In the 80s and 90s, this field was very controversial.
And I was considered a heretic.
I didn't mind that, but I wanted to be considered a scientific heretic, not a political heretic.
Whenever it takes winning a Nobel Prize for granted,
it's a lottery ticket that comes as a surprise in the middle of the night if you live in the US.
But of course it was.
very rewarding and emotional.
The fields of economics and psychology can make strange bedfellows,
which is why Richard Thaler spent years collecting a series of what he called anomalies,
basically curious behaviors that said something about human nature and the role it plays in our financial decisions.
He compiled these in a series of columns before he felt comfortable declaring war on the entire economics profession from which,
as he says, he was declared a heretic.
Richard Thaler would of course be proven right in the end.
His first book is called The Winner's Curse,
laying out all of those anomalies and put him on a path toward the Nobel Prize for Economics,
which he was given in 2017,
for his role in establishing the field that is now known as behavioral economics.
His other most famous book is Nudge, written with Cass Sunstein,
which built on the idea that policymakers could,
well, nudge people into better decisions at little or no cost to the taxpayer.