To call it his “new book” you’d have to accept that there is something meaningfully distinguishing it from his previous books

From The Sameness of Cass Sunstein: His books keep pushing the same technocratic fixes. But today’s most pressing questions cannot be depoliticized. by Aaron Timms.

I am not a big fan of Cass Sunstein, a clever and interesting thinker but tending towards dogmatism around select idée fixe.

Not my cup of tea but woof. This is a brutal review.

Say you want to write a book. Assume that you’ve written books before. Before beginning, you face a choice: Either you can research new material for the book, or you can write about similar topics and themes to those discussed in your previous books. How you choose may depend on whether you wish to maximize originality or efficiency; or it may not. What matters is the framing of this choice. You can expend 1 unit of energy (1E) to produce the work, W, where E is understood to be a finite resource subject to optimal allocation. Or you can expend 2E to produce W, where the increase in E is understood as the extra effort required to research new facts, do some thinking, and come up with fresh ideas. If the result, W, is the same in either case, it is not hard to see how you, as an efficiency entrepreneur, might choose the first path, which we will call, unnecessarily, Path 1.

As you begin writing the book, you have a realization: The book may be interesting, or it may not be interesting. Under imaginable assumptions, it is not interesting. Recall however that your goal here is to optimize E/W. Privileging slow or deliberative, Type 2 thinking over your intuitive, Type 1 impulse to throw in the towel and go out for pizza or whatever, you continue writing the book, filling it with false binaries, pointless hedging, cod-mathematical flourishes, and expressions annoyingly placed in italics as cover for the skinniness of their intellectual substance.

The book is released, and your publisher, amazed at the speed and efficiency of your production, rewards you with a deal for another book. You immediately begin work on your next book, which will be indistinguishable from this book. Congratulations: You are Cass Sunstein.

[snip]

How Change Happens, Sunstein tells us, “reflects decades of thinking.” This is another way of saying that it repeats decades of writing. To call it his “new book” you’d have to accept that there is something meaningfully distinguishing it, beyond the physical barrier of its cover and binding, from his previous books—an assumption that in Sunstein’s case is easily disproven. Like an unstuck Mallarmé, Sunstein does not produce books so much as The Book, a single volume of ideas that’s recycled, with only minor variations, from title to title.

Broaching a new Sunstein these days, you already know what you’re going to get: a section on the joys and uses of cost-benefit analysis, some dashed-off thoughts about utilitarianism and negative freedoms, three or four chapters on nudges and their importance to the design of seatbelt policy, the primacy of Daniel Kahneman–style “slow thinking” over intuition and moral heuristics, some tut-tutting about social media, a Learned Hand quote or two, and a few weak anecdotes about Sunstein’s time as President Obama’s regulator-in-chief, all delivered through a prose that combines the dreariest elements of Anglo-American analytical style with the proto-numerate giddiness of a libertarian undergrad who’s just made first contact with the production possibility frontier.

How Change Happens conforms so comically to type that it repurposes several passages of text from Sunstein’s previous books, even his most recent ones. Hence he tells us that people typically think that more words, on any given page, will end with -ing than have n as the second-to-last letter—an anecdote you would have already encountered had you made it as far as page 30 of The Cost-Benefit Revolution. He explains the Asian disease problem and provides a number of choice-framing analogies also found in The Cost-Benefit Revolution. He retells the David Foster Wallace water parable spotted on page eleven of On Freedom, published in February of this year. (Explaining the importance of the parable in that earlier book, he notes: “This is a tale about choice architecture—the environment in which choices are made. Choice architecture is inevitable, whether or not we see it, and it affects our choices. It is the equivalent of water.” Fast forward a few months to the publication of How Change Happens, and this gloss has become: “This is a tale about choice architecture. Such architecture is inevitable, whether or not we see it. It is the equivalent of water.”) He rehearses statistics on political polarization that were already seven years out of date when he last published them, in 2017; and so on. Round and round this carousel of “evidence” goes, all in the service of the same restricted set of ideas Sunstein has been shilling since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Perhaps we should not be surprised by any of this; if the titles of his books are any indication, Sunstein has never run from his reputation as a repetitious bore. This is, after all, the man who counts Republic.com, Republic 2.0 and #republic on his list of published works; who wrote one paean to cost-benefit analysis called The Cost-Benefit State and another, 16 years later, called The Cost-Benefit Revolution; who followed up his 2008 blockbuster, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, which set out the case for using welfare-oriented behavioral prompts or “nudges” in the design of regulation, with 2014’s Why Nudge?, which valiantly addressed the question already answered six years earlier. It takes real skill to continue to be published from a place of such undisguised unoriginality, and for that if nothing else, Sunstein deserves our admiration.

Not disputing the review, merely observing how uncharacteristically clear it is.