Richard Thaler quotes

Richard Thaler is an American economist known for his pioneering work in behavioral economics. His research has fundamentally changed how economists think about human decision-making and market behavior. He has received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to the field. Here are 66 of his quotes:

Retirement savings is probably behavioral economists' greatest success story. It is a prototypical behavioral-economics problem because saving for retirement is cognitively hard - figuring out how much to save - and requires self-control.

Richard Thaler

If rather than setting the minimum balance as the lowest possible amount, so we keep people in debt for as long as possible, we raise the minimum payment and encourage people to pay off their credit cards, we're going to make less money, but we're going to have costumers that are more solvent.

Richard Thaler

Many problems are so complex that even if we had the money to fix them, we wouldn't know how to do it. Fixing inner-city schools, reducing obesity, creating peace in the Middle East are just a few examples.

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler

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

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler

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

Richard Thaler

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

Richard Thaler

You go out on the practice range, and something kind of clicks, and you start hitting the ball very crisply. And you're sure that you've found it, the holy grail - that all you have to do is hold your hand in a certain way. Then you go out on the golf course, and it's completely disappeared.

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler

Even a mother - Jewish or not - can't worry about everything. So it is important that we limit our worries to real as opposed to imaginary risks.

Richard Thaler

Leaders are important but not omnipotent.

Richard Thaler

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

Richard Thaler

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

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler

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

Richard Thaler

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

Richard Thaler

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

Richard Thaler

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.

Richard Thaler