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" As a general rule, the United States government is run by lawyers who occasionally take advice from economists. Others interested in helping the lawyers out need not apply. "

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" Many problems are so complex that even if we had the money to fix them, we wouldn't know how to do it. Fixing inner-city schools, reducing obesity, creating peace in the Middle East are just a few examples. "

Richard Thaler

Know

Problems

Money

" 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. "

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

Richard Thaler

Economists

I Think

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

" I am all for trying to teach household finance in schools, starting as early as possible. And when it comes to high school, I think learning about compound interest is at least as important as trigonometry or memorizing the names of all 50 state capitals. "

" Most of us think that we are 'better than average' in most things. We are also 'miscalibrated,' meaning that our sense of the probability of events doesn't line up with reality. When we say we are sure about a certain fact, for example, we may well be right only half the time. "

" Morality aside, there are other factors deterring 'strategic defaults,' whether in recourse or nonrecourse states. These include the economic and emotional costs of giving up one's home and moving, the perceived social stigma of defaulting, and a serious hit to a borrower's credit rating. "

" The ability of businesses to monitor our behavior is already a fact of life, and it isn't going away. Of course we must protect our privacy rights. But if we're smart, we'll also use the data that is being collected to improve our own lives. "

" Tax cuts are one of many ways to stimulate the economy. Building infrastructure, for example, is another. "

" Real people have trouble balancing their checkbooks, much less calculating how much they need to save for retirement; they sometimes binge on food, drink, or high-definition televisions. They are more like Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock. "

" A nudge is some feature of the environment that changes the behaviour of humans but would not change the behaviour of rational economic agents, what we call Econs. "

" Academia does not provide many opportunities for immediate gratification. You work for two years on a project, it takes two more years to get it published, and then you start hoping someone might read it. "

" Even a mother - Jewish or not - can't worry about everything. So it is important that we limit our worries to real as opposed to imaginary risks. "

" The main thing that you learn in grad school, or should learn, is how to think like an economist. The rest is just math. "

Richard Thaler

Think

School

" The supply price and the demand price should be roughly the same. You're not supposed to have two different prices. According to economists. "

" People are less likely to think it's immoral to walk away from their home if they know others who have done so. And if enough people do it, the stigma begins to erode. "

" In a democracy, if a government creates bad policies, it can be voted out of office. Competition in the private sector, however, can easily work to encourage phishing rather than stifle it. "

" Here is a guiding principle: If a business collects data on consumers electronically, it should provide them with a version of that data that is easy to download and export to another Web site. "

" When it comes to my health, I would rather my doctor base her decisions on science rather than what she, or some lawyer, thinks will stand up in court. "

" Signing up to be an organ donor should be at least as easy as downloading a song to your iPhone. "

" It's hard to have any idea of how much money is enough to finance an appropriate lifestyle in retirement. But if a lump sum is translated into a monthly income, it's much easier to determine whether you have enough put away to afford to stop working. "

" There's a reason why start-ups, especially disruptive start-ups - like Google or Amazon or Uber - are full of young people. That's because young people are not as wedded to the old fashioned ways of doing things. "

" High school seniors should receive help in how to think about a student loan and how to make sure that the education bought with the loan offers good prospects for repayment. "

" 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. "

" Companies are accumulating vast amounts of information about your likes and dislikes. But they are doing this not only because you're interesting. The more they know, the more money they can make. "

" Claiming that Social Security benefits are safe may sound naive, but my view is actually quite cynical. I believe that as long as the elderly continue to vote in large numbers, no Congress will renege on promised payouts for those already eligible to receive benefits. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If we think that high marginal tax rates are bad because they distort incentives, the same is then true for tax subsidies. "

" My thesis topic was 'The value of a human life.' I asked people a question: 'Suppose you had some risk, a one in a thousand risk of dying - how much would you pay to eliminate it?' "