15 Quotes by Robert H. Frank

Concerns about relative position are a hard fact of human nature. No biologist is surprised that they loom so large in human psychology, since relative position was always by far the best predictor of reproductive success. People who didn’t care how well they were doing in relative terms would have been ill-equipped for the competitive environments in which we evolved. Few parents, on reflection, would want their children to be stripped of positional concerns completely.

They like the tax because they believe, correctly, that it will stimulate much needed savings and investment. But it’s an even better policy instrument than they think.

If tax remedies are so advantageous, why would they provoke the ire of voters? Here I will suggest that voters generally, and prosperous voters in particular, suffer from what I call the mother of all cognitive illusions: they believe that having to pay higher taxes would make it more difficult to buy what they want. Like many illusory beliefs, this one may strike most people as self-evidently true. And yet, as I will explain, it is completely baseless.

Homo economicus would cheat only if he stood to benefit by enough and if the odds of being caught were sufficiently low. So the mere fact that he does not have a reputation for being a cheat tells us only that he’s been prudent.

A 2018 meta-analysis of sixty-four earlier studies involving more than five thousand subjects confirms that students learn more effectively if they are asked to explain a concept to themselves than if it is presented to them in other ways. The included studies compared learning outcomes from prompted self-explanation to those produced by a variety of other instructional approaches, including lectures by instructors, solving problems, studying worked problems, and studying text.17.

Paul Samuelson once said, “Never underestimate the willingness of a man to believe flattering things about himself.