Cass Sunstein: preference

Transcript context

…Yes, he’s good. — likes Foucault and likes Hayek. He’s younger, and he’s not an economist. We’re not seeing a flowering of engagement with liberal thought. That’s for sure true. We are seeing a lot of work on agency and its limits. Sendhil Mullainathan, who is one of my favorite current thinkers — he’s not philosophically focused, but he’s just writing a paper now on behavioral economics, where agency is moving to the fore. It’s behavioral economics and AI, and the idea is that this is going to empower human agency, which is central for him. I think he’s a great liberal thinker. The book, Scarcity by Mullainathan and Shafir, neither of them old, is, I think, a path-breaking liberal book. It takes a while for people to write things that have a certain magnitude. They’re 25-something and 30-somethings who are going to be in the pantheon in a little while. Why do you think it is that it’s we economists who are holding the line, at least for the time being?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.