NY times profiles Cass Sunstien. Sunstien took Kahneman's behavioral economics to Washington and like it or not, life on this planet will not be same again. From the fate of organ donor-ship to climate change is one way or other is in his hands. I think, it's all for good but I can only hope it will turns out to be good. But what touched my heart was that the new version of morality has finally found its way to the most powerful office in the world - White House.
"One of the last papers Sunstein wrote as an academic concerned the fate of animals under environmental change — many species will quite likely become extinct if the planet continues to warm, but their fates had never previously been accounted for in a mathematical model that could be used by the government for cost-benefit analysis. Sunstein tried to do that, in a paper in which he wrote with feeling about the suffering of polar bears — starving cubs dependent on mothers unable to hunt in melting ice. It seemed to the environmentalists that his sympathies were with them. But to them, Sunstein’s moral judgment seemed compromised by his quest for a perfect technique and his insistence on counting things that were impossible to count. “You don’t spend that long at the University of Chicago,” McGarity told me, “without some of that thinking rubbing off on you.”
I don't think he is trying to quantify suffering but rather he is playing along with the economists to nudge them towards morality 2.0. At the end of the day, this might be his legacy.
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