168 Quotes by Richard Thaler

The same with the mortgage brokers that were selling people mortgages they couldn’t afford. We shouldn’t pay them on each mortgage they write. They should have what they call “skin in the game,” where they’ve got to reimburse us if the guy who sold the mortgage defaults.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If people just put away what’s left at the end of the month, that’s a recipe for failure.

Credit cards have been extremely profitable to banks. They’re profitable not from the fees they collect from the retailers that use the credit cards, that pays the bills, but the real profits come from the interest payments and the charges to users that are unexpected.

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.