Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Why tie to gold? Why not 1982 Bordeaux?
Leaders are important but not omnipotent.
Sunk costs? We pay too much attention to them.
If you want to encourage some activity, make it easy.
Tort reform is a complicated subject and not a panacea.
A good rule of thumb is to assume that everything matters.
I practice what has come to be called behavioral economics.
We humans actually need help controlling our impulses - nudges.
We all need a lot of humility, and especially about the economy.
You can't make evidence-based policy decisions without evidence.
People make just as many mistakes when the stakes go up, maybe more.
My mantra is if you want to help people accomplish some goal, make it easy.
If no estate tax is imposed, capital gains taxes can be avoided indefinitely.
The lesson from behavioral economics is that people only save if it's automatic.
Every American worker should be able to save for retirement via payroll deductions.
The sad truth is that many behavioral economists know very little about psychology.
There's no reason to think that markets always drive people to what's good for them.
I think we also have learned the lesson that we have to have better incentive structures.
If people just put away what's left at the end of the month, that's a recipe for failure.
Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a rational person.
Don't get trapped by looking at what the price was that you paid for some stock originally.
One reason for high health care costs is that patients fail to follow their treatment regimen.
God did not say that you should be able to borrow one hundred percent of the price of a house.
Signing up to be an organ donor should be at least as easy as downloading a song to your iPhone.
Demanding that the rich get a tax cut as a condition for tax relief for others is simply elitist.
For amateur golfers, I think one of the biggest mistakes is to model their play on professionals.
Most economists, including me, agree that longevity insurance would make sense for a lot of people.
Even if we grade on a very generous curve, many Americans flunk when it comes to financial literacy.
I don't think it says anywhere in the Bible that tithing should be calculated on a before-tax basis.
If governments want to encourage good citizenship, they should try making the desired behavior more fun.
Tax cuts are one of many ways to stimulate the economy. Building infrastructure, for example, is another.
The Nobel Prize is going to be 'fun money' - for an occasion, when my wife and I want a $50 bottle of wine.
We behavioralists differ from our more traditional brethren in the way we characterize agents in the economy.
I think behavioral economists don't have any more of an explanation about the rise of Trump than anyone else.
Shopping for an annuity with hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake can be daunting, even for an economist.
The good thing I will say about the Chicago School is that it was always about the world, not about the abstract.
When an economist says the evidence is "mixed," he or she means that theory says one thing and data says the opposite.
When it comes to assessing the chances of some complicated combination of events, gut feelings are pretty much useless.
When employees are first eligible for a retirement savings plan, they should be enrolled unless they choose to opt out.
The main thing that you learn in grad school, or should learn, is how to think like an economist. The rest is just math.
For many people, being asked to solve their own retirement savings problems is like being asked to build their own cars.
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'm all for empowerment and education, but the empirical evidence is that it doesn't work. That's why I say make it easy.
So, what's a nudge? A nudge is some small feature of the environment that attracts our attention and alters our behavior.
If we think that high marginal tax rates are bad because they distort incentives, the same is then true for tax subsidies.
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.
Payroll savings plans are vital because they are essentially the only way that middle-class Americans reliably save for retirement.
There are cases when I can make myself better off by restricting my future choices and commit myself to a specific course of action.
Most people start claiming benefits within a year of when they become eligible, although benefits increase substantially if they wait.
Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.