Economic Behavior Quotes

Rich people play the money game to win. Poor people play the money game to not lose.

The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics.

The negro is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.

If you spend your own money on yourself, you care how much you spend and how well you spend it. If you spend your own money on someone else, you care how much you spend, but you don't care how well it is spent. If you spend someone else's money on yourself, you don't care how much you spend, but you do care how well it is spent. And finally, if you spend someone else's money on someone else, you don't care how much you spend, and you don't care how well it is spent. That is government.

Sunk costs? We pay too much attention to them.

I'm a conservative and I believe if you tax something more you get less of it.

I think behavioral economists don't have any more of an explanation about the rise of Trump than anyone else.

Economists are people who wonder if what works in reality can also work in theory.

People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.

Everybody else, including the rich people, are willing to pay more. They want to pay more.

Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.

As a society we should be encouraging people out of the debt-culture mindset, not promoting it.

I would reject the distinction between a Keynesian moment and a behavioral moment.

Another great evil arising from this desire to be thought rich; or rather, from the desire not to be thought poor, is the destructive thing which has been honored by the name of 'speculation'; but which ought to be called Gambling.

Like everyone else, rich people respond to incentives.

Economics is a form of brain damage.

It's appropriate for people to pursue their profit motive in business. If you want to change that, you're going against human nature. But when it comes to setting the rules or creating the institutions, then you should have the general interest at heart.

The rich invest their money and spend what is left; the poor spend their money and invest what is left.

I always believed in animal spirits. It's not their existence that is new. It's the fact that they are not random events, but actually replicate in-bred qualities of human nature which create those animal spirits.

Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.

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.

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

Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.

It's almost as if we have two lobes in our brain. There's the consumer and investor mode, and we're doing better and better at that lobe. But at the producer and seller mode, we have to work harder and harder. And the better we do as consumers and investors - the easier it is for us to choose something better, to exit every commercial relationship - the harder we have to work as sellers and producers. One follows from the other.