Tom Price Quotes

Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That's why economics is not the dismal science, it's no science at all.

I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn't understand both is a damned fool.

In the 1940s, economics started getting highly mathematical. It was basically because economists weren't smart enough to write down models of real behavior that they started writing down models of highly rational behavior - and they kind of forgot about humans.

Like everyone else, rich people respond to incentives.

A nudge is some feature of the environment that changes the behaviour of humans but would not change the behaviour of rational economic agents, what we call Econs.

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.

Experts are human, and humans respond to incentives. How any given expert treats you, therefore, will depend on how that expert's incentives are set up.

I think that it's more important for an economist to be wise and sophisticated in scientific method than it is for a physicist because with controlled laboratory experiments possible, they practically guide you; you couldn't go astray. Whereas in economics, by dogma and misunderstanding, you can go very sadly astray.

We humans actually need help controlling our impulses - nudges.

If economists were to wait for careful studies before offering opinions about policy, we would never have anything timely to say.

The left-brainer and the economist in me says watch what people do, not what they say.

It's because finance is so baffling that makes being an economist such a safe option. It nestles down comfortably with psychiatry and astrology as a profession where getting it patently wrong is just not a problem - and also, rather wonderfully, seems to have no adverse affect on their professional standing whatsoever.

I never predict freight rates; nobody can do that.

The notion of humans as inherently rational beings has been not only trashed in economics, but trashed in all the best research on moral decision-making.

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.

If done correctly, dynamic scoring will provide a more complete picture of Congress's actions. This is exactly the type of modeling the private sector uses, and advances in data collection and analysis create an opportunity for it to be employed accurately.

Why is it that common sense is seldom common practice?

Economics has increasingly become the science of human behavior in general, and it's all the more unlikely to think that it can possibly be value-free - and, in fact, it isn't. Economics rests on un-argued assumptions that need to be examined.

Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.

We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.

Economists don't usually make good speculators, because they think too much.

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

The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.

[There will be movement toward] behavioral economics... [which] involves study of those aspects of men's images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.

The trouble with psychology is that it doesn't take human nature into account.