In the world of traditional economics, it shouldn't matter whether you use an opt-in or opt-out system. So long as the costs of registering as a donor or a nondonor are low, the results should be similar. But many findings of behavioral economics show that tiny disparities in such rules can make a big difference.

When it comes to my health, I would rather my doctor base her decisions on science rather than what she, or some lawyer, thinks will stand up in court.

Demanding that the rich get a tax cut as a condition for tax relief for others is simply elitist.

As both a consumer and producer of newspaper articles, I have no beef with pay walls. But before signing up, I read the fine print.

Doctors and hospitals should be paid for keeping their patients well. Paying them for doing more tests and surgeries creates bad incentives.

Companies are accumulating vast amounts of information about your likes and dislikes. But they are doing this not only because you're interesting. The more they know, the more money they can make.

Don't get trapped by looking at what the price was that you paid for some stock originally.

Fortunately, economists open to new ways of thinking are finding novel ways to use supposedly irrelevant factors to make the world a better place.

It is true that I am one of the co-authors of 'Nudge,' and I am a behavioral economist, but it does not mean that everything we write about in that book is behavioral economics, nor does it mean that my co-author, the distinguished legal scholar Cass Sunstein, is a behavioral economist.

I don't think it says anywhere in the Bible that tithing should be calculated on a before-tax basis.

I practice what has come to be called behavioral economics.

Academia does not provide many opportunities for immediate gratification. You work for two years on a project, it takes two more years to get it published, and then you start hoping someone might read it.

Traditional economics is based on imaginary creatures sometimes referred to as 'Homo economicus.' I call them Econs for short. Econs are amazingly smart and are free of emotion, distraction or self-control problems. Think Mr. Spock from 'Star Trek.'

You go out on the practice range, and something kind of clicks, and you start hitting the ball very crisply. And you're sure that you've found it, the holy grail - that all you have to do is hold your hand in a certain way. Then you go out on the golf course, and it's completely disappeared.

A nudge is some feature of the environment that changes the behaviour of humans but would not change the behaviour of rational economic agents, what we call Econs.

Claiming that Social Security benefits are safe may sound naive, but my view is actually quite cynical. I believe that as long as the elderly continue to vote in large numbers, no Congress will renege on promised payouts for those already eligible to receive benefits.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

My thesis topic was 'The value of a human life.' I asked people a question: 'Suppose you had some risk, a one in a thousand risk of dying - how much would you pay to eliminate it?'

The wealth in many large estates has never been taxed because it is largely in the form of unrealized - therefore untaxed - capital gains.

We behavioralists differ from our more traditional brethren in the way we characterize agents in the economy.

In a democracy, if a government creates bad policies, it can be voted out of office. Competition in the private sector, however, can easily work to encourage phishing rather than stifle it.

Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a rational person.

Many problems are so complex that even if we had the money to fix them, we wouldn't know how to do it. Fixing inner-city schools, reducing obesity, creating peace in the Middle East are just a few examples.

For many people, being asked to solve their own retirement savings problems is like being asked to build their own cars.

Payroll savings plans are vital because they are essentially the only way that middle-class Americans reliably save for retirement.

When employees are first eligible for a retirement savings plan, they should be enrolled unless they choose to opt out.

There can be legal conflicts over whether registering intent is enough to qualify you as an organ donor or whether a doctor must still ask your family's permission.

Many Americans say they want to be organ donors, but they just don't get around to acting on their intentions. Helping these potential good Samaritans overcome their inertia could prolong thousands of lives a year.

We should at least make sure that patients are given the opportunity to opt out of spending their final days in a hospital, hooked up to tubes and running up enormous bills.

Tort reform is a complicated subject and not a panacea.

Social Security may be the most beloved of all the government's programs, partly because it requires so little thinking. You pay taxes while you work, then you and your spouse collect until you die.

Sunk costs? We pay too much attention to them.

The supply price and the demand price should be roughly the same. You're not supposed to have two different prices. According to economists.

The Nobel Prize is going to be 'fun money' - for an occasion, when my wife and I want a $50 bottle of wine.

'Fun money' is another thing that makes no sense to traditional economists. Because there's just money; there's no 'fun money.' It's all supposed to be the same.

I think behavioral economists don't have any more of an explanation about the rise of Trump than anyone else.

If you're trading individual securities, you're almost certainly making a mistake. Because most professional managers can't outperform their benchmarks, and there's little reason to think that individuals can.

God did not say that you should be able to borrow one hundred percent of the price of a house.

We humans actually need help controlling our impulses - nudges.

Coining a term is not the same as creating a field!

For amateur golfers, I think one of the biggest mistakes is to model their play on professionals.

We could all use more coaching.

I have an agent, John Brockman, who is an agent to many academic authors like Dan Gilbert and Steven Pinker, and he's very good at conning academics into writing books. He pulled this trick on me.

There's a reason why start-ups, especially disruptive start-ups - like Google or Amazon or Uber - are full of young people. That's because young people are not as wedded to the old fashioned ways of doing things.

People make just as many mistakes when the stakes go up, maybe more.

Even if we grade on a very generous curve, many Americans flunk when it comes to financial literacy.

In some ways, the finding that financial education doesn't provide long-term payoffs is hardly surprising. After all, how much do you remember from your high school chemistry class? Unless you use chemistry at work, you probably don't recall much about ionic bonding.

High school seniors should receive help in how to think about a student loan and how to make sure that the education bought with the loan offers good prospects for repayment.

If no estate tax is imposed, capital gains taxes can be avoided indefinitely.

Here is a guiding principle: If a business collects data on consumers electronically, it should provide them with a version of that data that is easy to download and export to another Web site.