If you're trading individual securities, you're almost certainly making a mistake. Because most professional managers can't outperform their benchmarks, and there's little reason to think that individuals can.
God did not say that you should be able to borrow one hundred percent of the price of a house.
The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world.
It's essential that we understand things like the free-rider problem, but we also need to understand that, fortunately, humans are a little nicer than economists give them credit for. Some people actually leave money at roadside fruit stands; some people give money to NPR so we can listen to it.
We all need a lot of humility, and especially about the economy.
We humans actually need help controlling our impulses - nudges.
The sad truth is that many behavioral economists know very little about psychology.
Coining a term is not the same as creating a field!
For amateur golfers, I think one of the biggest mistakes is to model their play on professionals.
We could all use more coaching.
I have an agent, John Brockman, who is an agent to many academic authors like Dan Gilbert and Steven Pinker, and he's very good at conning academics into writing books. He pulled this trick on me.
There's a reason why start-ups, especially disruptive start-ups - like Google or Amazon or Uber - are full of young people. That's because young people are not as wedded to the old fashioned ways of doing things.
People make just as many mistakes when the stakes go up, maybe more.
Even if we grade on a very generous curve, many Americans flunk when it comes to financial literacy.
In some ways, the finding that financial education doesn't provide long-term payoffs is hardly surprising. After all, how much do you remember from your high school chemistry class? Unless you use chemistry at work, you probably don't recall much about ionic bonding.
High school seniors should receive help in how to think about a student loan and how to make sure that the education bought with the loan offers good prospects for repayment.
Arthur Laffer's idea, that lowering taxes could increase revenues, was logically correct. If tax rates are high enough, then people will go to such lengths to avoid them that cutting taxes can increase revenues. What he was wrong about was in thinking that income tax rates were already so high in the 1970s that cutting them would raise revenues.
If no estate tax is imposed, capital gains taxes can be avoided indefinitely.
Here is a guiding principle: If a business collects data on consumers electronically, it should provide them with a version of that data that is easy to download and export to another Web site.
If the government can manage to collect and release personal information in a secure and useful way, so can private companies, which will empower consumers to become better shoppers.
