Richard Thaler Quotes

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Richard Thaler

Profession : Economist

Birth : September 12, 1945

I think behavioral economists don't have any more of an explanation about the rise of Trump than anyone else.

Richard Thaler

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

If you're trading individual securities, you're almost certainly making a mistake. Because most professional managers can't outperform their benchmarks, and there's little reason to think that individuals can.

Richard Thaler

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

Richard Thaler

God did not say that you should be able to borrow one hundred percent of the price of a house.

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler

The good thing I will say about the Chicago School is that it was always about the world, not about the abstract.

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler

We all need a lot of humility, and especially about the economy.

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler

We humans actually need help controlling our impulses - nudges.

Richard Thaler

If you're not putting enough away for emergencies or retirement, making commitments in advance, such as signing up for payroll withholding, can help.

Richard Thaler

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

Richard Thaler

The sad truth is that many behavioral economists know very little about psychology.

Richard Thaler

It is true that I am one of the co-authors of 'Nudge,' and I am a behavioral economist, but it does not mean that everything we write about in that book is behavioral economics, nor does it mean that my co-author, the distinguished legal scholar Cass Sunstein, is a behavioral economist.

Richard Thaler

Coining a term is not the same as creating a field!

Richard Thaler

You go out on the practice range, and something kind of clicks, and you start hitting the ball very crisply. And you're sure that you've found it, the holy grail - that all you have to do is hold your hand in a certain way. Then you go out on the golf course, and it's completely disappeared.

Richard Thaler

For amateur golfers, I think one of the biggest mistakes is to model their play on professionals.

Richard Thaler

I have an agent, John Brockman, who is an agent to many academic authors like Dan Gilbert and Steven Pinker, and he's very good at conning academics into writing books. He pulled this trick on me.

Richard Thaler