Transcript of The Irrational Economy with Richard Thaler

Hey, everybody. Welcome once again to the Weekly Show podcast with Jon Steward. My name is Jon Steward, and we're going to be talking... I feel like the news of the world has so matched the climate here in the Northeast, which is dark and gray and apocalyptic, and this feeling that we are hurtling towards something just truly unimaginable and inexplicable. And it's why today, I just don't even want to fucking deal with it right now. In all these different ways, today's show is going to be slightly different, where once again, every now and again, we'd love to bring on experts, people of such regard and note to come and play with me like, let's say, a person with a cat and like a little string toy. Me being, of course, the cat, those individuals being the person. And today we want to talk about our ability as a country to fix the seemingly intractable systemic problems, more economic, and who better to do that with than an economist, and an economist that has in some ways changed the way that economists talk about the incentives that go into our economy. He a behavioral economist, which is something I didn't even know that there was.

But a brilliant thinker, and another in our continuing series of Brilliant Thinkers, we obviously had Jeffrey Hinton on who explained to me in childlike terms what AI actually is, and I'm sure this guest will be no different. So I'm excited to get to it. Let's jump in now. Richard Thaler. So, ladies and gentlemen, in our ongoing efforts to entertain and educate, we once again are going to welcome someone to the program who is so accomplished and smart that it'll be entertaining to watch him play with me like a monkey with a small grape. That's right. Our guest today, a professor from the University of Chicago, an American economist the founding father, one of the founding fathers of behavioral economics, and awarded a Nobel Prize in Econ in 2017, which I assume he will be giving to Donald Trump because that's where everybody has to give their Nobel Prizes. But please, Richard Thaler, thank you for joining us today.

It's a pleasure, John.

So most people think of economists as macroeconomists, microeconomists. Then there's this idea you created this field called behavioral economics. So if you could just very briefly, and I apologize for the remedial nature of it, what is behavioral economics? How does it differ from what we consider to be traditional economics? How did you even think of it?

I'll use one fancy word you may not know, which is pleonasm. Please. Pleonasm. Wait, what? Pleonasm.

Wow.

There's a guy smarter than me named Herb Simon who wrote a definition of behavioral economics and said, The phrase seems like a pleonasm. What is that? A redundant phrase, meaning one What other economics could there be? Presumably, economics is about the behavior of people in markets.

Yes. Thank you.

Why do we need that? Well, the reason we need that is standard economics leaves out the people. They're all about the markets. Then there are firms and workers and governments and countries and consumers. They're all people. You pick up a big economics textbook, you'll not see the word people. There are agents. These agents agents, they're like Spock in the old Star Trek series.

Logical.

Very logical and maximizing. They're as smart as the smartest economist.

When economists make a model in terms of how a market is going to behave, the assumptions that they make are that the people that make up the model are logical, rational, and will behave in the manner that maximizes value in the model. Would that be right?

Yes. They do that in part because that What's the easiest model to write down. It works out for simple. Right. I mean, suppose you tried to write down a model of John wandering through Costco, choosing the optimal stuff to put in a basket. No one can solve that problem. It's too hard. So you simplify the modeling task by saying, Okay, he's going to choose the best bundle. And that, the math is easy. And then they add to that an assumption that people are selfish jerks.

Because that- I don't want to say anything, but that That seems like a relatively simple assumption.

Yeah. Okay. So the idea is, well, what if we introduce some people? Because there are people run firms, people interact in markets. In fact, more and more people are interacting in markets every which way. Sure. You can bet on anything now.

But how would that manifest? So if I'm an economist and I want to make a model about, and I assume they model what would be the most efficient market for cereal, and they want to model how you would create that. How would introducing what you're suggesting change economic modeling, which I assume means you would be changing how policy is created, because policy, I would assume then, is downstream from economic modeling.

Right. Good. Let's start with a simple experiment. Please. We go into a classroom. I actually brought a prop.

What?

A mug.

What are you, carrot top? What are we doing here?

Yeah, I got a mug. Are you a Sir. I got a mug here. All right. What we did was we go into a classroom and we put a mug. I was teaching at Cornell at the time, so it was a Cornell insignia.

Safety school. Let's just point out very quickly, safety school. All right, go ahead.

Okay. William and- Sir?

We don't have time for this.

Okay, no slurs. Cornelius is a very fine school. Every other student has a mug sitting in front of them, and their neighbor doesn't get a mug. Now, we have a market for the mugs. We say, If you have a mug, John, you can sell it. Here's a price list. If It's $10. Will you sell it or keep it? 9: 50. And then you go down until, Okay, I'll sell at 8: 00, but I won't at 7: 50.

Okay.

All right. And then the guy sitting next to you doesn't have a mug, he has a price list. At each of the following prices, will you buy? Okay? So half the people are buyers, half of them are potential sellers.

Okay.

So the mug's worth will be determined in this market.

Okay.

Now, what does economic theory say? It says the value you put on that mug should not depend on whether it's sitting right in front of you or on the desk next to you. Right?

Mm-mm.

Well, it turns out... So the mugs are distributed at random. What we should see is, let's rank the people from highest to lowest on how much they like that of those mugs. The half that like mugs the most should end up with them.

Yes. That's what traditional economics would tell you.

Right. Okay. So about half the mugs should change hands.

Oh, they're saying that they're assuming that there is a rationality to people's affection for the mugs.

Well, then it doesn't depend on- Or a randomized value. We did They were randomized. They were handed out at random. The assumption is that the value you put on that mug shouldn't depend on whether it's sitting directly in front of you or adjacent to you, or in other words, whether you now own it. That will be the key phrase. We'll come back to that.

You do realize, I am failing this class right now.

John, you're asking You're doing great. All right, here we go. At current grade levels? Yes, sir. A plus plus.

That's very you, sir. Do I have a mug?

You can buy one.

All right. I didn't get a mug. Fair enough.

Okay. What happens? The people who have the mugs really don't want to sell them. The people The people who don't have mugs aren't all that interested in buying one.

There's no market.

