Daniel Kahneman Quotes

The advantage of the free market system is that people invest their capital, they create jobs by investing their capital, and hopefully they get a return on that investment. I don't think there's anything wrong with good old American capitalism.

One way to express choice is through the market. Well-functioning markets provide choices and, ultimately, the ability to express one's pursuit for happiness.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Economists, firstly, regard only one part of man's nature, and treat him simply as a money-making animal; secondly, they disregard the influence of custom, and only take account of competition.

It is the business of economists, not to tell us what to do, but show why what we are doing anyway is in accord with proper principles.

How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?

Neoclassical economics ... has uncovered important truths about the nature of money and markets because its fundamental model of rational self-interested human behavior is correct about 80% of the time.

The thing about markets, and I think the thing people don't understand about that, is markets are not kind, but they're very efficient. So when the marketplace determines an inefficiency in the system, it corrects that, and a market system that's left alone will reward good behavior and punish bad behavior.

The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.

The economist rarely examines the presuppositions of the models with which he works. The economist simply commences with individuals as evaluating, choosing, and acting units. This starting point for analysis necessarily draws attention to the choice or decision environment for the individuals who must make selections from among the alternatives.

And I know this happens because I took economics, and I'd explain it to ya, but I flunked that course. Not my fault. They taught it at 8 o'clock in the morning. And there is absolutely nothing you can learn out of one bloodshot eye.

Capitalism does millions of things better than the alternatives. It balances supply and demand in an elegant way that central planning has never come close to.

Personally, I don't see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption.

Markets are a good thing, and they are the best way of ensuring we have fairness.

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek.

Free markets work better when information is available.

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

Traditional economics is based on imaginary creatures sometimes referred to as 'Homo economicus.' I call them Econs for short. Econs are amazingly smart and are free of emotion, distraction or self-control problems. Think Mr. Spock from 'Star Trek.'

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.

That's the trick of free market economic theory: it doesn't just ask you to only be selfish and not care about others. It tells you that by being selfish, you are helping others. And, in fact, by trying to directly help others, you will hurt them.

If you take an economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market.

Choices abound in the free market. Choice creates real and immediate accountability.

I have not been able in one lecture even to scratch the surface of the role of maximum principles in analytic economics.

I practice what has come to be called behavioral economics.

Tastes and behavior are important in economics. Nobody denies that. But the question is: How much of behavior is irrational, and how much of the irrational behavior really affects prices? It turns out that's very difficult to answer.