90 Behavioral Economics Quotes
Following is our list of behavioral economics quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about what is behavioral economics.
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Famous Behavioral Economics Quotes
One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in. — Dan Ariely
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. — Gary Becker
The lesson from behavioral economics is that people only save if it's automatic. — Richard Thaler
Consumer behavior is a powerful realm from which to explore our biological heritage. — Gad Saad
Human behavior and information bias play a huge role in transaction prices. It creates short-term opportunities that can be exploited. — Naved Abdali
Economics, as it has emerged, can be made more productive by paying greater and more explicit attention to the ethical considerations that shape human behaviour and judgment. — Amartya Sen
Early in my doctoral training at Cornell University, I became immersed in the behavioral decision theory paradigm. — Gad Saad
Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. — James Clear
Environment, circumstances, psychology, markets, cause-and-effect relationships — Howard Marks
Persuading through Simplifying - Using computing technology to reduce complex behavior to simple tasks increases the benefit/cost ratio of the behavior and influences users to perform the behavior. — B. J. Fogg
Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behavior over time. — James Clear
To study consumer behavior is to explore human nature at its most fundamental level using the modern world as its backdrop. — Gad Saad
Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers. — Naval Ravikant
Human behavior, including indulging in various activities, stems from a desire to modulate neurochemistry, influencing emotional experiences. — Gary Brecka
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis fails because humans are herd animals, not independent rational actors. Thus the best investors tend to be antisocial and contrarian. — Naval Ravikant
Short Behavioral Economics Quotes
- Herd psychology, conformity, capitulation — Howard Marks
- The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason. — John Maynard Keynes
- Investor psychology, priced anywhere, fundamentals — Howard Marks
- Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge. — Plato
- Behavior only shifts if the punishment is painful enough and reliably enforced. — James Clear
- The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that. — Alfie Kohn
- Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist. — Thomas Carlyle
- Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life. — Alfred Marshall
- Our deeply rooted preferences make certain behaviors easier for some people than for others. — James Clear
- The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run. — James Clear
Behavioral Economics Image Quotes
What Is Economics Quotes
We are not afraid of economic sanctions or military intervention. What we are afraid of is Western universities. — Ruhollah Khomeini
To deal with radicalism and extremism, we need to deal with economic inequality. This is what I learned from my experience in Solo and then in Jakarta. — Joko Widodo
Even the greatest economic thinkers have historically struggled to agree on an answer to the question 'What is money?' — Robert Breedlove
We will never know what anyone is really like, until everyone has economic security and doesn't have to answer to anyone else. — Jacque Fresco
Movements have narratives. They tell stories, because they are not just about rearranging economics and politics. They also rearrange meaning. And they're not just about redistributing the goods. They're about figuring out what is good. — Marshall Ganz
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. — Friedrich August von Hayek
What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict. — Simone Weil
Unless we understand what it is that leads to economic and financial instability, we cannot prescribe -- make policy -- to modify or eliminate it. Identifying a phenomenon is not enough; we need a theory that makes instability a normal result in our economy and gives us handles to control it. — Hyman Minsky
If you’ve relied on data and logic alone to make sense of the economy, you’d have been confused for a hundred years straight…So much of what happens in our economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to make sense of. — Morgan Housel
Look at the declining television coverage. Look at the declining voting rate. Economics and economic news is what moves the country now, not politics. — Robert Teeter
Economic Crisis Quotes
I will not let anyone tell me we must spend more money. This crisis did not come about because we issued too little money but because we created economic growth with too much money and it was not sustainable growth. — Angela Merkel
The climate crisis is being used to create totalitarian controls on society by the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, and all of these megabillionaires. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Now our Earth is swarmed with issues such as life, death, illness, wars, economic crises and many others. It is time that we sing out loud the message, 'Love forever.' — Yayoi Kusama
The financial crisis should not become an excuse to raise taxes, which would only undermine the economic growth required to regain our strength. — George W. Bush
If we have an economic crisis in the Western world it's because the government makes up 50 percent or more of the economy. This is a cancer that is taking away people's freedom. — Marc Faber
The exchange-rate trap, another legacy of this former president Alberto Fernández’s government, not only constitutes a social and productive nightmare, but also the surplus of money today is double what it was before the Rodrigazo economic crisis of 1975. — Javier Milei
What the people here have said is that given the enormous crises facing our country, it is just too late for the same old, same old establishment politics and establishment economics. — Bernie Sanders
The economic crisis really affected my family - 2006 to 2011 were really bad times. Almost everybody in my family lost their jobs. — Joey Badass
Women's struggle for equality worldwide is about more than equality between men and women. Our struggle is about reversing the trends of social, economic, political, and ecological crisis - a global nervous breakdown! Our struggle is about creating sustainable lives and attainable dreams. — Bella Abzug
Marxists have more than once pointed out that the capitalist world economic system contains in itself the seeds of a general crisis and of warlike clashes. — Joseph Stalin
People Writing About Behavioral Economics
More Behavioral Economics Quotes
Evolution is the root of atheism, of communism, nazism, behaviorism, racism, economic imperialism, militarism, libertinism, anarchism, and all manner of anti-Christian systems of belief and practice. — Henry M. Morris
We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains. — Dan Ariely
The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems -- the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion. — John Maynard Keynes
The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion. — John Maynard Keynes
Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems — Cyril Connolly
One of the peculiarities of economics is that it still rests on a behavioral assumption-rational utility maximization-that has long since been rejected by sociologists and psychologists. — Lester Thurow
Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave. — Ellen Willis
