People Are Crazy-Richard Thaler Just Won the Nobel in Economics For Proving It
Richard Thaler, one of the fathers of behavioral economics and a professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, has won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.
From the article:
If irrational human behavior can be predicted, then it can be incited, or nudged. Thaler coined the term “nudging” to describe cheap and easy interventions that change people’s decision-making.
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To his credit, Thaler has acknowledged that nudging is a weapon that can used both for good and bad.
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In 2013, Robert Shiller won the Nobel in Economics for his work showing that markets are not rational and that their short-term gyrations are often driven by “animal spirits” that are more emotional than logical. Thaler did more than perhaps any other economists to devise a vocabulary for these animal spirits. While he is famous for exploding the myth of rational decision-making, the irony is that insisting that human beings are not rational is by far the more rational approach to studying their behavior.