2024-07-15
53 分钟You wouldn’t think you could win a Nobel Prize for showing that humans tend to make irrational decisions. But that’s what Richard Thaler has done. In an interview from 2018, the founder of behavioral economics describes his unlikely route to success; his reputation for being lazy; and his efforts to fix the world — one nudge at a time.
Hey, there, it's Stephen Dubner, and this is a bonus episode of Free Economics Radio.
On this week's regular episode, we traveled to Chicago to celebrate the legacy of Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist who recently died at age 90.
Kahneman and his research partner, Amos Tversky, produced a body of work that reshaped not just psychology, but economics as well.
But they were working from the outside.
On the inside were a few economists who admired their work and took it even further into the realm of policymaking.
You remember the greek myth of Prometheus?
He stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans.
The economist Richard Thaler may be the Prometheus of economics.
He took Kahneman and Tversky's research insights and made them useful for governments, firms, and everyday people.
But unlike Prometheus, who was punished by being chained to a rock where an eagle pecked out his liver every day for eternity, Thaler was rewarded with a Nobel prize of his own.
We spoke with him back in 2018, not long after he won the prize for his contributions to behavioral economics.
I thought this conversation was well worth revisiting now, and I hope you'll agree.
So let's begin.
If you would say your name and.
Title, I'm Richard Thaler.
I'm a professor at the Booth school of Business at the University of Chicago.
I see.
Technically, you're called the Charles R.
Walgreen distinguished service professor of behavioral sciences.
Blah, blah, blah.