Quotes About Behavioral Economics

#1. Behavioral economics tells us that people often focus too much on the wrong things, and tend to focus on aspects of the job that are salient. So, for example, the pay is salient, especially the starting pay.

Alan Krueger

#2. January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.

Sendhil Mullainathan

#3. [There will be movement toward] behavioral economics ... [which] involves study of those aspects of men's images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.

Kenneth E. Boulding

#4. The lesson from behavioral economics is that people only save if it's automatic.

Richard Thaler

#5. It is telling commentary on economic orthodoxy that a whole subdiscipline--behavioral economics--and a raft of lab experiments are needed to show that humans often fail to behave with the rationality expected of them.

Kaushik Basu

#6. Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, a book that offers an entertaining and engaging overview of behavioral economics.

Daniel H. Pink

#7. One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.

Dan Ariely

#8. Everyone's lost a lot of money on their 401k plans. I've heard some people calling them 201k plans. So it's even more important to get people to be saving more for retirement. Behavioral economics has helped us learn a lot about how to do that.

Richard Thaler

#9. I started to read as obsessively about Star Wars as I once did about Kant - and still do about behavioral economics and behavioral psychology.

Cass Sunstein

#10. Retirement savings is probably behavioral economists' greatest success story. It is a prototypical behavioral-economics problem because saving for retirement is cognitively hard - figuring out how much to save - and requires self-control.

Richard Thaler

#11. The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics.

Daniel Kahneman

#12. It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!

Dan Ariely

#13. At the last minute, I couldn't wear the Hitler mustache because Tiger Stripe ate it; and then I didn't want to take my kitty and risk his coughing up some big Nazi hairball on someone's front stoop.

Chuck Palahniuk

#14. If God doesn't want us to do it, He doesn't want us to get pleasure from thinking about doing it

Douglas Wilson

#15. The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.

Garrett Hardin

#16. Lavish praise on people and people will flourish; criticize people and they'll shrivel up.

Richard Branson

#17. One of the peculiarities of economics is that it still rests on a behavioral assumption-rational utility maximization-that has long since been rejected by sociologists and psychologists.

Lester Thurow

#18. A new year was a chance to start over. Maybe even, just maybe, there would be a peace on earth for one entire day.

Dorothea Benton Frank

#19. Wouldn't economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?

Dan Ariely

#20. Do I wake up every day and thank God that I live in 21st-century Britain? Of course not. But from time to time, I recognise it as an unfathomable privilege.

Robert Webb

#21. People think about life in terms of changes, not levels. They can be changes from the status quo or changes from what was expected, but whatever form they take, it is changes that make us happy or miserable.

Richard H. Thaler

#22. You're fourteen years old. You've only had that hair for fourteen years and you want to change it already! How bored are you going to be with it by the time you are thirty? What color will you be up to by then?

Louise Rennison

#23. I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.

Alison Bechdel

#24. Talking about things that are understandable only weighs down the mind.

Alfred Jarry

#25. The poor homosexuals
they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution (AIDS).

Pat Buchanan

#26. We had been working. We had a bunch of songs written and it came time to make the record, so we had our lawyer make the call to Elektra and ask for our advance. Then, we got dropped. It was actually exciting.

Gene Ween

#27. Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.

Walter Bagehot

#28. A cruel critic has never made anything; his glibness is a way of inflicting his emptiness on others.

John Lahr

#29. These words were small and they only meant what they said, not how they felt before he said them. He nearly wept with the frustration of it.

Catherynne M Valente

#30. Half of these aren't even Machiavelli.
Some are Plato, Thucydides etc ... doesnt anyone check these?

Niccolo Machiavelli

#31. On traditional economic theory:
We do not play chess as if we were a grandmaster, invest as if we were Warren Buffett, or cook like an Iron Chef. It is more likely we cook like Warren Buffett, who loves to eat at Dairy Queen.

Richard H. Thaler

#32. How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?

Charlie Munger