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

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" 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. "

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

" The wealth in many large estates has never been taxed because it is largely in the form of unrealized - therefore untaxed - capital gains. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The lesson of my field, behavioral economics, is that we need to understand the ways in which we differ from the rational human assumed in standard economic theory. "

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

" The ability of businesses to monitor our behavior is already a fact of life, and it isn't going away. Of course we must protect our privacy rights. But if we're smart, we'll also use the data that is being collected to improve our own lives. "

" The main thing that you learn in grad school, or should learn, is how to think like an economist. The rest is just math. "

" 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?' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I have an agent, John Brockman, who is an agent to many academic authors like Dan Gilbert and Steven Pinker, and he's very good at conning academics into writing books. He pulled this trick on me. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" There can be legal conflicts over whether registering intent is enough to qualify you as an organ donor or whether a doctor must still ask your family's permission. "

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

" 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. "

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