There is a market, but the people who have a mug demand about twice as much to give it up as the ones who don't have a mug are willing to buy it. So instead of half the mugs trading, we get about 20%.

Okay.

So what's the lesson? You You know this old Steven Sills song, Love the One You're With? Sure. I call this the endowment effect. That if you're endowed with something, you want to keep it. You won't give it up. But you don't have it? Okay, if the price is right, I'll buy it. This is a phenomenon we call loss aversion. That if you have something, you're going to fight like hell to keep it. If you don't have it, it's a mug.

The mug experiment is the genesis of behavioral economics. If I can sum this up. Because traditional economics would say Half the mugs would change hands based on value in markets and how they should operate in terms of people that have something and people that don't and people that want it. But what you found is only 20% changed because of behavioral tendencies that were not included in the model.

Correct. A plus.

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Even vegans, it could feel like they had a chocolate. You'll find vegan options at Whole Foods or Or get $5 off your next order at magicspoon. Com/tws. That's magicspoon. Com/tws for $5 off. This all sounds, if I may, insane to me because there could be somebody who is like a mug- People have called me worse. A mug fetishist. But the idea that economics don't take into account because buy low, sell high takes into account greed. It takes into account you're trying to get value. It seems like basic economics does.

Let me give you an example. Suppose that your uncle gives you an inheritance.

Sentimental. Is it a mug or is it something different?

It's like a thousand shares of some stock.

Okay, but my uncle gave it to me.

Your uncle gave it to you. All right. So To send it over to your wealth manager or broker or whatever.

All right. The thousand shares I got from my uncle. Yeah.

Then the question is, do you keep them? Let's ignore taxes.

Okay. Do I keep the shares or do I sell them?

Or you put them into an index fund.

Okay.

Well, economic theory would say the fact If there are no tax issues, the fact you got those shares from your uncle, if you wouldn't have owned a thousand shares of that company before, you shouldn't now. Just put it in with all the other stuff.

Don't do anything with it.

No. Just keep it. No, not just keep it. Diversify the way you would everything else.

Those thousand shares should be turned into Some should be in higher risk, some should be in medium risk, some should be in fixed income. I should split that up in the manner that I would split up any asset that I have.

Exactly.

That's what standard economic theory would say. Standard economic theory says, The best thing I would do is to do that. But behaviorally economics says, I won't do that for a variety of reasons, one, being maybe I'm lazy, two, being maybe I have sentimental value to my uncle, and therefore, those thousand shares are the only thing I have to remember him by. Apparently, I didn't take any pictures. I just have this thousand share inherited. I'm not going to do that. The standard economics misses all those externalities that are part of the human condition, and therefore, their models suck.

Well, we'll not make a value judgment Not quite yet.

Too pejorative. Too pejorative.

Too pejorative. You can say that. But let me just add that notice, one result of this experiment is people have a tendency to just stick with what they have. If they got a mug, they're much more likely to end up with it than if they didn't get a mug.

Okay, I see. Possession, nine-tenths of the law, and standard economics doesn't take in possession. How far would this possession theory skew economic models if they don't take it into account? For instance, I have a house, so the theory of economics would be, I will continue to try and get better, more valuable housing rather than just holding it since I have it.

Yeah, and it's that particular house. We call this status quo bias.

Okay.

People have a tendency to just stick with what they have.

Yes. A body at rest tends to stay at rest.

Exactly.

Do they really not take this into account in standard economics? That seems insane to me. Is that really something they don't consider?

They would consider it if there's transaction costs. But in the stock example, there are none. The cost of changing a thousand chairs of Google into, put that money into an index fund will cost you $10. If it was an offer to buy your house, then there would be costs to moving and- It's 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.

How does this manifest in markets? Because the reason why I want to talk about this, and I'll give the broader example, is things like climate policy or the ACA or those kinds of things, these are solutions to... Because economics is in some ways, it's the lubricant that we use to create solutions to problems or better conditions for people's lives and how that affects all that. I think the premise here is that standard economics misses, and so the solutions that we design for the problems in our lives are ill-conceived.

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.

That way, most economists think that?

Yes.

May I suggest that that's incorrect?

You may, but I'm included in those.

Can I say why I think it's incorrect?

Yeah, sure.

The minute you put a carbon tax on, people see their energy prices go up and you will no longer be serving in office politically.

Okay, but all right, then we're in agreement. What I'm saying is if you're God or King or President, and you could say, All right, what policy policy should we have, then the correct policy is the one that sets the prices to give people the incentive. 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 or switch to a heat pump or whatever. We run a poll of expert economists every couple of weeks at the University of Chicago, and there is one on that. Everybody says, Yeah, that would be the ideal policy.

They're saying a carbon tax would be the thing to solve the climate crisis because rather than changing the behavior, you have to make using fossil fuels, which are the driver of climate change, so much more expensive that it changes people's behaviors because they won't change behavior on their own. Is that standard economics or is that behavioral economics?

That's standard economics.

That's standard.

That's standard.

It feels behavioral, but that's standard.

No, it's standard because it's just changed the price. Then the alternative is we say you're not allowed We can't have cars that get less than such and such gas mileage.

Which we've done.

Right. We have lots of regulations.

Okay.

We essentially don't have a carbon tax.

The way we do it is, so Standard Economics, what they say is we have a series of either incentives or regulations. It would be a mix of subsidies and regulations, and that is how we will manage the energy market while also keeping an eye on trying to reduce emissions. That's how economists would design a program to solve it. We've done that with, we subsidize solar, we subsidize electric vehicles, and we regulate the miles that they must get there, and they must have a catalytic converter All that is what you would consider to be standard economic theory.

No.

We're almost fair. I am fucking this up.

You are not. You're not. What economists would say is, we don't Read all those rules and regulations. Just set the price right.

But doesn't the market set the price? Isn't that free markets?

No. The carbon tax will automatically raise the price of a Hummer, of operating a Hummer, because it only gets eight miles to the gallon compared to some EV. So we don't have to regulate. All we have to do is get the price right. That's standard economic.

