Cass Sunstein and the University of Chicago Mind

This New York Times Magazine article has some interesting insight into the mindset of this administration:

The professors in Hyde Park believe in something called the University of Chicago mind. It runs cold and analytical when the rest of the culture runs hot. Chicago scholars tend to be social scientists at heart, contrarian but empirical, following evidence to logical extremes. They are centrally interested not in what it is like to be an individual within society but in how society washes over individuals, making and remaking them. During the campaign, when his former Chicago colleagues were asked to detail Barack Obama’s intellectual evolution, many of them described him in these terms. But they knew Obama, at best, only partly exhibited this tradition. His friend Cass Sunstein, who is certainly the most productive and probably the most influential liberal legal scholar of his generation, inherited it in full. “Cass has,” says Saul Levmore, a former dean of the law school, “the quintessential University of Chicago habit of mind.”

The value of a human life:

The office’s administrators require that federal agencies express the costs and benefits of their proposed rules (lives saved, swampland preserved) in dollars. Moral principles, filtered through this cost-benefit analysis, find their way into confounding little boxes. A human life, the E.P.A. figured in a 2001 rule about arsenic and drinking water, was worth $6.1 million. (If an environmental regulation would save one life but cost $4 million, it ought to be put into effect; if it cost $8 million to save that life, the regulation would be scuttled.) Each I.Q. point a child lost because of exposure to lead was worth $8,346 over the course of a lifetime. A lost workday was worth $83. Many of these estimates used data from surveys — taken at malls, among other places — that asked passers-by how much more they would need to be paid to take on a job that carried, for instance, a 1-in-10,000 risk of death. Richard Posner, who has the most magnificent and chilly mind in this realm, used similar projections to price the benefit of preventing the extinction of the human race at $600 trillion.

The power, and danger, of putting an academic in an applied setting:

“There’s a big difference between the role of an academic and the role of someone in government,” Sunstein told me when we spoke at the Au Bon Pain near the White House. “That’s a cliché, but in academic life if you say things that are common sense and people nod their heads, it’s not very useful. You’re not adding anything.” One of the changes in Washington, he said, was the pace: he could no longer take off the afternoons to play tennis. It was past dinnertime, and Sunstein was headed back to the office, to his memos. “When I was an academic, I’d sometimes get a little feeling of excitement when I had an idea that was, I hoped, fresh,” he said. “And whether anyone should act on that idea is a very different question.”

Indeed.