Before this book I had never read anything by Cass Sunstein, but I knew the name. Partially it came from his time as head of the Office of Management and Budget in President Obama’s first term, but more so from his frequent mentions by Glenn Beck as a living, breathing, pillar of evil. From the tone and volume of Beck’s cries against anything Sunstein has to say I imagined the book would be filled to the brim with radical, communist, socialist agenda-promoting fantasies from the far-left, but I was somewhat sadly misled.

Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas is a collection of essays by Sunstein ranging over a number of topics. He covers same-sex marriage, global warming, free speech and a number of other hot button issues that we face in the country today. In each chapter he lays out the original problem or situation and proceeds to break it down from each side, measuring the common responses for and against to see which ones pan out. It’s a book written to make you think, not tell you what to think.

When Sunstein first walked into the limelight of the White House administration, the political extremes in the country saw diametrically opposed illusions. The left side of the country imagined wild and radical shifts in government, opening the doors to a wild wonderland of progressiveness and equality for all. The right imagined the complete and utter destruction of personal rights and capitalism, a roller coaster launch straight into the bread lines of Old World Russia. When he turned out to be much more moderate and reasoned in his policies, instead of either side taking a deep breath and releasing some of their fervor, they just hated him.

This book is a perfect reason of why. You cannot pin him down or pigeonhole his outlook into a cozy little box. He references “New Progressivism” numerous times throughout as the way forward, but since it is a political ethos of his own design, he can make it fit whichever legislative outcome he likes. The anti-capitalist crowd might be surprised by Sunstein’s argument against excessive damages in civil trials, including those awarded for emotional loss, suffering or even lost limbs. While the anti-government folks might be shocked by one of his core tenets for the New Progressivism:

"This is the sense in which New Progressivists endorse the old idea that there should be “No rights without responsibilities.”"

That sounds much more libertarian than communist.

The idea most pursued in this book is the need to really think about your standpoint and follow it beyond the horizon, see where it leads and whether it is worth the journey. Many choices sound beneficial in the outset (like massive increases to the minimum wage to help the working poor rise out of poverty), but when drawn out in studies and historical data they can lead to much different conclusions (dramatically increasing the minimum wage historically creates higher unemployment since only a fraction of the working poor retain higher wage jobs, while the rest are cut completely.)

Sunstein is more a hero for the moderate and studied middle over either extreme. Neither the devil of Glenn Beck’s nightmares nor the revolutionary of radical left, he uses his studies to navigate the chaos of public policy in the modern age. ( )

The title and cover are a bit misleading. The title makes it seem like the book is mostly about ideas clustered around conspiracy theories, but the book is in fact just a collection of law review articles by Sunstein that he likes. A more accurate title would be "A Collection of Law Review Articles by Cass Sunstein lead by an article about Conspiracy Theories" but that probably isn't as an exciting of title.

However, I still found the collection enlightening. For a writer as prolific as a Sunstein, it can be a bit overwhelming to wade into his work, so it's useful to see what he considers his best and most interesting work. The topics span conspiracy theories, animal rights, the second bill of rights, minimalism and nudges.

Some central themes do emerge from the cluster of articles. In particular, the variety of phenomena (from conspiracy theories to availability cascades) that can be explained by cascades (informational and reputational). There is an emphasis on applications of behavioral economics to public policy. In one article, Sunstein advocates cost benefit analysis as an anti-dote to the human tendency to overweight certain probabilities of disaster (availability). In another article, Sunstein discusses the failure of people to realize how adaptable they are to hardship, and how focusing on hardship makes juries and judges overweigh the pain and suffering of extreme events, while underweighting the effects of chronic unignorable pain. Sunstein instead advocates moving to a compensatory damage system based off of loss in capabilities. A recurring theme in Sunstein's work is that there is no real separation between negative and positive rights. He argues that even negative rights require a tax subsidized court and police system to enforce. In a similar vein, Sunstein argues that the market only exists as a result of government intervention (property rights and contract rights require a government to maintain them in their socially efficient state). However, he advocates for market-oriented solutions to most social ills (contrasted to the lack of understanding by central planners of the unintended consequences of their commands). In his essay, New Progressivism, Sunstein exercises trimming (another later article about principled compromising) that tries to combine social democratic ends with market means.

My favorite essay in the collection was about minimalism. This was partially because I had read extensively about Sunstein's work in behavioral economics and cascades. The minimalism essay is a sustained discussion on the concept of incompletely theorized agreements (when people agree on what to do, but not why). Sunstein argues that some agreements can be categorized by their their depth and width. The depth of an argument is the reasoning given for the argument, (how much does the argument rest on foundational principles?) and the width of the argument is how broad the rule is (just the narrow situation or more situations). Incompletely theorized agreements occur when people agree on the conclusion but not the argumentation arriving at the conclusion. The agreement can be shallow, but this could be a virtue. The shallowness of the agreement, allows compromise (who cares why we do x, as long as we do x?), lowers the cost of disagreement (the "losers" can still employ their reasoning for later debates), demonstrates respect for different points of view and builds in flexibility for the principle or agreement to change over time. Sunstein also praises narrow agreements, which again allow institutional compromise, lowers costs of error and information (a wrong narrow rule is less likely to be disruptive than a broad rule, and requires less information gathering to make a comprehensive rule), avoids unintended consequences and in the case of judges allows the societal debate over contentious issues to continue. Of course Sunstein, also describes cases where narrow and shallow decisions are not appropriate (in many cases they shift the burden of the decision into the future, or are just intrinsically inappropriate). ( )

I was only interested in the Conspiracy Theory article (reprinted from Journal of Political Philosophy, v. 17, #2, (June 2009), 202-27). It was very interesting in light of discussions about whether the Internet creates feedback loops so that you are only reading what you already believe. Evidently it's quite easy to do this even without the internet. That kind of loop is called an "impoverished epistemology," and is quite common in conspiracy theorists. I highly recommend this article to anyone interested in current thinking on conspiracy theories.

I tried the next essay and bogged down, so it's a mixed bag, depending on your intereests. ( )