Herbert A. Simon Quotes

I like to think that since I was about 19, I have studied human decision-making and problem-solving.

Pretty much, you point to a problem and good reasoning about why people are doing what they are doing and what constraints they face in terms of how others will behave, and you're looking at a problem that could be improved upon by game-theoretic reasoning.

It's actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.

The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful.

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.

It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!

Game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life, and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone's actions affect everyone else.

We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right.

There is much evidence that people are not rational, in the economist’s sense; nor do they take into account expectation, in the precise interpretation of that word. As a result, economic theory often does not correspond with what happens in the market. Some would argue that we need descriptive economics. I would argue that all should be taught about probability, utility, and MEU (maximization of expected utility) and act accordingly.

The sad truth is that many behavioral economists know very little about psychology.

I practice what has come to be called behavioral economics.

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

The lesson of my field, behavioral economics, is that we need to understand the ways in which we differ from the rational human assumed in standard economic theory.

Early in my doctoral training at Cornell University, I became immersed in the behavioral decision theory paradigm.

Humans are hard-wired to be irrational when it comes to financial decisions. We must understand that so we don't become the sucker at the poker table.

People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it.

I am saying that the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behaviour

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

When we deliberate it is about means and not ends.

How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind?... I think that these behavioral economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don't think it's going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what's right in psychology.

I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.

Learning about the way people process information and their emotions is hugely helpful to my work.

Positive defaults align our short-term decisions with our long-term interests. And we don't always do that.

When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.