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Richard Thaler recommends the Journal of Economic Perspectives as a valuable and accessible resource for those interested in economics. He praises its approach to making academic articles understandable to a broader audience.

The real debate in economics has been about whether models should reflect people behaving as if they were maximizing their outcomes, even if they don't literally know how to do it. This has been a central theme in my career.

Richard Thaler highlights the concept of 'mental accounting,' where people irrationally categorize money, affecting their financial decisions. This concept is widely applicable and often leads to irrational spending behaviors.

At a dinner party with economists, I removed a bowl of cashew nuts to prevent overeating. This sparked a discussion on choice, highlighting that more options aren't always better, which contradicts traditional economic theory.

Economists often model human behavior as if people are perfectly rational, making the best choices in every situation. However, this assumption overlooks the reality that people often take shortcuts and make less than optimal decisions.

Richard Thaler discusses the resistance he faced in academia when introducing behavioral economics. He recalls a time when he presented his theories on saving behavior to a psychology department, and the audience laughed because they found the traditional economic models unrealistic. Thaler points out that economists believed people behaved like expert billiards players, acting as if they knew physics, which he found absurd.

Richard Thaler discusses his project of revisiting and updating his 1992 book on economic anomalies. He highlights the importance of verifying whether the foundational experiments still hold true today, both in theory and in real-world applications.

Economics traditionally assumes people are selfish, but in reality, people care about fairness and often act in ways that aren't purely self-interested. This complexity is often ignored in traditional economic models.