State can still lead the way

Obama aide’s take on how government can help rather than hinder is worthy, says Kyran Fitzgerald.

Cass Sunstein, the man known as former US president Barack Obama’s ‘regulatory Czar’, visited Dublin the other day. At an event hosted by the Economic and Social Research Institute, Mr Sunstein set out his views on how best to persuade the population to accept reforms that are worthy but difficult to stomach.

The Sunstein diet involves coming up with a host of different ways to dress up the policy equivalent of green vegetables so as to make them palatable. As he put it, default rules — such as pre- enrolment in pension schemes — are the “gold standard of behavioral rules.”