If a major source of the nation's news is personalizing user experiences, people with different points of view will end up in echo chambers of their own design. Facebook didn't create that problem, but it shouldn't aggravate it.
If the air quality is terrible in Los Angeles, if a particular university is unusually expensive, if crime is on the rise in Dallas, or if a company has a lot of recalled toys, transparency can spur change. Whenever public or private institutions have to answer to the public, their performance is likely to improve.
In psychology and behavioral economics, people have shown that if you just describe options in a certain way, or make some features of a situation salient, you can get people to do and even see what you want. You don't have to be a Jedi to manipulate people's attention.
This part of the 21st century is preoccupied with risk, and there's a lot that law can do to make lives longer and healthier.
Individual investors beware: If you're constantly worried about a crash, you're probably making some big mistakes - and losing a lot of money in the process.
If interviewers are prejudiced against women or Hispanics, for example, a face-to-face interview will predictably result in discrimination. Reliance on tests, or on actual or past performance, can promote equality.
Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms - the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault.
The 'cash for clunkers' program was a big success in part because it gave people the sense that the economy was moving.
Interviewers actively fool themselves, finding ways to learn from interviews even if there's actually nothing there to learn from.
Catholicism is a wide tent in terms of political and legal positions. We could have nine Catholics on the Supreme Court and a great deal of diversity toward the law.
Most problems are best solved privately, not through government. There's a problem of discourtesy in the world, which is best handled through social norms, which are indispensable. But you wouldn't want the government to be mandating courtesy.
Television is, in many respects, a passive medium: people receive information without really exchanging ideas with others. By contrast, the Internet can be an active medium, allowing individuals to use e-mail, discussion groups, and even Web sites to engage with one another.
Today, we are announcing that agencies are releasing their final regulatory reform plans, including hundreds of initiatives that will reduce costs, simplify the system, and eliminate redundancy and inconsistency.
I think the arc of history is long, and it bends toward justice. And I think that's what the 'Star Wars' message is. You know, the dark side is in the human heart. And chaos is very troubling for an individual or for a culture, which can lead you to authoritarian leaders. But the arc of history is on the right side. I believe that.
The only answer to the question 'Which is the worst of the 'Star Wars' movies?' is, there is no worst 'Star Wars' movie. There - one might be the least amazing and fantastic, but there's none that is the worst of the 'Star Wars' movies.
Trump is more performance artist than zealot. But he's finding enemies everywhere, whether they are judges of Mexican ancestry, parents of those killed in war, the current president, or children of immigrants. Whether or not he has a sense of decency, he is in grave danger of losing it.
A few weeks ago, I was at the gym, talking to a friend about politics. Overhearing the conversation, a young man - maybe 25 years old - interrupted to say, 'Obama? He hasn't done a single thing!'
Masterful politicians and effective agents of change tend to succeed by singling out and making salient some aspect of a nation's self-understanding, sparking a sense of recognition - and ultimately moving voters in their favor. Obama made it into an art form.
Usually, to promote a new work, I'll aspire to be published in the 'Columbia Law Review' or the 'Stanford Law Review' and to have at least five really enticing footnotes.
I think that every state in the union should recognize same-sex marriage.
Voters like to fall in love with presidential candidates, at least a little bit.
Having a constant productive anxiety doesn't mean that people are miserable and wailing but that people know they will be held accountable if things do not go right.
The process of getting regulations right is described publicly as far more political than in fact it is. It's essentially a legal and technical enterprise.
I'm interested in how the Internet spreads information.
Employers, like most people, tend to trust their intuitions. But when employers decide whom to hire, they trust those intuitions far more than they should.
No one should take away people's rights. But with respect to 'the right to arm ourselves,' we have lost sight of our own history.
Rules are not improved by sloganeering, fact-free letter-writing campaigns, or special pleading from interest groups.
I love Richard Thaler's 'Quasi Rational Economics.' A collection of some of his most interesting and inventive essays, the real foundation of behavioral economics.
