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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Doctors and hospitals should be paid for keeping their patients well. Paying them for doing more tests and surgeries creates bad incentives. "

" Lotteries are just one way to provide positive reinforcement. Their power comes from the fact that the chance of winning the prize is overvalued. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" If the government can manage to collect and release personal information in a secure and useful way, so can private companies, which will empower consumers to become better shoppers. "

" The more we turn down questionable offers like trip insurance and scrutinize 'one month' trials, the less incentive companies will have to use such schemes. "

" Even if we grade on a very generous curve, many Americans flunk when it comes to financial literacy. "

" 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. "

" I don't think it says anywhere in the Bible that tithing should be calculated on a before-tax basis. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Arthur Laffer's idea, that lowering taxes could increase revenues, was logically correct. If tax rates are high enough, then people will go to such lengths to avoid them that cutting taxes can increase revenues. What he was wrong about was in thinking that income tax rates were already so high in the 1970s that cutting them would raise revenues. "

" 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. "

" Leaders are important but not omnipotent. "

" 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. "

" Pundits are no better at forecasting election outcomes than they would be at predicting the final path of a hurricane. Smart pundits should consider either abandoning this activity or consulting with the geeks before rendering their guesses. "

" If you want to encourage some activity, make it easy. "

" The Nobel Prize is going to be 'fun money' - for an occasion, when my wife and I want a $50 bottle of wine. "