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" Everyone knows it's dangerous to ingest gasoline or to inhale its fumes. But I am starting to believe that merely thinking about the price of gasoline can damage cognitive processing. "

Richard Thaler

Thinking

I Am

Dangerous

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

Richard Thaler

Just

Mistakes

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

" Parents want their children to excel, callers to a victims' hot line want help, and sick people want to get well. Offering aids is like providing an alarm clock: it may help people get to an appointment on time, but no one is forcing them to use it. "

" The government employs scientists of many varieties in technical capacities, from estimating the environmental toxicity of a chemical to the structural soundness of a bridge. But when it comes to forming policies, these scientists and, especially, behavioral scientists are rarely at the table with the lawyers and the economists. "

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

" 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. "

" One reason for high health care costs is that patients fail to follow their treatment regimen. "

Richard Thaler

Reason

Fail

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

" We humans actually need help controlling our impulses - nudges. "

" 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. "

" Behavioral economics offers a plausible explanation for overreactions by the market. For example, a long period of bad performance can lead to stereotyping. "

" I practice what has come to be called behavioral economics. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Sunk costs? We pay too much attention to them. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" How can government reduce the frequency and the severity of future catastrophes? Companies that have the potential to create significant harm must be required to pay for the costs they inflict, either before or after the fact. Economists agree on this general approach. The problem is in putting such a policy into effect. "

" 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. "

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

" We all need a lot of humility, and especially about the economy. "

" Social Security may be the most beloved of all the government's programs, partly because it requires so little thinking. You pay taxes while you work, then you and your spouse collect until you die. "

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

" When it comes to assessing the chances of some complicated combination of events, gut feelings are pretty much useless. "

" 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. "

" 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. "