Quotes from Robert H. Frank

No society has ever succeeded without a decent government.

If government is inevitable, the challenge is to come up with the most effective one possible.

So even when luck has only a minor influence on performance, the most talented and hardworking of all contestants will usually be outdone by a rival who is almost as talented and hardworking but also considerably luckier.

More important, such events share a second feature, one that is absent from an increase in taxes: they reduce our own incomes while leaving others' incomes unaffected. Higher taxes, in contrast, reduce all incomes in tandem. This difference holds the key to understanding the mother of all cognitive illusions.

Cartoons are data. If people find them funny, that tells us something about the world.

the average number of legs in any human population is slightly less than two. So most people actually do have "more legs than average.

In short both the things we feel we need and the things available for us to buy depend largely—beyond some point, almost entirely—on the things that others choose to buy.

Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

They like the tax because they believe, correctly, that it will stimulate much needed savings and investment. But it's an even better policy instrument than they think.

Homo economicus would cheat only if he stood to benefit by enough and if the odds of being caught were sufficiently low. So the mere fact that he does not have a reputation for being a cheat tells us only that he's been prudent.

If tax remedies are so advantageous, why would they provoke the ire of voters? Here I will suggest that voters generally, and prosperous voters in particular, suffer from what I call the mother of all cognitive illusions: they believe that having to pay higher taxes would make it more difficult to buy what they want. Like many illusory beliefs, this one may strike most people as self-evidently true. And yet, as I will explain, it is completely baseless.

A 2018 meta-analysis of sixty-four earlier studies involving more than five thousand subjects confirms that students learn more effectively if they are asked to explain a concept to themselves than if it is presented to them in other ways. The included studies compared learning outcomes from prompted self-explanation to those produced by a variety of other instructional approaches, including lectures by instructors, solving problems, studying worked problems, and studying text.17

As Warren Buffett once said, "Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence. Me? I study natural stupidity.

Before Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren went into politics, she and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, coauthored a book in which they asked why most one-earner couples could live comfortably within their budgets in the 1950s, yet the two-earner couples that had become the norm by the 1990s often struggled to make ends meet.9 Their answer was that the second paycheck went largely to fuel a bidding war for houses in better school districts.

In one large sample of women, for instance, the annual probability of divorce among those whose weddings cost more than $20,000 was more than three times that of those whose weddings cost between $5,000 and $10,000.

the effects of a decline in any one person's after-tax income are dramatically different from those of an across-the-board decline. If you alone experience an income decline, you're less able to buy what you want. But when everyone's income declines simultaneously, relative purchasing power is unaffected. And it's relative purchasing power that determines who gets things that are in short supply.

Concerns about relative position are a hard fact of human nature. No biologist is surprised that they loom so large in human psychology, since relative position was always by far the best predictor of reproductive success. People who didn't care how well they were doing in relative terms would have been ill-equipped for the competitive environments in which we evolved. Few parents, on reflection, would want their children to be stripped of positional concerns completely.

CEO compensation at large companies grew sixfold between 1980 and 2003, roughly the same as the market-cap growth of these businesses.

In 1980, the cost of an average American wedding, adjusted for inflation, was $11,000, a princely sum in most parts of the world even today. But by 2014, that figure had escalated to $30,000, and in Manhattan the average wedding now costs more than $76,000.1

In another study, the psychologist Martin Seligman and his coauthors asked people to engage in five exercises that had been shown in earlier work to boost feelings of well-being.15 One was to write and personally deliver a letter of gratitude to someone who had never been properly thanked for an earlier kindness. This step, they found, was associated with a larger and more persistent increase in happiness scores than any other of the four other exercises.

Hong Kong's maximum tax (the "standard rate") has normally been 15 percent, effectively capping the marginal rate at high income levels (in exchange for no personal exemptions).

The most common mistake we make as teachers is attempting to tell our students too much.