2025-11-21
38 分钟Richard Thaler may just understand people's foibles better than any other economist.
Economists think that the world is populated by people like Spock.
My choice will be a logical one.
Cold-hearted, rationalizing optimizers.
And I entertain the possibility that there are some Homer Simpsons around.
That view of the world set him on a lifetime of discovery.
And, since the 1980s,
Thayla's had a profound impact using psychology to help analyze economic decision-making.
The easiest models to write down are of people optimizing.
But if people are human and emotional and pay attention to supposedly irrelevant factors,
then that simple model will be false.
One day, he got a very special phone call.
My cell phone rang at four in the morning, and it said Sweden on the phone,
so I had a pretty good idea what that might be.
In 2017, Thaler was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics.
The Nobel Committee highlighted his work on foibles, anomalies,
behavioral economics, and what's been called nudge theory.
My mantra is if you want to get people to do something, make it easy.
Remove the obstacles.
So if we want people to use less energy, figure out ways to make that easy.