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" As every successful parent learns, one way to encourage good behavior, from room-cleaning to tooth-brushing, is to make it fun. Not surprisingly, the same principle applies to adults. Adults like to have fun, too. "

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" The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world. "

Richard Thaler

Simple

Chicago

Tradition

" 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. "

" Whenever I'm asked to autograph a copy of 'Nudge,' the book I wrote with Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor, I sign it, 'Nudge for good.' Unfortunately, that is meant as a plea, not an expectation. "

" Demanding that the rich get a tax cut as a condition for tax relief for others is simply elitist. "

" One of society's thorniest problems is that children from poor families start school lagging badly behind their more affluent classmates in readiness. "

" You go out on the practice range, and something kind of clicks, and you start hitting the ball very crisply. And you're sure that you've found it, the holy grail - that all you have to do is hold your hand in a certain way. Then you go out on the golf course, and it's completely disappeared. "

" Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated. "

" 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. "

" Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a rational person. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If no estate tax is imposed, capital gains taxes can be avoided indefinitely. "

" Tort reform is a complicated subject and not a panacea. "

" 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

" Coining a term is not the same as creating a field! "

" The lesson for businesses is you are dealing with real people. Those are your customers, those are your employees, those are your bosses, and the better you understand how real people tick, the more successfully you will be able to accomplish your goals. "

" People make just as many mistakes when the stakes go up, maybe more. "

Richard Thaler

Just

Mistakes

" We should at least make sure that patients are given the opportunity to opt out of spending their final days in a hospital, hooked up to tubes and running up enormous bills. "

" We behavioralists differ from our more traditional brethren in the way we characterize agents in the economy. "

" Fortunately, economists open to new ways of thinking are finding novel ways to use supposedly irrelevant factors to make the world a better place. "

" God did not say that you should be able to borrow one hundred percent of the price of a house. "

" 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. "

" Payroll savings plans are vital because they are essentially the only way that middle-class Americans reliably save for retirement. "

" Many Americans say they want to be organ donors, but they just don't get around to acting on their intentions. Helping these potential good Samaritans overcome their inertia could prolong thousands of lives a year. "

" Shopping for an annuity with hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake can be daunting, even for an economist. "

" You can't make evidence-based policy decisions without evidence. "

" It makes sense for social scientists to become more involved in policy because many of society's most challenging problems are, in essence, behavioral. "

Richard Thaler

Society

Become

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

" Traditional economics is based on imaginary creatures sometimes referred to as 'Homo economicus.' I call them Econs for short. Econs are amazingly smart and are free of emotion, distraction or self-control problems. Think Mr. Spock from 'Star Trek.' "

" Don't get trapped by looking at what the price was that you paid for some stock originally. "