Then the market will change.

Then the market will change.

But isn't that just an intervention? How is that a market? That's just the government saying, If we set a price that is unreasonable, the market will behave.

It's just setting the price so that you have the incentive to act in a way that's best for society.

But that's not economics. Economics doesn't take into account what's best for society.

It takes- Yes, it does.

What? Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Let me- Hold on here. Economists know about externalities. Now, here's the point I want to make. We don't have carbon taxes. Why? Because, and you started with this, so you got to the answer right away, you got to this because people hate taxes. They hate high prices. So what do we have? We have lots of subsidies. We have no taxes.

Well, that's not exactly. I mean, we have gas taxes. If you go to California, it's very different than buying gas in New York Very different than buying gas in Minnesota.

That's right. But even in high gasoline tax states, the taxes on emissions are still way too low compared to what they should be.

Compared to what they should be if our goal is to reduce carbon emissions. But that's not the goal of economics. The goal of economics in a capitalist system is to make the most amount of money for your shareholders. My point is, since when is economics about improving the human condition and not just making money for the companies that are extracting the fossil fuels from the Earth? Isn't that everything else is interventionist?

Okay, so I did not anticipate that my role here was going to be as the defender of neoclassical economics, but here I am.

We're here, baby.

I am here. My economist friends will be proud that I'm defending them.

All right, beautiful.

Look, there's an economist named Arthur Pigou.

Oh, Pigou's work is... I don't miss an essay.

Yeah. No, he's died 100 years ago. That's what I meant. Anyway, there are Piguvian taxes. 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.

Is Pguvian familiar with the 2008 financial crisis? Well, no. 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, 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. If they're Republicans, they really hate taxes. But we all hate paying taxes. We'll subsidize EVs. We won't tax Hummers, and we won't tax gas, and we won't tax... 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.

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Yeah.

What I'm suggesting is all markets are designed to some extent. We have this fiction that we live in a free market where it's only the rules of supply and demand and that our policies have to basically give way to these market forces that if left to their own devices, will solve these. What I'm getting at is, government intervention in markets is seen as a negative and paternalistic anti-capitalist movement, where muckety-mucks and elites design systems that are not as efficient and functioning as capitalist markets. But we all know that that's a fiction, that we intervene in markets all the... The big thing is always the government's not supposed to pick winners and losers, but they do it all the time, and they've done it since time immemorial as governments.

Okay, so There are two different issues here. Putting a tax on a bad pollution isn't interfering with markets. It's making the market efficient in the sense that the price people are paying reflects the cost they impose on others. It's not picking winners and losers. It's picking... There will be losers, people who like to drive five gas guzzling cars will lose, but we're not aiming it at them. It's a free choice.

No, they won't lose because let's say that's because they have the money to burn, it doesn't affect them. In other words, the downstream cost of the pollution that they create won't affect them because they are buffeted either by geography or wealth so that the tax itself is- No, but look, let's think of what we did.

What did we do? We subsidized EVs. Who was the beneficiary of that? Mostly rich guys.

But we also, the EPA, regulated what you could put out into the environment. I mean, that's how we got cleaner air when the government regulated what you could actually do.

That's true. But the choice to have subsidies and regulations, it benefited some companies versus others. Tesla was a big beneficiary of this.

Exactly. No, I'm saying government always picks winners and losers and then pretends like that's something that they can't do. Well, but Donald Trump is a great example. He's like, Government can't pick winners and losers. Oh, NVIDIA, I'll let you sell chips to China if you give me or Intel. How about I'll take 10% of your company. I guess what I'm saying is, aren't we all operating under a fiction? If we were more honest about the way economies worked, we could be more honest about the way we solve some of these larger scale problems.

Okay, you're skipping one step ahead.

I don't want to do that. Take me back.

In a world where we don't know any of the people in any of the companies. We're back in the world of inside an economist's head. We just have there are firms and there are people and there's something people are doing that causes harm to others. The solution to that, that all economists agree to is put a price on that bad and then let the market clear, and the people who produce bads will suffer. And if they're poor, they'll suffer more, but that's true of all policies. And that part is uncontroversial. I'm not saying that's a world we live in. In fact, my point is-So economists don't live in the world that we live in. No, they live... They would say this is... They would call this a first best, meaning if they could design everything, that's the way they would do it. They would try to make the price Cases reflect the harms that are people causing and then let the chips fall where they may. That's very different from giving contracts to your buddies, which has been going on at the local level as long as there have been politicians and buddies, we've just taken it to a new levels.

Is the idea of behavioral economics to help economists get more grounded in what the actual externalities are? Is that the point? Because the way you're describing economists and the way that they talk about the economy seems utterly removed from reality to some extent. No.

Okay. Here's where- I'm the worst student you have ever had. Oh, John. You are so far from that. These are very good questions. All right.

Let's get to it.

All right. The point I want to start with is, economists don't have a good answer to the question, why do we have only subsidies rather than taxes? Because as far as economists are concerned, they're the same. It's just a sign. If we subsidize the good thing or tax the bad thing, if there are red mugs and blue mugs, and the red mugs- In their model, they see no distinction between a subsidy and a tax.

And what you're saying is a tax is actually much worse than a subsidy in real-world economics because people view losses as more damaging than wins, which is the subsidy.

Perfect. You nailed it. All right. So if we're trying to understand the world, it's important to understand this thing about losses and about status quo bias. That people tend to stick with what they have, and we can use that to help or hurt people.

How would you take in behavior Behavioral economics, staying with the climate model. If an economist would say, it really makes no difference whether you do a tax or a subsidy, but very clearly, we only do subsidies, so somebody must understand the political realities Of all this, how would a behavioral economist... Because here's what I'm trying to get to. We've understood since the '70s that the world is warming through our climate policies. They've had Kyoto treaties, and they've had giant conferences every year where everybody flies private jets to discuss how we're going to change fossil fuels. They all work through subsidies and caps and cap and trade and net neutrality and all these different goals and things. And nothing has really changed. We've made certainly advances in solar and wind and batteries and EVs, but the energy needs of the world continue to spiral and AI. My point is, everything we've done has been utterly inadequate. I guess I'm trying to figure out What are we misunderstanding about the solutions and how can behavioral economics give us a better angle on it than the standard economics and the standard political realities which have failed us? How would you change the way.

