Sutherland Famous Quotes

So You Want to Be Famous

Behavioural economics is an odd term. As Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger once said, ‘If economics isn’t behavioural, I don’t know what the hell is.’ It’s true: in a more sensible world, economics would be a subdiscipline of psychology.* Adam Smith was as much a behavioural economist as an economist – The Wealth of Nations (1776) doesn’t contain a single equation. But, strange though it may seem, the study of economics has long been detached from how people behave in the real world, preferring to concern itself with a parallel universe in which people behave as economists think they should. It is to correct this circular logic that behavioural economics – made famous by experts such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Dan Ariely and Richard Thaler – has come to prominence. In many areas of policy and business there is much more value to be found in understanding how people behave in reality than how they should behave in theory.

he should leave us alone,” Zoe said, “and then we won’t really need nose plugs.” “Famous last words,” Logan said.

wise storyteller called Aesop. It appears in several of his fables including, most famously, the story of the fox and the grapes. A fox gazes longingly at a beautiful bunch of grapes hanging from the high branch of a tree, his mouth watering. He jumps to reach them, but misses by a long way. He tries again and again, but each time it is in vain. Sitting down, he looks at the grapes in disgust. ‘What a fool I am,’ he says, ‘wearing myself out to get a bunch of sour grapes* that are not worth the effort.’ The moral of the fable is that many pretend to despise and belittle that which is beyond their reach. This seems fair enough, though it is worth asking how our lives would feel if we did not play this mental trick on ourselves – we might go about in a constant state of resentment because we were not the billionaire recipient of a Nobel Prize.