Robert J. Shiller Quotations

My very first publication was an estimator - this was a statistical procedure - a kind of invention. My father got a patent and started a business; it wasn't successful, but maybe I have some of him in me.

Liberalism downplays certain of our moral senses: loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

I have argued that we need livelihood insurance, which would protect people against the risk of seeing their skills and expertise no longer needed. Such insurance could be offered by the private sector.

News media stimulate bubbles, since stories about them boost their audience.

In the longer run and for wide-reaching issues, more creative solutions tend to come from imaginative interdisciplinary collaboration.

Physicists have a bias to aspire to be "seers" like Einstein rather than "craftspeople" who do simple and practical research. I have seen that in economics departments. The same must be true to some extent in other departments.

Life's meaning heavily benefits from lifelong bonds.

Marketers know that if people you respect - perhaps laughably including entertainers and athletes - say they like a product, you're more likely to buy.

Each profession has its own toolkit.

Consider our difficulties avoiding junk food and overspending. Such addictions were carefully planned-for by professional marketing teams.

There is more uncertainty than usual about job futures because computers are replacing more and more human intelligence, and globalization is proceeding at an accelerating pace.

My clinical psychologist wife of 40 years has always had a close intellectual influence on me. When I was beginning to talk openly in the economics profession about irrationality in decision-making, I received a lot of criticism. Ginny would support my views and remind me that a whole other profession - psychology - studies people's irrational sides.

As I write in 2012 we certainly do not believe that it is over yet, and the worst may be yet to come. Efforts by governments to solve the underlying problems responsible for the crisis have still not gotten very far, and the 'stress tests' that governments have used to encourage optimism about our financial institutions were of questionable thoroughness.

Money management has been a profession involving a lot of fakery - people saying they can beat the market, and they really can't.

A major boom in real stock prices in the U.S. after 'Black Tuesday' brought them halfway back to 1929 levels by 1930. This was followed by a second crash, another boom from 1932 to 1937, and a third crash. Speculative bubbles do not end like a short story, novel, or play. There is no final denouement that brings all the strands of a narrative into an impressive final conclusion. In the real world, we never know when the story is over.

The good news is that, at least in economics, I've seen movement away from its overemphasis on mathematical models of purely rational behavior to a more eclectic and commonsense approach: research that is, among other things, more respectful of insights from psychology.

It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble.

Some of the best theorizing comes after collecting data because then you become aware of another reality.

Somehow, talking to young students brings you back to reality - it should, anyway.

In the short run and for decisions unlikely to have broad impact, it may be more cost effective to use just one expert.

I am worried that the collapse of home prices might turn out to be the most severe since the Great Depression.

Stock prices are likely to be among the prices that are relatively vulnerable to purely social movements because there is no accepted theory by which to understand the worth of stocks....investors have no model or at best a very incomplete model of behavior of prices, dividend, or earnings, of speculative assets.

Economics is (now) about emotion and psychology.

Can a controlled experiment explain why people like Kewpie dolls in one year, Beanie Babies in another, and American Girl dolls this year? Yet social scientists are asked to answer analogous questions. We economists and perhaps psychologists shouldn't overreact to the derision. That is, we shouldn't try to overlay a false sense of precision on our admittedly squooshy work.

My father, Benjamin Shiller, told me not to believe in authorities or celebrities - that society tends to imagine them as superhuman. It's good advice. People are snowed by celebrities all the time. In academia people have this idea of achieving stardom - publishing in the best journals, being at the best university, writing on the hot topic everyone else is writing about. But that's what my father told me not to do. He taught me that you have to pursue things that sound right to you.

The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.

Economists who adhere to rational-expectations models of the world will never admit it, but a lot of what happens in markets is driven by pure stupidity - or, rather, inattention, misinformation about fundamentals, and an exaggerated focus on currently circulating stories.