Okay, good. Yeah. What have we done? God, almost 20 years ago, I wrote a book with Cass Sunstein called Nudge.

Yes, I remember Nudge.

It was a book about how we can help in this situation. Here's one example. All right, We're in this world where gas guzzling cars are too cheap. We all would like to put a tax on that, but we can't. Well, one thing we can do is we can put labels on the cars telling you how much it's going to cost you to operate this car. Well, that will help a little.

Right. Like a food labeling will help you with health. If people see like, Oh, this car is going to cost me $6,000 a year to buy gas for. This other car is going to cost me $3,000 a year to buy gas for. That's a piece of information that will help me make a decision, and that decision, we think, will also be better for the environment.

Right.

Those are little things, nudges, that move us in the right direction.

Right. Another example is you probably get a utility bill that I'm guessing you personally don't look at.

I look at it every day.

That tells you how much energy you use compared to your neighbors with a similar house.

You're going with shame. You're going with economic benefit and then also shame.

Well, shame and no, and patting on the back. Right? If you've put in solar or a heat pump. All right. Oh, John, most guys with Mick mansions like yours.

You are misunderstanding my neighborhood, sir. They would in no way. They'd be like, What are you, a pussy? What are you doing over there?

Okay. In any case, my co-author, Cass Sunstein, was the so-called regulation Tsar for President Obama for a while. His job was to make sure all the regulations that were being passed did more good than bad.

A series of nudges that would incentivize people through a variety of psychological, some would say manipulations. But understanding that, that could drive our economy incrementally to a more positive climate future. Let me ask you a question. Are we in a nudge economy, or should you write a book called Shove? Because it feels like the incentives and subsidized taxes are all inadequate to address the reality of people's behavior and the totality of what we face. Why aren't we redesigning the entire system?

Nudge has two sets of critiques.

Okay.

One, you could think of as complete free market guys that's saying, Go away. Let markets do it.

Yeah, but they live in La La land.

Then there are the others saying, Come on, we have to tell people what to do. My next book should be called Shove.

Yes. Let me- Yeah, but you go ahead, and then I'll explain why I think I'm different than those two. But go ahead.

There's at least one of my colleagues has written such a book, and I will point out to that person and you that if we're in that world, sometimes Trump is President. If we want to design a system where the government just tells us what to do as opposed to nudge us, wouldn't that be worse?

Well, first of all, the government tells us what to do all the time. I mean, any regulation and all those kinds of things. No, no, but you're saying we should- Shove. We should shove- Let me explain what I'm saying.

All right, do it.

When I say shove, I don't mean the government saying to people, You are not allowed to use this much electricity or you are not allowed to use this much gas. When I say shove, it means understanding what the 10,000 years of human endeavor and progress on this Earth really means. We are a species that if shit's easier, we will do it that way. The horse didn't go by the wayside of the car because of anything other than like, wait a minute, I can get there in half the time and not have the smell of horse shit? Done. We are incentivized to, you've given me a product that makes my life easier. We don't care where the electricity comes from. When I say shove, it's this. It's stop thinking incrementally about the subsidies and the thing. People want the convenience that modern life has provided them, whether they live the global south or whether they live in our thing. And shove means these incremental systems, and with all its political peril and all those things, aren't what's actually going to solve the problem. Shove means looking at mitigating the damage that human beings in all their greed and convenience need.

In other words, shove is not telling people what to do. It's getting scientists to help us clean up this mess, meaning carbon capture or other types of models, because what you won't be able to do through a series of nudges is make people not want the most efficient, convenient, cheapest thing that they can possibly get. And anything that doesn't take that into account is naive. So I'm not suggesting Having a paternalistic government that decides, oh, my God, climate changes, and we've got to be better people, and how do we incentivize everyone to be better people? My view is you can't. You actually need to think completely differently and create a model that creates robust markets in damage mitigation and carbon mitigation. That's my position.

Okay, but what I would say is that position is identical to the one that you mocked as the standard economic prescription, which is set the prices right, and then people will have all the incentive to invent the new technologies to solve it. If If the carbon prices are right, then people are going to pour all kinds of money.

That's only one way of doing it, though. Setting the carbon price is not necessarily the only way to do it. The other way to do it is create a market for mitigation. That's what I'm saying. It's not just about carbon.

There will be a market for mitigation, but if it doesn't cost you much to emit carbon, then people won't buy it.

No, it's not that people will buy it. It's that you need to create a market for profit for companies, not people. John, Am I nuts?

Yeah.

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Avocadogreenmattress. Com/tws. But then explain to me how nudge is going to... Everything we've been talked about is this is an urgent crisis, and all the nudging and subsidies is only incrementally inching us to I think. Meanwhile, you have a whole global south that hasn't developed the progress at the pace that in the global north has. And now we're telling them, you have to do it through this series of subsidies and markets. That seems unrealistic. It seems more realistic to go Exxon or wherever they are and go, we'll give you a shit ton of money if you can figure out how to clean carbon out of our atmosphere.

Well, but we wouldn't have to go to them to do that if the prices were right.

But what I'm saying is, if you live in the reality of the world, look at the yellow vest movement in Europe. Even Europe with their, We're doing the right thing and we ride our bikes everywhere. When you set the carbon price not to the market of supply and demand, but to the idea of what would be best for the world, you make yourself politically untenable. That's, to me, the largest problem.

We're in agreement.

You just said I was out in a... Wait a minute.

No, we are in agreement. No, but, John, you want... You're a son of a... You want to have it both ways.

Professor, when are your office hours, Professor? I'm coming in there. This grade, C minus.

Man, you know what? I've given you office hours at 8: 00 AM, California time. This is the first time I've ever had office hours at eight o'clock in the morning, John. Sir, point taken. I have a long career.

