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?'
Picture your brain forming new connections as you meet the challenge and learn. Keep on going.
Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.
Trying to make a feature film yourself with no money is the best film school you can do.
Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people-- people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.
The impact of giving someone a connected smartphone is no different from giving them a real computer. I look at how my kids learn and how different it is from how I learned because the impact of these things is just so huge. Sometimes I think we don't fully internalize what it is to get the power of knowledge in everyone's hand.
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