Richard Thaler

So if it was an offer to buy your house.

Yes.

then there would be costs to moving and- Yeah, it's a pain in the ass.

Right.

But for most things, the economist would assume that because the cost of switching things around-

is low, we can ignore it.

Great.

So let's take climate change as an example.

Great.

All economists, including this one, think that the first thing we should have done when we figured out there was climate change is impose a carbon tax.

Okay, but all right, then we're in agreement.

What I'm saying is if you're God or king, you know, or president, and you could say, all right, what policy should we have?

Then the correct policy is the one that sets the prices to give people the incentive to

So if we increase the cost of heating your home to reflect the externality, the cost you're imposing on other people, then you'll have the correct incentives to put in solar or insulate or switch to a heat pump or whatever.

And so, yeah.

We run a poll of expert economists every couple of weeks at the University of Chicago, and there is one on that.

And yeah, everybody says, yeah, that would be the ideal policy.

No, that's standard economics.

No, it's standard because it's just changed the price.

And then the alternative is we say...