Point taken. Objection sustained.

You have office hours anytime you want, but it's going to be starting at 10: 00 my time henceforth.

Works better for me, too.

Let me move to one direction.

Yes, GPS. Okay.

If you have to... You do leave home occasionally, I hear.

Pretty occasionally, so that's not a ton.

Yeah. Pretty Before we get off the topic of status quo bias.

Yes.

Some people have called me the first clinical economist that I feel- Because of the psychological aspect of what you do? Yeah. I think there is some danger you suffer from status quo bias syndrome.

Tell me more. I'm always up for having a new illness.

Yeah. Doesn't like leaving home.

Yeah. No questions asked.

Starts every show with some left-handed scribbling. Yes, sir. It looks panic.

Oh, by the way, if anybody would see it, there's no artistry there. It is really- Brittany and her team- Yes. Have been tell- Are producers. Yeah.

They tell me that there's A lot of status quo bias syndrome in our boss.

You're saying inertia. There's a lot of inertia. Yeah, I got you.

I would add continuing to root for the Mets for...

Oh, sir. No, if you're saying that I somehow seem to be in love with the type of pain, yeah, masochism runs in my family.

I'm going to get in a lot of trouble for the following statement, and then I will move on. Yes, please. I don't think there's anything wrong with firing your team.

Oh, sir, you're treading on very dangerous ground right now.

I also grew up in New Jersey.

This type of heresy, sir. Galileo was killed for less, sir.

Yeah, I know. We may not want to air this episode because I think we both could get burned at the stage.

Not at all.

But I grew up in I grew up a Yankees fan in the Mantle and Maris glory years.

Sure.

Then I grew to hate George Steinbrenner. In my class on managerial decision making, I had one of my rules, Don't be like George Steinbrenner.

Fair enough. Okay. You're saying, Don't go to jail for any violations of certain shipping rules?

No, I mean, Don't hire and fire the same manager three times.

But George Steinbredder did win championships.

He did, but not in a way that- You enjoyed. Or I approved of. I fired the Yankees. All right. I'm just saying you should... Yes.

But after you fired the Yankees, they apparently still had a job. What I'm saying is that firing has no impact.

Look, my son suffers from this. When he was a kid, he fell in love with the dolphins.

Great uniform. Dan Marino, I'm assuming that was the Dan Marino era.

Great uniform. His wife and two daughters. They live in San Francisco. They all adopted the Niners, but they have to put up with that turquoise and orange. The cost he's imposed I suppose.

So is the point you're making here, if I may, is the point you're making that I am not giving humankind enough credit for an ability to adapt to understanding that the long-term harms that our short-term actions are taking are damaging us, and that if I'm just nudging them enough, we will understand that the short-term pleasure is not worth the long-term harm.

No. I mean, what I was just doing is giving you a little shit. But let's get back to climate change.

Yeah.

Gps is my favorite nudge. I'm geographically dyslexic. Gps has saved me. I can wander around in a strange city and find my way back to my hotel all by myself. Normally, I need my wife leading me by the hand. You're a big boy. By the hand. Yes. Now, and my motto, my mantra is design policies, make it easy. Yes. That's my mantra, make it easy.

You and I are agreeing. You can't tell people to go back to paper maps. Let's say we found out that GPS emits something through the towers that they use in the satellites that is heating the environment. Nudging people back to maps isn't going to work. And so what I'm saying is you have to create shoves that create new avenues and new incentives that allow people to still enjoy the benefits of that progress while mitigating the... You have to look at it.

Nobody's required to use GPS.

But it's better.

Exactly.

Right. That's my point. Energy is better. People need energy. A lot of the suggestions from governments is, let's use less.

Okay, so bear with me, John.

Yeah, please.

Let's switch to a different problem.

Let's do ACA. Let's do health care because that's another one that I think in terms of its incentives and subsidies, but it's nudging a broken system when we should be shoving. Okay, so let's go there by a way of retirement saving becauseYes.

Okay? Because that one, we did a little thing. All right? So one of the problems economists ignore is that people have self-control problems. I'm We're fat. We drink too much. We don't save enough.

Dark vision.

We look around.

Open your eyes. Social Security was a way to mitigate that, no?

Yeah, but it's not It works pretty well for one segment, which is people who have regular low paying jobs. The replacement rate is is okay, but if you're in and out, not so much. For the upper middle class, social security isn't enough really to live on. We used to have these old-fashioned defined benefit pension plans that guaranteed you an annuity depending on how much you made and how long you worked. They replaced with these 401k things.

Right. Those pensions were generally matched by employers, and they were part of the responsibility and compensation package that you would get from the old world of you went to work at a factory and You left it 45 years later.

Right. You had no decisions to make. With the new 401k, you had to join and decide how much to save and how to invest. That was hard. A lot of people in the early days of these didn't even join, and the company was matching their contributions. It's the dumbest thing. It's turning down free money. How did we, I'm not going to say fix this, but improve it? One thing we did was we said it used to be, if you wanted to be in the 401k, you had to fill out a form. We said, Okay, let's change the default. People are good at doing nothing. So we send them- You're not a fan of people, sir. We go back, Rewind the tape to the diagnosis of John, right? Yes. Okay. You now get a message saying, Welcome to our firm. We're going to enroll you in the 401(k) plan unless you fill out this form.

You made it so that the opt-out took an action, whereas the opt-in did not take an action, therefore incentivizing the opt-in, which is the better outcome for people in terms of money.

Right. And incentivizing cost just by changing the box. Right? So again, regular economists would assume it doesn't matter what box is ticked.

Would they really? Regular economists don't take into account pain in the ass, that level of it?

They would say the cost of ticking a box versus 6% of your salary? I mean, really?

Here's what I would say. Businesses understand that. That's why your credit card bill is unintelligible. When you read all that fine print, you have no idea what you're reading. And that's purpose obfuscation. It's purposeful. They understand that people aren't going to wade through that. They're not going to understand that, wait a minute, after six months, this goes up to 21%. They understand how to manipulate us all the time.

