Richard Thaler
The Reformer
Changing the system from inside it, principle turned into change.
Richard Thaler earns The Reformer by converting what colleagues dismissed as noise into the founding signal of a new discipline. He did not walk away from orthodox economics. He stayed inside it, mapping its anomalies with such rigour that dismissal became impossible. His informal lists of human 'dumb stuff' were early operational prototypes of behavioral economics, assembled with a founder's instinct for what the existing system could not explain and would eventually have to absorb.
“When I read their papers, I had this big Aha moment because what their research showed was not just that people make mistakes — behavior is predictably different from the model that economists use.”
“I started making a list of dumb stuff people do, but that was just to annoy my friends. Then somebody introduced me to the work of two Israeli psychologists Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky.”
“Each strategy is based on a bias. There's one based on overreaction, one on underreaction. We try to find stocks where we think the rest of the market is making a mistake.”
Masters in Business: “How Investors Fall Into Bias Traps with Economists Richard Thaler & Alex Imas”
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