Top 62 Richard Thaler Quotes
#1. If you want to encourage someone to do something, make it easy.
Richard Thaler
#2. 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
#3. specific values to objects. When they have to give something up, they are hurt more than they are pleased if they acquire the very same thing.
Richard H. Thaler
#4. One overly simplistic idea is that we can improve student performance by just by giving financial incentives to parents, teachers, or kids. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that such incentives are effective, but nuances matter.
Richard H. Thaler
#5. Doctors are crucial choice architects, and with an understanding of how Humans think, they could do far more to improve people's health and thus to lengthen their lives.
Richard H. Thaler
#6. The reason is they failed to learned the primary lesson we should have learned from when Long Term Capital Management went belly up ten years ago. That is, investments that seem uncorrelated can be correlated simply because we're interested in it.
Richard Thaler
#7. Compare subliminal advertising to something just as cunning. If you want people to lose weight, one effective strategy is to put mirrors in the cafeteria.
Richard H. Thaler
#8. 10. Calories count in New York City. The Big Apple recently adopted a law that requires fast-food restaurants with at least fifteen outlets in the city to post, in prominent places, the calories of each of their food items so that customers can make informed choices.
Richard H. Thaler
#9. If rather than setting the minimum balance as the lowest possible amount, so we keep people in debt for as long as possible, we raise the minimum payment and encourage people to pay off their credit cards, we're going to make less money, but we're going to have costumers that are more solvent.
Richard Thaler
#10. It is time to stop making excuses. We need an enriched approach to doing economic research, one that acknowledges the existence and relevance of Humans.
Richard H. Thaler
#11. Wealth, too, is often separated into various mental accounts. At the bottom of this hierarchy sits the money that is easiest to spend: cash.
Richard H. Thaler
#12. We can even see the legal institution of marriage as a precommitment strategy, not unlike that of Ulysses in approaching the Sirens, in which people knowingly choose a legal status that will protect them against their own errors.
Richard H. Thaler
#13. MBA students are not the only ones overconfident about their abilities. The "above average" effect is pervasive. Ninety percent of all drivers think they are above average behind the wheel,
Richard H. Thaler
#14. We don't have to stop inventing abstract models that describe the behavior of imaginary Econs. We do, however, have to stop assuming that those models are accurate descriptions of behavior, and stop basing policy decisions on such flawed analyses.
Richard H. Thaler
#15. A company invites their employees to sign up for a plan where every time they get a raise, some part of that raise goes to increasing their contribution rate to the 401k plan. In the first company we convinced to adopt this plan, saving rates tripled.
Richard Thaler
#16. suppose there was some medical procedure that will provide some modest health benefit but is extremely painful. However, the procedure is administered with a drug that does not prevent the pain but instead erases all memory of the event. Would you be willing to undertake this procedure?
Richard H. Thaler
#17. 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.
Richard Thaler
#18. The lesson from behavioral economics is that people only save if it's automatic.
Richard Thaler
#19. So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.
Richard Thaler
#20. It would be much more consumer friendly for them to beep you when you swipe your card that says, uh-oh you're over your limit, are you sure you want to use that?
Richard Thaler
#21. Most people start claiming benefits within a year of when they become eligible, although benefits increase substantially if they wait.
Richard Thaler
#22. I think the people who've been the most overconfident in our business in the last decade have been the people that called themselves risk managers.
Richard Thaler
#23. Most economists, including me, agree that longevity insurance would make sense for a lot of people.
Richard Thaler
#24. Every American worker should be able to save for retirement via payroll deductions.
Richard Thaler
#25. One simple step firms can take is make sure that people that are getting paid a lot of money, say more than a million or two, that a big chunk of that money is deferred. That's going to change the whole ballgame.
Richard Thaler
#26. there is no question that social pressures nudge people to accept some pretty odd conclusions - and those conclusions might well affect their behavior.
Richard H. Thaler
#27. There's a second component of a good savings plan, which is something that a colleague of mine called Schlomo Benartzi and I developed many years ago, that we call "save more tomorrow."
Richard Thaler
#28. I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.
Richard Thaler
#29. When should we nudge and when should we shove, I think, it's a political judgment. Obviously in some situations we need shoves, we need laws. Fraud is against the law, murder is against the law, drunk-driving is against the law. We don't need just nudges.
