Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

" Countries all around the world, starting with the U.K., have started behavioural insight teams, often referred to as nudge units. And they seem to be doing lots of good. "

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

" It's not that we can predict bubbles - if we could, we would be rich. But we can certainly have a bubble warning system. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In the world of traditional economics, it shouldn't matter whether you use an opt-in or opt-out system. So long as the costs of registering as a donor or a nondonor are low, the results should be similar. But many findings of behavioral economics show that tiny disparities in such rules can make a big difference. "

" In some ways, the finding that financial education doesn't provide long-term payoffs is hardly surprising. After all, how much do you remember from your high school chemistry class? Unless you use chemistry at work, you probably don't recall much about ionic bonding. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" The voting public is not very good at attributing credit and blame to presidents. They get too much credit when things go well and too much blame when things go badly. The same applies to coaches, C.E.O.'s, parents, and anyone else in charge. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

" The good thing I will say about the Chicago School is that it was always about the world, not about the abstract. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For amateur golfers, I think one of the biggest mistakes is to model their play on professionals. "