankfurter professor of law. This confounds the constitutional vision of the founding fathers through a perversion of the notion of free speech. Such environments reinforce preexisting viewpoints, undermining the constructive dialogue that promotes progress in democracies. [bold added]

You may be, like I was, a little confused at the language used here, or you may wonder what the fuss is all about. A "perversion of free speech" because it's too free? And it undermines "the constructive dialogue that promotes progress?" What does that even mean? I had the profound sense that Sunstein and his like-minded friends were using a very specialized language that relied on core assumptions and ideologies that I didn't know enough about to evaluate his arguments.

If the Internet is too free and is thus a threat, what should be done about it? If you read Eric Daniels' excellent and biting review of Sunstein's book, Nudge, you'll have a sense of the type of "soft regulation" that Sunstein advocates to get people to make the right decisions. This view, that the government should "nudge" people for their own good, and the good of the society, pervades all of Sunstein's thought. It's no different with his Internet/Democracy obsession.

In an early book on the topic, Republic.com, he described the threat he saw, and proposed what amounts to a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. Imagine things like mandating that a conservative blog must have at least 20% of its links pointing to liberal sites. He backed away from this in the sequel, Republic.com 2.0, after getting a lot of criticism. But he is still afraid of the freedom of the Internet.

Why? What is the real reason behind the fear? Because for all the talk about "polarization" and "social fragmentation", the "threat to democracy" argument never rings true, and is never fully substantiated.

Back to our young British MEP, Daniel Hannan. In the blog post quoted above, Hannan concludes:

Breaking the press monopoly is one thing. But the internet has also broken the political monopoly. Ten or even five years ago, when the Minister for Widgets put out a press release, the mere fact of his position guaranteed a measure of coverage. Nowadays, a politician must compel attention by virtue of what he is saying, not his position.

It's all a bit unsettling for professional journalists and politicians. But it's good news for libertarians of every stripe. Lefties have always relied on control, as much of information as of physical resources. Such control is no longer technically feasible. [bold added]

This seemingly offhand comment, a pithy way to end an article, has answered the question that has perplexed me for weeks: what is Sunstein after? "Lefties have always relied on control," Mr. Hannan writes. That's it!

The expression (not perversion) of free speech on the Internet is not a threat to democracy, but to the people in power (of which class Sunstein is now a part) and their ability to control what people read, what they say, what they know. "Such control is no longer technically feasible," Mr. Hannan says. "Not unless I can nudge the people's choice architecture," Sunstein seems to be saying.

Sunstein is now the Head Nudger In Charge in Obama's administration. His office in OMB oversees the rule-making for all executive agencies such as the FCC and the EPA. I predict we will soon see what a real threat to the republic looks like.

Economist refutes rationality, proves own stupidity

Thank you Boston Globe for providing an endless stream of things to get annoyed about. This time, the Globe profiled an MIT 'behavioral economist' named Dan Ariely, who is hawking a book claiming that humans are consistently and predictably irrational. Thus the title of his book, "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions."

He starts off with a bang, saying "I don't think people are stupid - just human," of course implying that to be human is to be irrational. To be fair, the idea of behavioral economics sounds at least somewhat interesting, in that they are trying to make mathematical models correspond better to reality by challenging the long held assumption that the "economic agents" in the model will always act rationally.

Ariely, apparently in support of this approach, uses experiments to prove that people are mostly irrational in their daily choices. The problem is, these experiments are so flawed that I have no idea how anyone could find them compelling. Here's one:

In one experiment, ...to test the power of "free," he and two colleagues set up a table in an MIT cafeteria. They offered normally high-priced Lindt chocolate truffles for 15 cents and ordinary Hershey kisses for a penny. Customers had to pick one or the other, not both. Seventy-three percent of the customers saw a good deal and went for the truffles. But when the prices were cut to 14 cents for the truffles and free for the kisses, 69 percent of customers went for the kisses, even though the truffles were an even better deal.

This supposedly proves that people are completely irrational because they passed up a 14 cent Lindt truffle. The problem with this is that it completely ignores the "pain-in-the-ass factor". Yes, I just coined a new behavioral economics catchphrase. Imagine you're walking through a cafeteria and pass a table where two guys are selling cheap chocolates. You want some chocolate, you have some change, so you might as well get a truffle for a trifle since you're already going to reach into your purse or pocket for the coins.

The next day, you pass the same table, and the prices are lower. In fact, the ho-hum Hershey's Kiss is free. I know that if I were in that situation and perhaps was in a hurry, or didn't feel like searching for pennies to make up the 14 cents, or break a dollar and be left with annoying change and another useless penny that I'd just throw away, I'd just take the free Kiss and walk away. Even though I like truffles better.

Does that prove I'm irrational? Or does it show that the "experiment" is incredibly poorly designed, and only highlights that there are many other facets to the decision-making process than Ariely seems to understand?

According to the article, Ariely also peppers his book with examples from his own life.

He tells of considering a sporty Audi vs. a Honda minivan. He chose the Audi because it came with three years of "free" oil changes. Later he computed the value of the oil changes: $150, or about 0.5 percent of the purchase price. Because he and his wife have two children, the minivan made much more sense, but "free" was irresistible.

Ariely chose an Audi, which probably cost $40,000, over the practical choice of a $30,000 Honda mini-van that was much better for his family, because of free oil changes? Seriously? That is so absurd that there are only two possible explanations:

1. Ariely truly is a complete moron, and a perfect example of the "consistently irrational economic actor" he believes predominates in our society. He doesn't take into account his family's needs or finances, and instead is lured into an irrational decision by $150 worth of free oil changes because he somehow thinks it's a better deal. Or....
2. Ariely is a snake oil salesman.

After reading the article and taking a look at the website for his book (which I won't link to here because he doesn't deserve the publicity), I think the answer is yes to both.

In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't read his book. It's even possible that the Globe's characterization of his experiments is superficial and doesn't describe experimental controls that appear to be missing. But I'd be surprised if that was the case. Every indication is that Ariely is either a charlatan, an incompetent, or both, and is trying his damnedest to propagate the repugnant notion that human beings are inescapably, completely irrational, and all we can do is to try and trick ourselves into making good decisions, in spite or our natures.

As a conclusion, I'll let Ariely's own words speak for themselves:

How has all this affected Ariely's own decision-making? He says he tries to be alert to early-warning signs of irrational behaviors and have a plan to avert them. Examples: ... "I have learned to avoid things that are 'free.' I have learned the importance of taking decisions out of my hands, like the decision to save. I don't want to have to think every month about how much money to put toward my retirement."

As Ariely speaks, new experiments and optimistic ideas tumble out of him, like water from a fountain. "It's amazing, the little secrets of life that make us a little better," he said. "Like dieting, for example. If only we got rid of elevators. . . ." [emphasis added]