Say you want to write a book. Assume that you’ve written books before. Before beginning, you face a choice: Either you can research new material for the book, or you can write about similar topics and themes to those discussed in your previous books. How you choose may depend on whether you wish to maximize originality or efficiency; or it may not. What matters is the framing of this choice. You can expend 1 unit of energy (1E) to produce the work, W, where E is understood to be a finite resource subject to optimal allocation. Or you can expend 2E to produce W, where the increase in E is understood as the extra effort required to research new facts, do some thinking, and come up with fresh ideas. If the result, W, is the same in either case, it is not hard to see how you, as an efficiency entrepreneur, might choose the first path, which we will call, unnecessarily, Path 1.

HOW CHANGE HAPPENS by Cass R. Sunstein The MIT Press, 344 pp., $29.95

As you begin writing the book, you have a realization: The book may be interesting, or it may not be interesting. Under imaginable assumptions, it is not interesting. Recall however that your goal here is to optimize E/W. Privileging slow or deliberative, Type 2 thinking over your intuitive, Type 1 impulse to throw in the towel and go out for pizza or whatever, you continue writing the book, filling it with false binaries, pointless hedging, cod-mathematical flourishes, and expressions annoyingly placed in italics as cover for the skinniness of their intellectual substance.

The book is released, and your publisher, amazed at the speed and efficiency of your production, rewards you with a deal for another book. You immediately begin work on your next book, which will be indistinguishable from this book. Congratulations: You are Cass Sunstein.

America’s most influential law professor is now four decades into a career that has been as consistently productive as it has been unswerving in its message. Through his writings and work in government, most notably as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during the first term of the Obama administration, Sunstein has done perhaps more than anyone else on these shores to popularize and champion the cause of the wonk, to advocate for a model of government that is data-driven and technocrat-led. How Change Happens is Sunstein’s third release in less than a year, after The Cost-Benefit Revolution and On Freedom, matching a rate of output over the past decade whose best comparison is probably late-career Woody Allen. Unfortunately for Sunstein, this analogy also holds when assessing the quality of his latest work.

How Change Happens, Sunstein tells us, “reflects decades of thinking.” This is another way of saying that it repeats decades of writing. To call it his “new book” you’d have to accept that there is something meaningfully distinguishing it, beyond the physical barrier of its cover and binding, from his previous books—an assumption that in Sunstein’s case is easily disproven. Like an unstuck Mallarmé, Sunstein does not produce books so much as The Book, a single volume of ideas that’s recycled, with only minor variations, from title to title.