Richard Thaler Quotes

Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

We liked to think that polling and political analysis had become scientific, but this campaign changes all that.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

Markets work best when there's lots of information available and a historical track record to go on; they excel at predicting things like horse races, election outcomes, and box-office results. But they're bad at predicting things like who will be the next Supreme Court nominee, as that depends on the whim of the president.

I think it's almost impossible for any expert to predict for the rapid changes we see in the Middle East. They are rapid and they will continue for quite a while.

The idea of trying to predict what people will or won't respond to is risky.

No one can forecast the economy with certainty.

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the outcome he predicted yesterday did not happen today.

The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year – and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

The experts, for all their superior knowledge, rarely do better than chance in predicting future events.

If there is a constant to the American campaign story, it is that elites can’t predict the future very well. News is what surprises us, which is why the political press always has news. Voters are always undoing our certainties.

We don't know the probabilities of future events. Still, you have to take action, and so you do it on gut feeling. That's the world we live in.

Punditry is like weather forecasting: the winds can shift without warning. I remember when nobody would bet a McDonald's Quarter Pounder that Bill Clinton would win the White House.

Anything that makes us take more seriously scientists - or economists or chemists or physicists or biologists - I think is helpful in times when things get distorted because of people not paying attention to all the facts.

There are a lot of parallels between being a mutual fund manager and being a general manager. Both in the financial markets and in baseball, we're dealing with a world where uncertainty reigns. We're trying to predict the future performance of human beings. It's a fundamental difficulty for which we both have to account.

We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We shall never be able to say, "Ha! My perception, my accounting for that series, will indeed cover its next and future components," or "Next time I meet with these phenomena, I shall be able to predict their total course."

Today, if someone showed me a five-year plan, I'd toss out the pages detailing Years Three, Four and Five as pure fantasy Anyone who thinks he or she can evaluate business conditions five years from now, flunks.

It's impossible for us to forecast what's going to happen ten years from now and make a decision today to say what we're going to do.