Everyone's lost a lot of money on their 401k plans. I've heard some people calling them 201k plans. So it's even more important to get people to be saving more for retirement. Behavioral economics has helped us learn a lot about how to do that. — Richard Thaler
Adam Smith had one overwhelmingly important triumph: he put into the center of economics the systematic analysis of the behavior of individuals pursuing their self-interest under conditions of competition. — George Stigler
A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic. — E. O. Wilson
The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics. — Daniel Kahneman
Retirement savings is probably behavioral economists' greatest success story. It is a prototypical behavioral-economics problem because saving for retirement is cognitively hard - figuring out how much to save - and requires self-control. — Richard Thaler
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. — Charlie Munger
January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken. — Sendhil Mullainathan
Economists suffer from a deep psychological disorder that I call 'physics envy'. We wish that 99 percent of economic behavior could be captured by three simple laws of nature. In fact, economists have 99 laws that capture 3 percent of behavior. Economics is a uniquely human endeavor. — Andrew Lo
Economic transactions between national bodies who are at the same time the supreme judges of their own behavior, who bow to no superior law, and whose representatives cannot be bound by any considerations but the immediate interest of their respective nations, must end in clashes of power. — Friedrich August von Hayek
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. — George Stigler
A lot of the interesting issues and dynamics within a city occur over things such as socio-economic issues or ethnic issues. But they require a much more elaborate model of human behavior. — Will Wright
There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world. — Paul Dirac
The good news is that, at least in economics, I've seen movement away from its overemphasis on mathematical models of purely rational behavior to a more eclectic and commonsense approach: research that is, among other things, more respectful of insights from psychology. — Robert J. Shiller
While the apostles of the new so-called "behavioral" theory present ample evidence of how often human beings make irrational financial decisions, it remains to be seen whether these decisions lead to predictable errors that create systematic mispricings upon which rational investors can readily and economically capitalize. — John C. Bogle
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them. — Malcolm Gladwell
[A] private property regime makes people responsible for their own actions in the realm of material goods. Such a system therefore ensures that people experience the consequences of their own acts. Property sets up fences, but it also surrounds us with mirrors, reflecting back upon us the consequences of our own behavior. — Tom Bethell
Society's double behavioral standard for women and for men is, in fact, a more effective deterrent than economic discrimination because it is more insidious, less tangible. Economic disadvantages involve ascertainable amounts, but the very nature of societal value judgments makes them harder to define, their effects harder to relate. — Anne Wilkes Tucker
[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. — Kenneth E. Boulding
Society's double behavioral standard for women and for men is, in fact, a more effective deterrent than economic discrimination because it is more insidious, less tangible. Economic disadvantages involve ascertainable amounts, but the very nature of societal value judgments makes them harder to define, their effects harder to relate. — Anne Tucker
I believe that the behavior of too many of our corporations investment bankers and fund managers has jeopardized some of the trust that investors have had. It's not the economic engine that we need to focus on, but the need to make sure that our investors receive their fair share of the returns that that great economic system produces. — John C. Bogle
We need to use economic instruments such as carbon taxes, cap and trade, tax and dividend and whatever else to help incentivize behavior that will move us to a post-carbon, post-animal agriculture world, and make our societies more resilient to the shocks that are already baked into the system. But that doesn't make climate change an "economic issue." — Dale Jamieson
Behavioral economics can explain some things, but it's hard to explain a lot of the underlying processes that generate these decisions, much less some of these unconscious things that we don't have a handle on at all. — Edward Boyden
I started to read as obsessively about Star Wars as I once did about Kant - and still do about behavioral economics and behavioral psychology. — Cass Sunstein
The longer people receive economic assistance, the worse their social condition and behavior. — James Cook
The possibility that stock value in aggregate can become irrationally high is contrary to the hard-form "efficient market" theory that many of you once learned as gospel from your mistaken professors of yore. Your mistaken professors were too much influenced by "rational man" models of human behavior from economics and too little by "foolish man" models from psychology and real-world experience. — Charlie Munger
Economics is not an attempt to generalize human desires or human behavior; but to generalize the phenomena of price. — Michael Joseph Oakeshott
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. — Francis Fukuyama
Polak, a psychiatrist, has applied a behavioral and anthropological approach to alleviating poverty, developed by studying people in their natural surroundings. He argues that there are three mythic solutions to poverty eradication: donations, national economic growth, and big businesses. Instead, he advocates helping the poor earn money through their own efforts of developing low-cost tools that are effective and profitable. — Amy Lockwood
Executives need to understand the economic benefits of trust dividend, especially when the behavior is real, not artificially or superficially created as PR to manipulate trust. — Stephen Covey
Studios felt like Blu-ray was going to be the next panacea, and so they dumped the prices (of traditional DVDs) and devalued the product. That's a misreading of consumer behavior as well as a misreading of the economic environment. — Bill Mechanic
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! — Dan Ariely
Reclaim our environment from those who would destroy it with their predatory economic behavior. — Dennis Kucinich
Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed — John Maynard Smith
In Stage I, divorces were not allowed, so men's [sexual] affairs did not put women's economic security in jeopardy; in Stage II, affairs could lead to divorce, so men's affairs did place women's economic security in jeopardy. We did not want political leaders who would be role models for behavior that would put women's economic security in jeopardy. — Warren Farrell
Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior. — Peter Drucker
Most of us still believe in the intrinsic value of nature, but I think the first century of the environmental/conservation movement demonstrated pretty clearly that this value cannot compel a civilization-wide shift toward sustainable behavior and enterprise when stacked up against the urgent economic and social needs of 7 billion people, most of whom are struggling to get out of poverty. — Edward Norton
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