A Quote by 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

Quote Topics

Because Behavioral Control Economics Economists Figuring Greatest Greatest Success Hard How How Much Much Out Problem Requires Retirement Save Saving Savings Self Self-Control Story Success Success Story

Quote Author

Richard Thaler
American - Economist
Born: September 12, 1945

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

How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind?... I think that these behavioral economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don't think it's going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what's right in psychology.

Charlie Munger

How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?

Charlie Munger

It is true that I am one of the co-authors of 'Nudge,' and I am a behavioral economist, but it does not mean that everything we write about in that book is behavioral economics, nor does it mean that my co-author, the distinguished legal scholar Cass Sunstein, is a behavioral economist.

Richard Thaler

I favor every worker having access to a retirement savings account, and there are various options for doing this. I do support states implementing their own plans, and I expect them to play an important role in increasing retirement savings for young professionals especially.

Joe Sestak

I always tell people, it's never too late to start saving for retirement. It's not that important how much you have already saved. What's important is that you start saving. And save as much as you can. You will be amazed at how quickly it will build up.

Rodney Brooks

I started to read as obsessively about Star Wars as I once did about Kant - and still do about behavioral economics and behavioral psychology.

Cass Sunstein

The lesson from behavioral economics is that people only save if it's automatic.

Richard Thaler

Americans should be able to enjoy a secure retirement after a lifetime of hard work. But too many Americans reach retirement without enough savings to supplement their Social Security benefits.

Tom Perez

January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.

Sendhil Mullainathan

Payroll savings plans are vital because they are essentially the only way that middle-class Americans reliably save for retirement.

Richard Thaler

There's a popular image of people who don't save for the future as lacking in self-control. But the reason saving is so hard has less to do with self-control and more to do with a scarcity of attention.

Sendhil Mullainathan

Hell, I live like I did when I was 35. I don't believe in retirement groups because I don't believe in retirement. How long can I keep coaching? How about forever? I'll never walk off the field.

Sid Gillman

I love Richard Thaler's 'Quasi Rational Economics.' A collection of some of his most interesting and inventive essays, the real foundation of behavioral economics.

Cass Sunstein

Behavioral economics can explain some things, but it's hard to explain a lot of the underlying processes that generate these decisions, much less some of these unconscious things that we don't have a handle on at all.