Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People are irrational - and predictably so.
Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.
None of us always make the best financial decisions.
What reminds you in your environment about saving? Nothing.
that when given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat.
The more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips.
The idea that you will make the right decision every time is very unlikely.
A very simple bad decision is to get into debt. And that is very expensive.
Companies, however unintentionally, choke the motivation out of their employees.
Honesty is a complex and tricky thing, and we don't want to be honest all the time.
It was shocking to realize how many low-income Americans don't have savings accounts.
In life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces.
Motivation, basically getting people to be happy at work, everybody - everybody benefits.
Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.
But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?
The problem with opportunity cost is that opportunity cost is divided among many, many things.
With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors.
The people who need to overcome temptation to the highest degree have the hardest time doing it.
individuals are honest only to the extent that suits them (including their desire to please others)
Not all debt is bad. From time to time we should get into debt when there's a good reason for that.
Marketing is all about providing information that will heighten someone's anticipated and real pleasure.
We need to believe that we're good people, and we'll do just about anything to maintain that perception.
Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time.
When parents have college savings accounts for their kids, their kids show higher social and cognitive performance.
I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?
There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.
Money is all about opportunity cost. Every time you spend on something, that's something you can't spend on something else.
Why would you take money out of your paycheck at the beginning of the month when you don't know how much money you'll need?
I don't know what exactly the translation is but when we do consume something now, something else has to give at some point.
That’s a lesson we can all learn: the more we have, the more we want. And the only cure is to break the cycle of relativity.
The experiments show quite clearly that, as you resist more and more temptation, you're actually more and more likely to fail.
When people are in severe pain, there's an expression, you're a "pain person," and what that means is that nothing else matters.
When you're in pain, tomorrow doesn't exist - just the pain - and the only thing that you want in the world is for it to go away.
Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.
Disasters are usually a good time to re-examine what we've done so far, what mistakes we've made, and what improvements should come next.
The problem is that people basically dangle debt in front of us. And the cost for the poor of course is much higher than for the wealthy.
But because human being tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently .
Once we start thinking of ourselves as polluted, there is not much incentive to behave well, and the trip down the slippery slope is likely.
If you ever go bar hopping, who do you want to take with you? You want a slightly uglier version of yourself. Similar ... but slightly uglier.
People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.
Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are.
When you get a checking account, you should have a savings account, and the number for the savings account should be one off of your checking account.
We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions.
What you should do is wait until the end of each month, and then say, "OK, how much money do I have? How much do I need? Let me send the rest to retirement."
The major thing that holds you back when you're trying to change a bad habit like eating, smoking, or drinking too much is your belief you are out of control.
The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don’t see how our conflicts of interest work on us.
Rainy day savings are incredibly important, because from time to time, bad things happen. And if you're not prepared for that, it's going to be really terrible.
The real issue is, how much goodwill do you invest in the work? And goodwill is not something that we can buy with money. It's very hard to buy goodwill with money.
I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier. We're less productive as individuals. We're less productive as companies, and we're more miserable.