走近凯斯•桑斯坦：奥巴马超级智囊揭秘

    按照桑斯坦的说法，他的方法要温和许多。他把它称为“监管魔球”（"Regulatory Moneyball"）。“监管魔球”的宗旨是将规章的制定过程升华，使之经受经验主义的严格考验，而不再是机械、刻板的政策工作。桑斯坦的新书名为《更精简：政府的未来》，这本书可以说是《助推：我们如何做出最佳选择》（Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness）的续编。《助推》（书中助推的定义是：不用强制手段，不用硬性规定，却能保证你同时收获“最大利益”和“自由选择权”。这股轻轻推动你做出最优选择的力量，就是“助推”——译注）是他与行为经济学家理查德•泰勒合写的著作，是2009年的畅销书。桑斯坦已竭尽全力消除他的监管方法所带有的意识形态色彩。毕竟，如果连英国保守党首相大卫•卡梅伦这样的人都能接受助推型的规章，甚至建立了自己的“助推小分队”（"Nudge Unit"）来促进戒烟、能源效率和器官捐献，那么助推型的规章又能有多大的害处呢？

    桑斯坦把奥巴马的上任跟里根的当权联系了起来。正是里根首开先河，把审查所有联邦规章的使命交给了OIRA。为了减少累赘的规章命令， 里根还要求OIRA务必确保新规章的收益大于成本。桑斯坦全心全意地接受了这项命令。当然，琢磨成本和收益一直是桑斯坦全身心投入的事情，尽管其结果经常惹恼自由派。在奥巴马的第一个任期内，当初美国政府拒绝提高环境和工作场所的某些标准时，自由派看不下去了，他们指责助推型规章为跛脚政策。

    桑斯坦令人信服地表明，将益处和坏处量化、同时明明白白地摆到台面上，这样既有助于改善市场，也有助于改善政府。他的功绩之一就是不再把每加仑英里数作为衡量汽车燃油效率的标准——事实证明每加仑英里数并不是反映燃油效率的线性指标——取而代之的是100英里的路程消耗的加仑数，以及预计五年的燃料成本。这样一来，横向比较就会更有意义。

    但是，把同样的理论运用到政策决定上或许更困难，因为他的部门必须把任何一个降低风险的规章可能拯救的人数跟这个政策的经济影响做对比。要做到这一点，就必须用美元量化一个人生命的价值——或者更确切地说，要把消除一例死亡的统计风险所需的价值用美元量化出来。桑斯坦的团队解决了这个难题，他们的方法是，先做调查，人们愿意花多少钱来消除10万分之一的死亡风险，然后计算企业为消除这个风险所支付的工资溢价。根据这个算法，政府目前将一个生命的价值认定为900万美元左右。

    政治体制变动过于频繁的情况下，研究这样的算法可谓一剂良药。话虽如此，桑斯坦的书还是表明，他身为一位知识渊博的作者，身上带着不安分的一面。他的书给人感觉有点杂乱。但是考虑到它的着眼点是精简我们的监管制度——跟一般的畅销书路数不太一样，这本书着实有趣，引人入胜。为了说明我们的理性是多么脆弱，桑斯坦援引了大众心理学的一个例子，这个例子很让人印象深刻。那些对纽约市长迈克尔•布隆伯格禁售大份苏打水的措施嗤之以鼻，嘲笑他是书呆子的人要是知道了下述实验的结果，估计会大受打击。在这项实验中，受试者被告知可以尽情饮用金宝（Campbell）番茄汤。他们不知道的是，汤碗里其实有个机关，藏在桌子下面的装置会将碗里的汤自动填满。很多受试者只是一直不停地喝汤，直到实验人员出面阻止。

    这是个典型的例子，而这本书或许是了解桑斯坦这个白宫监管一把手的最好窗口。桑斯坦和他效力的总统一样，为了消除项目的党派色彩而煞费苦心。他试图运用科学的方法，为复杂的公共政策问题寻找有理有据、经得住考验的解决之道。不过从根本上讲，这个方法其实基于一个信念，那就是，由专家担任顾问的政府理应配备各种工具，拯救我们不受自身的伤害。他或许是对的。但是有一点桑斯坦还需要注意，那就是我们美国人生性不顺从。

    译者：Nasca

    In Sunstein's telling, his method is a lot more benign. He calls it "Regulatory Moneyball," an effort to lift rulemaking out of the arena of knee-jerk politics and subject it to the rigors of empiricism. His new book is called Simpler: The Future of Government. It's a kind of follow-up to Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the 2009 bestseller he wrote with behavioral economist Richard Thaler. Sunstein does his best to drain his approach of any ideological spirit. After all, how pernicious can nudge-based regulation be if it's been embraced by the likes of Conservative British prime minister David Cameron, who has established his own "Nudge Unit" to promote smoking cessation, energy efficiency, and organ donation?

    Sunstein draws a straight line from Obama's embrace of the office back to its empowerment by Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan who first gave OIRA its mission of overseeing all federal rule-making. In a bid to choke off burdensome regulatory mandates, Reagan also required OIRA to ensure that the benefits of new rules outweighed their costs. Sunstein accepted this mandate wholeheartedly. Indeed, crunching costs and benefits has been a central preoccupation of Sunstein's, although the results frequently frustrated liberals. They stewed during Obama's first term when the White House declined to tighten certain environmental and workplace standards, and they panned nudges as limp.

    Sunstein argues persuasively that quantifying upsides and downsides and laying them bare improves both markets and government. One of his wins was replacing the miles-per-gallon standard for cars -- which turns out to be a non-linear measurement of their fuel economy -- with one that states how many gallons they use over 100 miles, as well as expected fuel costs over five years, making side-by-side comparisons more meaningful.

    Applying that same discipline to policy decisions can prove trickier. Because his office had to weigh the economic impact of any risk-reducing regulation against the lives it would save, it had to assign a dollar value to a human life -- or, more precisely, the dollar value of eliminating the statistical risk of a death. Sunstein's team answered this grim question by weighing both what individuals say they would pay to eliminate the risk of one death out of, say, 100,000, and calculating the wage premiums that companies pay to reward that risk. Based on that math, the government currently values a human life at roughly $9 million.

    The practice of working through those calculations acts as a curative in the heart of a political system that's too often jumpy and reactive. That said, Sunstein's book displays some of the restless energy of its polymath author and feels a bit disorganized. But considering it's addressed to the task of streamlining our regulatory regime -- not exactly the stuff of page-turners -- it's a remarkably fun, engaging read. And to illustrate the frailty of our rational systems, he makes his arguments with memorable examples from pop psychology. Those who scoffed at New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's ban on supersized sodas -- a textbook nudge -- might be struck by the experiment in which subjects were told to eat as much Campbell's tomato soup as they wanted, without being informed that their bowls were designed to refill themselves through a device hidden under the table. Many just continued eating until the experimenters finally stepped in to stop them.

    It's a characteristic example, and the book is perhaps most useful as an insight into the man who functioned as the superego of the Obama White House. Like the president he served, Sunstein takes pains to frame his program as post-partisan. He invokes scientific method in pursuit of testable, provable solutions to entrenched public policy problems. And yet at bottom this approach rests on a belief that government, informed by experts, should be equipped with the tools to save us from ourselves. He may be right. But Sunstein must also appreciate that our American id can't help but object.