American - Economist | September 12, 1945 -
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.
Richard Thaler
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Don't get trapped by looking at what the price was that you paid for some stock originally.
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God did not say that you should be able to borrow one hundred percent of the price of a house.
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The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world.
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The good thing I will say about the Chicago School is that it was always about the world, not about the abstract.
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The main thing that you learn in grad school, or should learn, is how to think like an economist. The rest is just math.
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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.
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It's essential that we understand things like the free-rider problem, but we also need to understand that, fortunately, humans are a little nicer than economists give them credit for. Some people actually leave money at roadside fruit stands; some people give money to NPR so we can listen to it.
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My thesis topic was 'The value of a human life.' I asked people a question: 'Suppose you had some risk, a one in a thousand risk of dying - how much would you pay to eliminate it?'
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We all need a lot of humility, and especially about the economy.
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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.
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We humans actually need help controlling our impulses - nudges.
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