Richard Thaler

Nobody's designing that innocently.

There are some big subscription-based companies that I've personally tried to convince to stop doing this, and somebody has told me, no, that would cost us too much money.

No, not that I've seen.

And part of the problem is so much of it is time.

But, I mean, if we think about the U.S.

medical system, the sludge has to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

I'm a psychologist.

And we can't send those reports electronically.

In one case, we actually had to mail the report to another agency in our city.

It's a pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

Anomalies are what's unusual.

I love Escher paintings, you know, those paintings that have impossible staircases.

So I love anomalies generally, and I love them as a way of learning about economics because they tell us where the weaknesses are.

Yao Ming is an anomaly, but not of theoretical interest.

Somebody has to be tall.

But the anomalies that I study tell us something about people and tell us something about economics.

And economics needs to be able to incorporate what real people do, or they're going to have theories about fictional creatures.

Here's one example from my time in grad school.

One of my professors, the chairman of the department, was a big wine lover.