Fazit - das Wirtschaftsblog

© APRichard Thaler

Here are some quotes from the newest economics nobel laureate Richard Thaler:

• “My thesis advisor, Sherwin Rosen, gave the following as an assessment of my career as a graduate student: We did not expect much of him.” (ibid.)
• “I said that the difference between our models was that he assumed that the agents in his model were as smart as he was, and I assumed they were as dumb as I am. Barro agreed.” (In his book “Misbehaving”)
• “At the University of Chicago, you can call someone a Marxist, an anarchist, or even a Green Bay Packers fan, but calling a colleague a paternalist is the cruellest cut of all.” (ibid.)
• “I spent that year out there with Kahneman just up the hill at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and Tversky down on campus in the psychology department. I took a course from him, Tversky, but spent hundreds of hours talking to both of them and taking walks with them. They didn’t know anything about economics. I didn’t know anything about psychology, so there were gains from trade.” (About his year in Stanford, in this very insightful interview
• About bubbles: “So when Gene and I have these arguments, he’ll say the fact that you can’t predict when they will end means you can’t say anything about them. I say, no, that’s not the case. And that’s why I separate these two aspects of the efficient markets argument: Whether you can get rich (the “no-free-lunch” part) and whether the “price is right.” It’s hard to get rich because even though I thought Scottsdale real estate was overpriced, there was no way to short it. Even if there were a way—Shiller tried to create markets in that, so that you could have shorted it—you might have gone broke before you were right. But I think of these two components. Gene will always say the “you can’t beat the market” part is the more important part. Now, I don’t know whether that’s self-serving or whether that’s what he believes.” (ibid.)
• “I still believe in supply and demand, you’ll be happy to know.” (ibid.)
• “Don’t trust men under 30”. (In this interview)
• “Stockholm is a charming place, but I wouldn’t necessarily go there in December.” (ibid.)
• “Now I don’t have to call him Professor Fama any more” (About his golf partner Eugene Fama, who already had a nobel prize, during the nobel prize announcement)