Robert H. Frank famous quotes

The most common mistake we make as teachers is attempting to tell our students too much.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Teacher #Mistake #Too Much

In short both the things we feel we need and the things available for us to buy depend largely—beyond some point, almost entirely—on the things that others choose to buy.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Needs #Feels

Economics, as it is often taught today, portrays us as ***** economicus-someone who doesn't vote in presidential elections, doesn't return lost wallets, and doesn't leave tips when dining out of town. Julie Nelson reminds us that most people aren't really like that. She helps point the way to a richer, more descriptive way of thinking about economic life.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Thinking #People #Presidential

Trusting others puts us at risk. Yet failure to trust entails risk as well. The ability to navigate through this minefield successfully is one of life’s most valuable assets. DeSteno provides by far the best account of what science has learned about how we do this. The Truth About Trust is also a terrific read.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Risk #Assets #Ability

No society has ever succeeded without a decent government.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Government #Decent

Life is graded on the curve. It's not how big you are, how strong you are, how smart you are. It's how good you are at the things that count relative to the people around you.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Strong #Smart #Curves

No one could argue with a straight face that the couples getting married today are much happier just because their wedding celebrations cost three times as much as those in 1980. Bigger mansions and costlier parties are wasteful in the same sense that larger antlers on all bull elk are wasteful. The good news is that simple changes in the tax system can eliminate much of this waste without having to deny people the right to decide for themselves how best to spend their money.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Couple #Party #Simple

Pass down values every day through your actions, your words and your time with your kids.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Self Esteem #Kids #Action

If top marginal income tax rates are set too high, they discourage productive economic activity. In the limit, a top marginal income tax rate of 100 percent would mean that taxpayers would gain nothing from working harder or investing more. In contrast, a higher top marginal rate on consumption would actually encourage savings and investment. A top marginal consumption tax rate of 100 percent would simply mean that if a wealthy family spent an extra dollar, it would also owe an additional dollar of tax.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Mean #Dollars #Income

A good school is a relative concept, and the better schools are located in more expensive neighborhoods. But when everyone bids more for a house in a better school district, they succeed only in bidding up the prices of those houses. As before, 50 percent of all children will attend schools in the bottom half of the school quality distribution. As in the familiar stadium metaphor, all stand, hoping to get a better view, only to discover that no one sees better than if all had remained seated.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Children #School #Views

For the three decades after WWII, incomes grew at about 3 percent a year for people up and down the income ladder, but since then most income growth has occurred among the top quintile. And among that group, most of the income growth has occurred among the top 5 percent. The pattern repeats itself all the way up. Most of the growth among the top 5 percent has been among the top 1 percent, and most of the growth among that group has been among the top one-tenth of one percent.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Years #People #Growth

If government is inevitable, the challenge is to come up with the most effective one possible.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Government #Challenges #Come Up

Questions like, "Is my suit OK?", or "Is my job performance satisfactory?", are impossible to think about in the absence of a suitable frame of reference. For an interview suit to serve its purpose, it must make you look good relative to other candidates for the job you want. For your job performance to be satisfactory, it must compare favorably with the performance of others who want the same promotion you do. As Charles Darwin saw clearly, much of life is graded on the curve, and conventional economic models completely ignore that fact.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Jobs #Thinking #Economic Models

If the search is for examples that contradict the predictions of standard economic models, a good rule of thumb is to start in France.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Economic Models #Example #Thumbs

Adam Smith's uncritically enthusiastic modern disciples portray his invisible hand theory as saying that market forces reliably harness selfish individuals to serve the common good. That's often true, but as Darwin recognized clearly, many traits that serve the interests of individual animals make life more difficult for larger groups.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Selfish #Animal #Hands

The link between rational individual behavior and collectively desirable outcomes is extremely tenuous.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Links #Outcomes #Behavior

When the economic pie grows larger, it's always possible for everyone to have a larger slice than before. So it's really in all of our interest to make the economic pie larger by eliminating waste whenever and wherever possible.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Pie #Waste #Economic

When people bump up against one another in the course of pursuing their goals, it is in everyone's interest to resolve any resulting problems in the least costly ways possible.
-- Robert H. Frank

#People #Goal #Bumps

When the rich build bigger, they shift the frame of reference that shapes the demands of the near rich, who travel in the same social circles. Perhaps it's now the custom in those circles to host your daughter's wedding reception at home rather than in a hotel or country club. So the near rich feel they too need a house with a ballroom. And when they build bigger, they shift the frame of reference for the group just below them, and so on, all the way down.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Daughter #Country #Home

Many social critics wag their fingers at what they perceive to be frivolous luxury spending. But that misses the point that consumption norms are local. It's not just the rich who spend more when they get more money. Everyone else does, too. The mansions of the rich may seem over the top to people in the middle, but the same could be said of middle-class houses as seen by most of the planet's seven billion people.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Class #Luxury #People

Many decry rising inequality because it makes those who've fallen behind feel impoverished. But it's done much more than cause hurt feelings. It has also raised the real cost to middle-income families of achieving many basic goals. The process begins with the completely unremarkable fact that top earners have been spending at a substantially higher rate than before. They've been building bigger mansions, staging more elaborate weddings and coming-of-age parties for their kids, buying more and better of everything.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Hurt #Real #Party

The most glaring deficiency in traditional economic models is that they completely ignore the role of context in evaluation.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Economic Models #Roles #Evaluation

The primary source of waste in government is that legislators are often under heavy pressure to vote for projects that will benefit their campaign contributors, even when those projects fail a simple cost-benefit test. But with the Supreme Court showing little interest in permitting tighter rules on campaign contributions in recent years, there is little reason to be optimistic that we'll start curbing this kind of waste any time soon.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Optimistic #Simple #Government

One reason that might motivate a worker to accept a riskier job at higher pay, for example, would be that doing so would enable him to bid more effectively for a house in a better school district. But if other workers did likewise, none would achieve the goal they were striving for.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Jobs #School #Goal

We've long known that firms can pay higher wages if they spend less on workplace safety enhancement. Libertarians ask, "If a worker is willing to accept higher wages in return for his agreement to exercise greater caution while performing his job, why should the government prevent him from making that choice?" It's a rhetorically powerful question, yet it overlooks the fact that the agreement in question will have adverse effects on others.
-- Robert H. Frank

#Jobs #Powerful #Exercise