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" 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. "

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" When employees are first eligible for a retirement savings plan, they should be enrolled unless they choose to opt out. "

Richard Thaler

Employees

Out

Choose

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" In the 1940s, economics started getting highly mathematical. It was basically because economists weren't smart enough to write down models of real behavior that they started writing down models of highly rational behavior - and they kind of forgot about humans. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For many people, being asked to solve their own retirement savings problems is like being asked to build their own cars. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

Richard Thaler

Just

Mistakes

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

" We could all use more coaching. "

Richard Thaler

Could

Coaching

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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?' "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "