Richard Thaler's Savvy, Calculating Insurrection

There is no shortage of people who think mainstream economics is a wrongheaded endeavor overdue for overthrow. Their insurrectionist noises grew louder after the financial crisis of 2008, but they've been around for much longer than that, and have been heard pretty much constantly since the modern mainstream was formalized with the Bank of Sweden's 1969 creation of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

This year's winner of that prize was once one of those people -- sort of. In the late 1970s, Richard Thaler thought most of his fellow economists deeply misunderstood how actual people make actual economic decisions, and his renegade ideas risked derailing his career. But they didn't. Thaler's was a lonely struggle for a while, but it evolved into a savvy, calculating operation. And it was successful -- not in overthrowing the mainstream, but in changing it.