Daniel Kahneman

I'd like people to know that motivation is complex and that people do good things for a mixture of good and bad reasons and they do bad things for a mixture of good and bad reasons.

And I think that there is a point to educating people in psychology is to make them less judgmental.

Just have more empathy and more patience and being judgmental doesn't get you anywhere.

I mean, feelings get in the way of clear thinking.

There is a phenomenon that we call the endowment effect.

which is that when I'd ask for more money to sell you my sandwich than I'd pay to get it.

I mean, that's essentially the endowment effect.

And our explanation of it, there are many explanations, but a story I like to tell about it is that it's more painful to give something up than to get something.

But there is an interesting result that if you have an agent

making decisions on somebody's behalf, that agent doesn't have loss of urge.

So that agent sells and buys at the same price, which is an economically rational thing to do.

Where this goes into policy and governments and really important things,

that governments are like agents or people who think about the good of society.

And agents, they take the economic view.

They take the view of what things will be like at the end.

They don't figure out that there are some people who are going to be losing because of the reform that they're making.

And it turns out that you can really expect losers, potential losers, to fight a lot harder than potential winners.

And that's the reason that reforms are frequently fair and that when they succeed, they're almost always way more expensive than anticipated.

And they're more expensive because you have to compensate the losers.

And that frequently is not anticipated.