You go out on the practice range, and something kind of clicks, and you start hitting the ball very crisply. And you're sure that you've found it, the holy grail - that all you have to do is hold your hand in a certain way. Then you go out on the golf course, and it's completely disappeared.
If you're not putting enough away for emergencies or retirement, making commitments in advance, such as signing up for payroll withholding, can help.
We behavioralists differ from our more traditional brethren in the way we characterize agents in the economy.
In a democracy, if a government creates bad policies, it can be voted out of office. Competition in the private sector, however, can easily work to encourage phishing rather than stifle it.
Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a rational person.
Many problems are so complex that even if we had the money to fix them, we wouldn't know how to do it. Fixing inner-city schools, reducing obesity, creating peace in the Middle East are just a few examples.
For many people, being asked to solve their own retirement savings problems is like being asked to build their own cars.
Payroll savings plans are vital because they are essentially the only way that middle-class Americans reliably save for retirement.
When employees are first eligible for a retirement savings plan, they should be enrolled unless they choose to opt out.
There can be legal conflicts over whether registering intent is enough to qualify you as an organ donor or whether a doctor must still ask your family's permission.
Many Americans say they want to be organ donors, but they just don't get around to acting on their intentions. Helping these potential good Samaritans overcome their inertia could prolong thousands of lives a year.
Signing up to be an organ donor should be at least as easy as downloading a song to your iPhone.
We should at least make sure that patients are given the opportunity to opt out of spending their final days in a hospital, hooked up to tubes and running up enormous bills.
Tort reform is a complicated subject and not a panacea.
Social Security may be the most beloved of all the government's programs, partly because it requires so little thinking. You pay taxes while you work, then you and your spouse collect until you die.
Sunk costs? We pay too much attention to them.
The supply price and the demand price should be roughly the same. You're not supposed to have two different prices. According to economists.
The Nobel Prize is going to be 'fun money' - for an occasion, when my wife and I want a $50 bottle of wine.
'Fun money' is another thing that makes no sense to traditional economists. Because there's just money; there's no 'fun money.' It's all supposed to be the same.
I think behavioral economists don't have any more of an explanation about the rise of Trump than anyone else.
