Richard Thaler famous quotes
50 minutes ago
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When an economist says the evidence is "mixed," he or she means that theory says one thing and data says the opposite.
-- Richard Thaler -
I don't go by the ratings. I buy wine that tastes good. Statistically, anybody's ability to predict what will be a good wine a decade from now is limited.
-- Richard Thaler -
Rip Van Winkle would be the ideal stock market investor: Rip could invest in the market before his nap and when he woke up 20 years later, he'd be happy. He would have been asleep through all the ups and downs in between. But few investors resemble Mr. Van Winkle. The more often an investor counts his money - or looks at the value of his mutual funds in the newspaper - the lower his risk tolerance.
-- Richard Thaler -
People exaggerate their own skills. they are optimistic about their prospects and overconfident about their guesses, including which managers to pick.
-- Richard Thaler -
There's no reason to think that markets always drive people to what's good for them.
-- Richard Thaler -
Investors must keep in mind that there's a difference between a good company and a good stock. After all, you can buy a good car but pay too much for it.
-- Richard Thaler -
A good rule of thumb is to assume that everything matters.
-- Richard Thaler -
My mantra is if you want to help people accomplish some goal, make it easy.
-- Richard Thaler -
So, what's a nudge? A nudge is some small feature of the environment that attracts our attention and alters our behavior.
-- Richard Thaler -
The lesson from behavioral economics is that people only save if it's automatic.
-- Richard Thaler -
Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.
-- Richard Thaler -
People worry that if they buy an annuity and then die before the policy starts to pay off, their heirs will lose out. I tell them, "What you should be more worried about is if you outlive your money, you will have to move in with your kids. Ask your kids which of these outcomes they are more worried about."
-- Richard Thaler -
If people just put away what's left at the end of the month, that's a recipe for failure.
-- Richard Thaler -
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.
-- Richard Thaler -
I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.
-- Richard Thaler -
There are cases when I can make myself better off by restricting my future choices and commit myself to a specific course of action.
-- Richard Thaler -
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.
-- Richard Thaler -
Most economists, including me, agree that longevity insurance would make sense for a lot of people.
-- Richard Thaler -
Everyone's lost a lot of money on their 401k plans. I've heard some people calling them 201k plans. So it's even more important to get people to be saving more for retirement. Behavioral economics has helped us learn a lot about how to do that.
-- Richard Thaler -
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 -
I think we also have learned the lesson that we have to have better incentive structures.
-- Richard Thaler -
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.
-- Richard Thaler -
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.
-- Richard Thaler
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