, Columnist
Thaler Changed My Life (and Everybody Else's)
The Nobel winner's collaborator remembers the thrill of first encountering his ideas.
The economics of real life.
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I first heard about Richard Thaler in the 1980s, in a locker room at the University of Chicago.
I had run into Steve Shavell, an economist at Harvard Law School, who asked me what I was working on. I mumbled some question I had, about whether people really behaved as rationally as economists said they do. Shavell responded without a lot of enthusiasm: “Oh, you should be reading Thaler, that guy from Cornell.”