When like-minded people, talking mostly with one another, end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk... If you put a bunch of rebels in a room and ask them to discuss rebellion, they'll get more extreme.
If the prospect of a bad result gets the heart racing - a plane crash, a terrible disease, a loss of 30 percent of your portfolio - most people will take strong steps to avoid it. They will pay too little attention to a comforting thought, which is that worst-case scenarios usually don't come to fruition.
They call soccer the beautiful game, but if I had to identify just one sport to show members of some alien species what the human race is all about, I'd nominate squash.
One lesson is that if you want to predict voter turnout, you should ask whether at least one candidate is attracting high levels of enthusiasm - not whether the stakes are high, or even perceived to be high. That fits the historical pattern.
When government programs aren't working, those on the Left tend to support more funding, while those on the Right want to scrap them altogether. It is better to ask whether the problem is complexity and poor design. We can solve those problems - sometimes without spending a penny.
The U.S. is blessed with tremendously creative and imaginative law students at places like Chicago, Harvard, Columbia and Yale.
Antonin Scalia was witty, warm, funny, and full of life. He was not only one of the most important justices in the nation's history; he was also among the greatest.
The economic analysis of law has had many good ideas. It's had one great idea -like, world-transforming idea, I think. And the idea is, when you're stuck, minimize the sum of the costs of decisions and the costs of errors.
Wherever people find themselves in trouble, or at some kind of crossroads, the series proclaims you are free to choose. That's the deepest lesson of 'Star Wars.'
The U.S. is supposed to be a nation of second chances, but for the 70 million Americans with a criminal record, we're not doing such a great job. Even among those whose crimes were nonviolent and committed long ago, too many still bear a scarlet letter.
Behavioral scientists distinguish between fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is represented in the mind's System 1: it is automatic, intuitive, and often emotional. Slow thinking, reflected in System 2, is deliberative and reflective; it likes statistics. It's hard to think of a purer System 1 candidate than Trump.
Personalization is everywhere. We are constantly asked, directly or indirectly, to create Our Own Whatever - containing and limited to our 'favorite sources of information.' Republicans do that; Democrats do it; environmentalists do it; terrorists do it; science fiction enthusiasts do it. That's a real problem, I think.
Facebook seems to think that it would be liberating if everyone's News Feed could be personalized so that people see only and exactly what they want. Don't believe it. That's a prison.
On some issues, Republicans and Democrats disagree so sharply that compromise is nearly impossible. Republicans are not going to support a cap-and-trade program to limit greenhouse gases, and Democrats won't support a 1,000-mile wall on the border with Mexico.
Research shows that if people are talking and listening to like-minded others, they become more dogmatic, more unified, and more extreme. Personalized Facebook experiences are a breeding ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication across political lines and, ultimately, for extremism.
When it comes to discrimination, Americans pride ourselves on how far we've come. Racial segregation is history. Explicit sex discrimination is banned. Same-sex marriage is the law of the land. But amidst all the progress, the male-female wage gap persists, and it's big.
Many Americans abhor paternalism. They think that people should be able to go their own way, even if they end up in a ditch. When they run risks, even foolish ones, it isn't anybody's business that they do.
Bottom 10 Percent progressives are not enthusiastic about concentrations of wealth. But that's not what keeps them up at night. Their focus is on deprivation and lack of opportunity. They're motivated by empathy for people who are suffering, rather than outrage over unjustified wealth.
When it imposes expensive regulatory mandates on the private sector, Congress often acts on the basis of interest-group pressures, anecdotes, and the emotions of the moment. The executive branch is hardly perfect, but it is far less likely to do that.
The U.S. is an optimistic nation. No candidate has ever won the American presidency by speaking primarily to people's deepest fears and by manufacturing a sense of apocalypse - that our leaders 'can't do anything right,' that things are utterly falling apart.
It's hard to get me out of the office.
