My thesis topic was 'The value of a human life.' I asked people a question: 'Suppose you had some risk, a one in a thousand risk of dying - how much would you pay to eliminate it?'

The wealth in many large estates has never been taxed because it is largely in the form of unrealized - therefore untaxed - capital gains.

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.

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.

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.

We humans actually need help controlling our impulses - nudges.

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.

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.

The ability of businesses to monitor our behavior is already a fact of life, and it isn't going away. Of course we must protect our privacy rights. But if we're smart, we'll also use the data that is being collected to improve our own lives.

Even a mother - Jewish or not - can't worry about everything. So it is important that we limit our worries to real as opposed to imaginary risks.

Everyone knows it's dangerous to ingest gasoline or to inhale its fumes. But I am starting to believe that merely thinking about the price of gasoline can damage cognitive processing.

Although the United States cannot unilaterally lower the price of oil, it can reduce its consumption by using oil more efficiently and by developing alternative sources of fuel.

The voting public is not very good at attributing credit and blame to presidents. They get too much credit when things go well and too much blame when things go badly. The same applies to coaches, C.E.O.'s, parents, and anyone else in charge.

As every successful parent learns, one way to encourage good behavior, from room-cleaning to tooth-brushing, is to make it fun. Not surprisingly, the same principle applies to adults. Adults like to have fun, too.

As a general rule, the United States government is run by lawyers who occasionally take advice from economists. Others interested in helping the lawyers out need not apply.

The government employs scientists of many varieties in technical capacities, from estimating the environmental toxicity of a chemical to the structural soundness of a bridge. But when it comes to forming policies, these scientists and, especially, behavioral scientists are rarely at the table with the lawyers and the economists.

You can't make evidence-based policy decisions without evidence.

Morality aside, there are other factors deterring 'strategic defaults,' whether in recourse or nonrecourse states. These include the economic and emotional costs of giving up one's home and moving, the perceived social stigma of defaulting, and a serious hit to a borrower's credit rating.

People are less likely to think it's immoral to walk away from their home if they know others who have done so. And if enough people do it, the stigma begins to erode.

Shopping for an annuity with hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake can be daunting, even for an economist.

It's hard to have any idea of how much money is enough to finance an appropriate lifestyle in retirement. But if a lump sum is translated into a monthly income, it's much easier to determine whether you have enough put away to afford to stop working.

Most of us think that we are 'better than average' in most things. We are also 'miscalibrated,' meaning that our sense of the probability of events doesn't line up with reality. When we say we are sure about a certain fact, for example, we may well be right only half the time.

It makes sense for social scientists to become more involved in policy because many of society's most challenging problems are, in essence, behavioral.