Richard Thaler
Richard Thaler
Richard H. Thaleris an American economist and the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business...
Richard Thaler quotes about
retirement able should
Every American worker should be able to save for retirement via payroll deductions.
goal people want
My mantra is if you want to help people accomplish some goal, make it easy.
years saving tomorrow
There's a second component of a good savings plan, which is something that a colleague of mine called Schlomo Benartzi and I developed many years ago, that we call "save more tomorrow."
two people tonight
"Save more tomorrow" is a nudge to help people do what they know they want to do, which is save more, but they can't bring themselves to save more now. Just like many of us are planning to go on diets next month, or maybe in two months, certainly not tonight.
rare-events swans giving
So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.
class two oil
LTCM lost money when Russia defaulted on a certain class of bonds, and then they had other investments like on the spread between two different kinds of shares of Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company. Now that seems completely unrelated to Russian bonds. But they were related because other hedge funds saw similar discrepancies and they were all making similar bets.
should-have years long
The reason is they failed to learned the primary lesson we should have learned from when Long Term Capital Management went belly up ten years ago. That is, investments that seem uncorrelated can be correlated simply because we're interested in it.
thinking people risk
I think the people who've been the most overconfident in our business in the last decade have been the people that called themselves risk managers.
thinking law drunk
When should we nudge and when should we shove, I think, it's a political judgment. Obviously in some situations we need shoves, we need laws. Fraud is against the law, murder is against the law, drunk-driving is against the law. We don't need just nudges.
nudge attention environment
So, what's a nudge? A nudge is some small feature of the environment that attracts our attention and alters our behavior.
assumption figures plans
The assumption that everybody will figure out how much they have to save and then will just implement that plan is obviously preposterous.
retirement self saving
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.
empowerment easy empirical-evidence
I'm all for empowerment and education, but the empirical evidence is that it doesn't work. That's why I say make it easy.
over-you friendly use
It would be much more consumer friendly for them to beep you when you swipe your card that says, uh-oh you're over your limit, are you sure you want to use that?