Richard Thaler

So, no, he's died 100 years ago.

Anyway, there are Pigouvian taxes.

So, in any economics textbook, it will say that if you're causing some harm –

then the way to fix it is to charge you for the harm you're causing so that you will decide just the right amount of harm.

Because that is not what happens.

Okay.

Now, I'm not saying any economist thinks –

that we have these optimal policies.

What I'm saying is- That's how it's supposed to work.

That's the way any economist basically would have advised, you know, take any council of economic advisors before this one.

because they always had real economists, they would all be saying something similar to, well, what we really should do is this.

But then they would say, but it's true, boss, that people hate taxes.

And if they're Republicans, they really hate taxes.

But we all hate paying taxes.

And so we'll subsidize EVs.

We won't tax Hummers and we won't tax gas and we won't tax.

So, and that all goes back to the mugs that it's because we hate losing more than we like winning.

So what we'll do is we'll have all these policies where we subsidize you to do the right thing.

as opposed to penalizing you via prices for doing the wrong thing.

Okay.