Richard Thaler
#30. "Save more tomorrow" is a nudge to help people do what they know they want to do, which is save more, but they can't bring themselves to save more now. Just like many of us are planning to go on diets next month, or maybe in two months, certainly not tonight.
Richard Thaler
#31. John Rawls (1971) called the publicity principle. In its simplest form, the publicity principle bans government from selecting a policy that it would not be able or willing to defend publicly to its own citizens.
Richard H. Thaler
#32. My mantra is if you want to help people accomplish some goal, make it easy.
Richard Thaler
#33. The same with the mortgage brokers that were selling people mortgages they couldn't afford. We shouldn't pay them on each mortgage they write. They should have what they call "skin in the game," where they've got to reimburse us if the guy who sold the mortgage defaults.
Richard Thaler
#35. 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
#36. As I have learned over the years, and will discuss further in subsequent chapters, the reluctance to experiment, test, evaluate, and learn that I experienced at General Motors is all too common.
Richard H. Thaler
#37. A good rule of thumb is to assume that everything matters.
Richard Thaler
#38. I think we also have learned the lesson that we have to have better incentive structures.
Richard Thaler
#39. individual risk taking, especially in the domain of risks to life and health.
Richard H. Thaler
#40. An especially good way to gain weight is to have dinner with other people.11 On average, those who eat with one other person eat about 35 percent more than they do when they are alone; members of a group of four eat about 75 percent more; those in groups of seven or more eat 96 percent more.*
Richard H. Thaler
#41. So, we experience life in terms of changes, we feel diminishing sensitivity to both gains and losses, and losses sting more than equivalently-sized gains feel good.
Richard H. Thaler
#42. 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.
Richard Thaler
#43. Investors must keep in mind that there's a difference between a good company and a good stock. After all, you can buy a good car but pay too much for it.
Richard Thaler
#44. average article written in a specialized academic journal is probably lucky to find 100 readers.
Richard H. Thaler
#45. If people just put away what's left at the end of the month, that's a recipe for failure.
Richard Thaler
#46. 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
#47. By properly deploying both incentives and nudges, we can improve our ability to improve people's lives, and help solve many of society's major problems. And we can do so while still insisting on everyone's freedom to choose.
Richard H. Thaler
#48. There are cases when I can make myself better off by restricting my future choices and commit myself to a specific course of action.
Richard Thaler
#49. When an economist says the evidence is "mixed," he or she means that theory says one thing and data says the opposite.
Richard Thaler
#50. People exaggerate their own skills. they are optimistic about their prospects and overconfident about their guesses, including which managers to pick.
Richard Thaler
#51. My hunch is that as the importance of a decision grows, the tendency to rely on quantitative analyses done by others tends to shrink. When the championship or the future of the company is on the line, managers tend to rely on their gut instincts.
Richard H. Thaler
#52. To approach these problems we once again rely on one of our guiding principles: transparency.
Richard H. Thaler
#53. So, what's a nudge? A nudge is some small feature of the environment that attracts our attention and alters our behavior.
Richard Thaler
#54. The assumption that everybody will figure out how much they have to save and then will just implement that plan is obviously preposterous.
Richard Thaler
#55. 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
#56. The three social influences that we have emphasized - information, peer pressure, and priming - can easily be enlisted by private and public nudgers. As we will see, both business and governments can use the power of social influence to promote many good (and bad) causes.
Richard H. Thaler
#57. There's no reason to think that
markets always drive people to
what's good for them.
Richard Thaler
#58. Psychologists tell us that in order to learn from experience, two ingredients are necessary: frequent practice and immediate feedback.
Richard H. Thaler
#59. Credit cards have been extremely profitable to banks. They're profitable not from the fees they collect from the retailers that use the credit cards, that pays the bills, but the real profits come from the interest payments and the charges to users that are unexpected.
Richard Thaler
#60. I don't go by the ratings. I buy wine that tastes good. Statistically, anybody's ability to predict what will be a good wine a decade from now is limited.
Richard Thaler
#61. It turns out, that men, when they're taking care of their business, they're not fully attending to the task at hand, but, I'm sure there's an evolutionary explanation for this, if you give them a target, they will aim.
Richard Thaler
#62. Is there a market for somebody selling a credit card that helps people pay down their balances? I think the question is yes. But it would have to be sold by a bank that's really willing to invest in being a trusted partner with its consumers, because they will make less money on each consumer.
Richard Thaler
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