Absolutely. All right. We are exactly on the same page. Yes.

The system is designed to exploit us, and people don't have an ability to understand that because of the way that the system is allowed to be designed.

Right. Look, making it opt-out is good for people, and we improved pension plans just by switching which box is ticked.

No, that sounds like a very smart move.

But of course, companies learn the same trick, not from us, or at least I'm not taking the blame.

You're reverse engineering. Of course. Nabisco makes chips that They design them so that they're almost impossible not to eat. You get fat, and then Big Pharma makes GLP-1s, and that makes it so that you control your appetite. Then Nabisco has to engineer that to get past. I mean, this is the cycle of exploitation. Again, that gets back to the incentive here is greed. That's what we're doing. That's why I'm saying nudges sometimes are inadequate and shove Yeah. Okay.

I totally agree. So far, the only thing we disagree about-Mets, the Mets. Yeah. Okay. The two things we disagree about.

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The two things we disagree about are the Mets Yeah. Whether getting the prices right would be sufficient.

Let's look at the ACA because the whole idea there is if we create a market for insurance, we'll get the prices right and we'll subsidize for the people who can't because to get the market to be efficient, we need everybody to be in it. To get the insurance companies to allow everybody to be in it, we're going to have to make sure that we subsidize them because the markets include people with pre-existing conditions or people who are not healthy, and the insurance companies don't want to deal with that. We do little nudges about, you can check this box because it's a very complicated market. I look at that and think, We are papering over a broken system with nudges when we have to shove ourselves into what makes the most sense for health care, which every other developed country in the world has already realized, which is free market incentives don't work in a system with those kinds of externalities. Health care will never be a functioning market. The system is designed to exploit people's need to not die. And by creating the ACA and all those other things, we're papering over what should be the reality of the system, which is centralizing it is the only way to create something that will efficiently help people not die.

That's where I would crystallize my argument in all of this.

Right. And obviously, we're going to have no listeners left. We don't have.

Yeah. All right.

If we go all the way down that path, here's what I will say. I was actually in the White House, while the catastrophic website that was being for ACA, which crashed on the opening day, somebody was designing that. I was talking to somebody.

I said, Could- Wait, you were in the White House while that was going on?

Not while it was crashing. Before that, when somebody was designing it, and I said, Oh, can I go talk to that guy? And they said, Oh, yeah, go see that guy. They showed me some screenshots. Here's what a behavioral economist thinks about. Somebody had decided that the plans should be grouped into categories, and the categories should get labels of metals, platinum, gold, silver, bronze.

Sell like time shares.

I said, Why should we do this? I never got an answer of what the theory was for why.

I think the theory is credit cards. You get a platinum, you get a black card, you get a... One is basic, one has got some frills, the other is free drinks and food.

But then down at the bottom, there was another category, and it didn't get a medal. It was called catastrophic. I said, Wait a minute. So Catastrophic policy is one with a high deductible.

It only helps you if the shit hits the fan.

Yeah, but a lot of economists would say, That's probably the most efficient policy I see. But my comment to these guys was, Wait, you're not calling one of the brands catastrophic, right? We've got platinum, gold, bronze. Catastrophic? They said, Yeah, well, that's what economists call those plans.

But my comment would be, Catastrophic is how I would categorize the choice to treat health care like It's a product that companies like health insurers haven't already figured out how to exploit for maximum profit to the detriment of people who we always know People don't shop around for health care. Making it more transparent doesn't mean they'll shop around. They want to live. They want to go to the best doctor that they can who is nearest to them, especially in an emergency. They don't get a choice. For us to continue to treat this as though it is some functioning market that we can do our usual games of subsidies and labeling to fix. My point is that's a market that needs a shove.

Yeah. Okay. I'm going to make two points. One is, some friends of mine and I ran a quick little experiment. Simply changing the name of the catastrophic policy to economy or value, in our experiments, reduced the number of uninsured by 10%. Right. That was good. It's better to have- No, I'm not saying there isn't goods to be had through that. All right.

That's point one. Let me say this. Are there still people who go bankrupt because they get sick? Have we fixed the problem that needs to be- No, we have not. Are there still people that- Okay.

All right. Here's my- Don't let perfect be the enemy of good is the point. Yes. If we're striving for perfect, you're absolutely right, John. There are vested interests. The hospitals, the insurance companies, the doctors that don't want nurses to be able to do a lot of stuff. Pharmacists are the most overtrained people in the economy because they end up working in some God awful Walgreens.

Right. Meanwhile, it's the benefit managers that are making all the money because they're the middlemen setting the prices.

Right.

But if we allow ourselves to be satisfied by these incremental positives and not let perfect be the enemy of good, don't we lose sight of, don't let insane be the enemy of sane, or don't let sane be the an enemy of insane. If we have a system that is blatantly insane, aren't we, yes, you make all these improvements. I'm not suggesting that there will ever be anything that's perfect. But if we continue to accept such a broken and corrupted system as our only option is incremental improvements within that, our Aren't economists and policymakers and everyone else robbing us of an opportunity? Because sometimes you need to view it on not to go with the other terms of economics, but the macro, not the micro.

Right. What I would say is Mark Cuban has a little company that- Sure.

It's very smart.

Very smart.

But why does the government do that?

Well, because all of the vested interests- That's my point. Okay, but look, Suppose you say Medicare for all.

Medicare for all that wanted. Yes, great.

Right. So language matters. Sure. Having a system that people can buy into.

Anybody that wants to join a system so that you remove the possibility of going bankrupt because you get sick, to me, is the baseline of a healthy society.

Well, so I would go further. Yeah, please. My plan would be, if we're going to start with something, I wouldn't start with that. Okay. I would start with a catastrophic insurance for free for everyone.

Okay. Now we're getting somewhere. I'm a behavioral economist. I'm with you, baby.

All right, you've graduated. Let's go, Metz. Let's go, Metz. Let's go, Metz. He was so close. He was almost there. We can't ignore all the vested interests.

No, but they're the ones we should be nudging and shoving, not consumers. I think we're always shoving on the wrong end of the horse.

