Transcript
TED GAYER: My name is Ted Gayer; I am the co-director of Economic Studies here at Brookings. Today it’s my pleasure to introduce Cass Sunstein, who is the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, known as OIRA, within the Office of Management and Budget.
OIRA is one of those government agencies that very few people outside of this and maybe even outside of D.C. have heard of, but it is enormously influential. It is the overseer of our federal regulatory process, and thus, has enormous influence on the regulations that affect the every day lives of millions of Americans.
There’s arguably no one better qualified to serve as OIRA administrator than Cass. He’s currently on leave from Harvard Law School, where he is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law. He may be, in fact, I’m pretty sure he is the most prolific legal scholar alive, so I won’t go through listing all of his many publications.
I will point out, a little Google searching, there is an article called "Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein," which crowns him, for you mathematicians out there, crowns him the legal Erdos of his time. You may not know, there is – mathematicians compute their Erdos number, which is the collaborative distance between themselves and the mathematician, Paul Erdos, who was a – wrote hundreds of articles with many, many co-authors in many different mathematical fields. So I, of course, had to look it up. My Sunstein number is two. I have yet to have the privilege to co-author with Cass, but I have co-authored with one of his many co-authors.
Among his many articles and books, of particular for note, for those of us interested in regulatory policy, are his recent writings on behavioral economics, on a precautionary principal, on the role of cost benefit analysis, and on risk regulation.
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