When employees are first eligible for a retirement savings plan, they should be enrolled unless they choose to opt out.

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

For many people, being asked to solve their own retirement savings problems is like being asked to build their own cars.

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.

Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a rational person.

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.

We behavioralists differ from our more traditional brethren in the way we characterize agents in the economy.

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

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?'

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

Claiming that Social Security benefits are safe may sound naive, but my view is actually quite cynical. I believe that as long as the elderly continue to vote in large numbers, no Congress will renege on promised payouts for those already eligible to receive benefits.

A nudge is some feature of the environment that changes the behaviour of humans but would not change the behaviour of rational economic agents, what we call Econs.

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.

Traditional economics is based on imaginary creatures sometimes referred to as 'Homo economicus.' I call them Econs for short. Econs are amazingly smart and are free of emotion, distraction or self-control problems. Think Mr. Spock from 'Star Trek.'

Academia does not provide many opportunities for immediate gratification. You work for two years on a project, it takes two more years to get it published, and then you start hoping someone might read it.

I practice what has come to be called behavioral economics.

I don't think it says anywhere in the Bible that tithing should be calculated on a before-tax basis.

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.

Fortunately, economists open to new ways of thinking are finding novel ways to use supposedly irrelevant factors to make the world a better place.

Don't get trapped by looking at what the price was that you paid for some stock originally.

Companies are accumulating vast amounts of information about your likes and dislikes. But they are doing this not only because you're interesting. The more they know, the more money they can make.

Doctors and hospitals should be paid for keeping their patients well. Paying them for doing more tests and surgeries creates bad incentives.

As both a consumer and producer of newspaper articles, I have no beef with pay walls. But before signing up, I read the fine print.

Demanding that the rich get a tax cut as a condition for tax relief for others is simply elitist.