Well, but the problem is that all those vested interests have lots of money, and they support both parties, and they will make it difficult.

But that's the job of governance. I would say Here's what I would love for economists, and behavioral economists, I think, could play a big part in this, is to help us understand that the founders looked at the system and said, there's going to be a balance, a power, checks and balances between the executive and the judiciary and the legislative. But there's another power, and that's corporate power. It's really the fourth branch of government, and maybe one of the most influential branches. The only thing that we have in this country that is is powerful enough to in any way mitigate that is the government. If the government refuses to take a courageous stand in mitigating that, damage the damage of... I remember Alan Greenspan was on my show in 2008, 2009.

That must have been exciting.

Oh, it was tight. At that time, I think he was 98. He might have been 103 at that time. I asked him, The financial crisis of 2008, what the hell happened? He goes, I think we overestimated the bank's ability to regulate themselves. I was like, Do you mean you were idiots? Because that's insane.

Well, but look, the Fed is probably, you could argue, the best functioning branch of the government. Certainly, you can argue it's got the best, at least right now, best trained people working for them. It's a well-functioning branch of the government. That may all change.

I think I believe the plan is already in place to knock down the East Wing of the Fed. Listen, we have a mutual friend, Austin Goolsby.

I love the Goolsby. Love him. He's the President of the Chicago Fed. Come on.

I love Goolsby. Tell him I said hello. Tell him to come on this show.

Well, right now- He's in the Fed.

He's not allowed to talk much.

Yeah.

Anyway- That's tough on him. He's funny. He's actually really funny.

No, he's very funny.

No, I like Goldsby.

Where were we?

We were tearing down the fabric of capitalist institutions and reforming them.

The problem is we wouldn't know where to start. If Mark Cuban can't do it, I don't know. Just any one step, so like my version of free catastrophic for all, I think is a good place to start, but it wouldn't eliminate the power of the American Medical Association to limit what physicians' assistants can do and the insurance companies and all the benefit managers and all the layers. It's above my pay grade to think about- No, I understand.

You know what? It's a great place, I think, and I've I so appreciated your time and your office hours. You've been so generous with them. I was taking this thing past fail anyway. So the idea that you gave me all this time- No, I don't allow past fail.

What?

No, I'm not going near you, man.

But there's great nondisclosure.

That's where I'm at. Let's do that. But I think the point that I think maybe I love coming to is this. I love the idea of of those really smart incentivized nudges and those things, but not allowing that to remove our higher aspiration of actually looking at the logistics and the guts of something and getting systems that are not as exploitative, that government has to have a larger role in mitigating the damage. Look, capitalism is the operating system we have. But it's clearly not a free market. It's intervened in by governments and all kinds of other corrupt actors and the crony capitalism that goes along with it. My point is, let's continue to do those really smart things that you're talking about, but we cannot lose sight of the larger goal, which is that a government has to be there to help mitigate the collateral damage that the operating system we've chosen to use often creates.

Yeah. We need another show, John, to figure out how to get there.

Oh, but we will. We can. Yes, the audacity of a hope, baby. Yeah. You're a good man. Professor, thank you for joining us. Professor Richard Taylor, University of Chicago, and one of the founding fathers of behaviorally economics, the 2017 Nobel Prize in Econ, which is sitting on Donald Trump's fireplace mantle as we speak.

But it's up for sale. Up for sale. Up for sale for the husband.

You know what? You can get that and a Cornell mug, I'm assuming, for just $7 more.

Or a Nudge mug. There you go.

Excellent product placement. Thank you so much, Professor.

Thank you, John. Pleasure to meet you.

Pleasure to meet you, too. Hey, folks. It's Quince time. Today's sponsor, Quince, helps you forget about all the fashion nightmares. Quince, they bring together the premium materials, the thoughtful design, the quality. You stay warm, you look sharp, you feel your best. Each piece made from premium materials by trusted factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. But they cut out the middleman. I don't like middlemen. Do you like middleman? Maybe you're a middleman. Maybe you do like middleman. But you cut out the middleman and you cut out the traditional markups. Quince delivers the same quality as these luxury brands at a fraction of the price. Refresh your winter wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince. Com/twes for free shipping on your order and a 365-day return. Now, available in Canada, too. That's quince, q-u-i-n-c-e. Com/tws. Free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince. Com/tws. Man, my favorite part of the interview, if I may.

Yes.

Was how slowly he talked to try and... I really felt like... I think he was about 10 minutes into it when he was like, I'm going to have to I'm going to change my tact here because little brain is not.

No.

Yeah, I don't think he was expecting that conversation.

My favorite part was when he psychoanalyzed you. I think that was the first time that's happened on the pod.

That is right. I got to tell you, though, he fucking nailed it.

I mean, they don't give out Nobel Prizes for nothing.

No, I thought he did an excellent job. Did any of that resonate, though, with you guys? I I get where he's coming from with that idea of, Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. But I don't know that they... It's not to suggest that incrementalism isn't still a part of the equation. Of course. But I don't know if they understand the general frustration within the public.

100%.

I thought it was incredibly illuminating that a conversation about health care, his grievance or what his brain went to was the categorization of plants. Not having those categories explaining in really big print exactly what these plants do does not mean they don't all suck still.

Yeah, I think it's like, so if economists argue that you should choose the catastrophic plan because that would be optimal, and then behavioral economists argue we need to change the name because people aren't choosing the most optimal plan, then we need to find someone that will argue that the problem is actually that The most optimal plan is a plan that you will go broke if you need to use. That's the real problem here.

I was just trying to explain, aren't you just polishing turds at that point? But I get his point that there It was like, you did help some people. But I think sometimes that gives you license to ignore the larger totality of climate change, health care. But by incrementalizing, you You also are forgetting that you have to maximize as well.

Big structural change.

Thank you.

