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.
Interpretation
Academia often requires long-term effort without immediate rewards.
Richard Thaler’s quote highlights the delayed gratification inherent in academic work. It emphasizes that the process of conducting research and publishing findings is lengthy, often taking years before any recognition or impact is realized, creating a challenging environment for those seeking quick rewards in their efforts.
In practice
Referencing this quote during a seminar about the challenges of academic publishing.
The ability of businesses to monitor our behavior is already a fact of life, and it isn't going away. Of course we must protect our privacy rights. But if we're smart, we'll also use the data that is being collected to improve our own lives.
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.
When an economist says the evidence is "mixed," he or she means that theory says one thing and data says the opposite.
In the 1940s, economics started getting highly mathematical. It was basically because economists weren't smart enough to write down models of real behavior that they started writing down models of highly rational behavior - and they kind of forgot about humans.
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.
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?'
Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of The Dinner Party is to break this cycle.
I don't have a college degree, and my father didn't have a college degree, so when my son, Zachary, graduated from college, I said, 'My boy's got learnin'!'
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
Your teacher might be a child who takes you by the hand and asks you a question that you hadn't considered before, and your answer to the child is your answer to yourself.
Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.
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