Quotes from Richard Thaler

The main thing that you learn in grad school, or should learn, is how to think like an economist. The rest is just math.

In a democracy, if a government creates bad policies, it can be voted out of office. Competition in the private sector, however, can easily work to encourage phishing rather than stifle it.

I practice what has come to be called behavioral economics.

The voting public is not very good at attributing credit and blame to presidents. They get too much credit when things go well and too much blame when things go badly. The same applies to coaches, C.E.O.'s, parents, and anyone else in charge.

Sunk costs? We pay too much attention to them.

As both a consumer and producer of newspaper articles, I have no beef with pay walls. But before signing up, I read the fine print.

It's not that we can predict bubbles - if we could, we would be rich. But we can certainly have a bubble warning system.

I don't think it says anywhere in the Bible that tithing should be calculated on a before-tax basis.

It makes sense for social scientists to become more involved in policy because many of society's most challenging problems are, in essence, behavioral.

The supply price and the demand price should be roughly the same. You're not supposed to have two different prices. According to economists.

Fortunately, economists open to new ways of thinking are finding novel ways to use supposedly irrelevant factors to make the world a better place.

In some ways, the finding that financial education doesn't provide long-term payoffs is hardly surprising. After all, how much do you remember from your high school chemistry class? Unless you use chemistry at work, you probably don't recall much about ionic bonding.

As every successful parent learns, one way to encourage good behavior, from room-cleaning to tooth-brushing, is to make it fun. Not surprisingly, the same principle applies to adults. Adults like to have fun, too.

Investors must keep in mind that there's a difference between a good company and a good stock. After all, you can buy a good car but pay too much for it.

I don't go by the ratings. I buy wine that tastes good. Statistically, anybody's ability to predict what will be a good wine a decade from now is limited.

The lesson of my field, behavioral economics, is that we need to understand the ways in which we differ from the rational human assumed in standard economic theory.

Behavioral economics offers a plausible explanation for overreactions by the market. For example, a long period of bad performance can lead to stereotyping.

We could all use more coaching.

If you want to encourage someone to do something, make it easy.

Here is a guiding principle: If a business collects data on consumers electronically, it should provide them with a version of that data that is easy to download and export to another Web site.

I try to teach people to make fewer mistakes. But in designing economic policies, we need to take full account of the fact that people are busy, they're absent minded, they're lazy, and that we should try to make things as easy for them as possible.

The economics training the students receive provides enormous insights into the behavior of Econs, but at the expense of losing common-sense intuition about human nature and social interactions. Graduates no longer realize that they live in a world populated by Humans.

The technical term for discounting of this general form that starts out high and then declines is quasi-hyperbolic discounting. If you don't know what "hyperbolic" means, that shows good judgement on your part in what words to incorporate in your vocabulary.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.