I was thinking a little bit when you were bringing up the subsidies, that's a shove, right? If we just think about the subsidy itself, this The shove is even small in comparison to what we should be doing. We take away the subsidy, 1. 5 million people drop out of the ACA marketplace. Those are the people who are young, who are holding up the system for the 5% of people are really using it. But the whole thing is going to start crumbling because of this shove that was supposed to be a fix, which it's not.

That's right. I almost think he would still categorize a subsidy as a nudge in shove would be the redesign of it. But they don't... I thought he got really... That was where he was uncomfortable. You can't bring your weight on insurance companies. That's not right.

His pauses got longer in in those moments.

He just got sad. That's when he went to like, You're a Mets fan, aren't you? But anyway, it was very interesting, very illuminating, I think, for me. What about Brittany? What do we got for the listeners there? What do they got there? What do they want?

All righty. First up, we've got, John, of all the Trump news this week, which development worried you the most?

I think the election. With all the elites are going to get out of Everything I'm accustomed to, as we said on the show last night, the real sanctuary city in this country, which is this privileged class that there is no crime they can commit that would have any accountability to it. But it was the raid on the Fulton County Electoral Board, along with his offhand remark about nationalizing the election, only in, I think, the 15 states that caused him problem.

I'm just spitballing here, but what if I nationalize the elections in the 15 states that caused me a problem? Right.

I mean, he's going to end up tariffing states to get them- That's the sweet Lord.

This was a small related situation, but he actually called Tulsi Gabbard after assigning her that mission. Trump was just on the phone with her while they were doing- Why is he even assigning her anyway?

What the fuck is the President assigning the DNI to an FBI? He's not supposed to be assigning the FBI to stuff. They're supposed to be independent.

She's also under some top secret investigation while this is all going on. The whole thing is a mess, but I agree with you.

Do you know what the investigation is?

No, it's top secret. It's locked away so that even Congress doesn't know because they don't want it to get out.

It's in a safe, literally.

I bet it's about the streak, the streak in the air. No one knows. Oh, don't talk about people's great. No, it's the streak. People are going to say, What is that? She's giving a sign to somebody. Hold our There's no secrets in that. Is it Putin? Yeah. Is that who would? Yeah, no, I agree with you. The problem is you don't ever think... There'll be no accountability for any of them in the first place anyway. They're operating under, as they would say, as JD Vance would say, absolute immunity, which is a fucking ridiculousness. What else do they want? What else do these viewers, listeners?

Why can Trump threaten to sue everyone for a gazillion dollars, but no one can sue him back?

That is a Zen Cohen. I think I might have that. I believe that might have been a fortune cookie that I got the other day. That's one of those, the Buddhist will go to a monastery, and they will sit there in silence for years, pondering the question of why Trump... Now, to be fair, no one has been sued more than Donald Trump, in my estimation. If you go through his construction records, every fucking contractor he's ever worked with is like, Hey, man, you still owe me 15% of the money. And he's like, Come and get me.

Try it. He's a victim. Yeah.

Poor, poor, sweet billionaire president.

There have been some recent suits, but I think that he's making so much money off the presidency. Probably go on forever, whereas people can't afford to continue these suits.

The Supreme Court made it basically so that no matter what he does, it's in the guise of his presidential duties, you're not even allowed to do discovery. I think part of why you can't sue him is like, I'm suing you. Great. What evidence do you have? Well, I'd like to see your emails. Boy, I'd love to, but I don't have to. But it's interesting. The mindset that he had as running Trump enterprises is the same as he has when it comes to be President. It's the exploitation he did on all of his contractors. People don't realize, so many contractors in New York City fucking hate that guy because his whole strategy was, I'll pay you just enough money to satisfy a certain portion of the contract, but I won't pay you the final 10 or 15 %, knowing that you as a small contractor, the hassle and money it will take you to try and recoup that, won't be worth it. And so I will get myself 10 to 15% off of everything that I do.

That's behavioral economics, right?

We're tying it all together. One more question.

All righty. All right. John, which Super Bowl halftime show will you be watching? Bad Bunny or Kid Rock?

Puppy Bowl.

There's already counter programming, if only you're not going USA.

No, I always watch a Super Bowl halftime show. I don't particularly care who's on it. A, it's a continuity issue, behavioral economics, status quo thinking.

Nice.

Inertia?

I feel bad. Not bad, but he's a superstar, but Bad Bunny. The shit this guy's... He reaches the pinnacle of his professional career in a global superstar to get the opportunity to do a halftime show. The guy's clearly a fucking extraordinary musician and entertainer who's earned this place. The idea that He's facing a backlash. My favorite backlash to it is, you got to get a fucking American in there, and you're like, Uh. Yeah.

Read a fucking book.

Right?

The Gillian sigh tells us all we need to know.

It drives me crazy. I love Bad Bunny. Like, Oh, he's going to kill it. I can't wait. Benito. That's why I'm tuning in. I'm so excited. The game is going to be a blowout. He's wonderful. He just won three Grammys Sunday night. Right. Plus, he's really hot. Really? It has kid rock beat in that element for sure. Yeah.

Wait, so the Bad Bunny also has a little bit of a machismo, a little bit of a vibe going.

Oh, yeah.

Interesting.

But to be a musician versus a commu. This This is never done about comedians. It's always musicians. People love the... It's something with the hips not lying. Well, listen, very, very lovely, guys. Thank you once again. Brittany, how do they stay in touch with us for all this?

Twitter, we are Weekly Show Pod. Instagram threads TikTok Blue Sky, we are Weekly Show Podcast, and you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart.

And Instagram, baby, if you want to see all of my nasal pores, join me on my page. Thank you guys so much. Lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer, Brittany Mamedevik, producer, Gillian Speer, video editor and engineer, Rob Vittola, audio editor and engineer, Nicole Bois, executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie gray. We will see you See you guys next time. The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bustboy Productions.

247 und ohne Beamtendeutsch. Ja richtig, aber wieso weißt du so was? Weil, wieso Steuer die Erstattung live anzeigt? Das ist einfach die Steuer-App für alle Fälle. Ja und Fragen beantwortet sie auch. 247 und ohne Beamtendeutsch.

Paramount Podcasts.