Words matter. These are the best Robert J. Shiller Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There’s so much disagreement about investing, and it’s because nobody really knows.
Oppression thrives on distance – on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.
I didn’t vote for Trump. So we’ve got him. Let’s hope for the best. He might do something good.
Hesitation is often like procrastination. One may have vague doubts and feel a need to mull things over; meanwhile, other issues intrude on thought, and no decision is taken. Ask people why they procrastinate, and you probably won’t get a crisp answer.
Money management has been a profession involving a lot of fakery – people saying they can beat the market, and they really can’t.
Housing traditionally is not viewed as a great investment. It takes maintenance; it depreciates. It goes out of style. All of those are problems. And there’s technical progress in housing. So, new ones are better. So, why was it considered an investment? That was a fad.
This is the paradox of thrift: belt-tightening causes people to lose their jobs, because other people are not buying what they produce, so their debt burden rises rather than falls.
Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.
That’s the world we live in: when it comes to economics, people have emotions; it’s not like chemistry or physics.
Yes, horoscopes still persist in popular newspapers, but they are there only for the severely scientifically challenged, or for entertainment; the idea that the stars determine our fate has lost all intellectual currency.
Any time you have change, it costs somebody. Somebody is a loser.
We should not be focusing on quick solutions. The really important concern for policymakers everywhere is to prevent disasters – that is, the outlier events that matter the most.
Finance is not merely about making money. It’s about achieving our deep goals and protecting the fruits of our labor. It’s about stewardship and, therefore, about achieving the good society.
People who stay unemployed for a long time start to look like damaged goods, and they don’t get such good offers. Also, they’re not learning anything. Most learning is on-the-job learning.
The future is always coming up with surprises for us, and the best way to insulate yourself from these surprises is to diversify.
A moderate tax on robots, even a temporary tax that merely slows the adoption of disruptive technology, seems a natural component of a policy to address rising inequality. Revenue could be targeted toward wage insurance, to help people replaced by new technology make the transition to a different career.
Somehow, talking to young students brings you back to reality – it should, anyway.
The problem is that once we focus on economic policy, much that is not science comes into play. Politics becomes involved, and political posturing is amply rewarded by public attention.
Trump does magic. Maybe it will be black magic sometime, but he’s an amazing phenomenon.
As a child, I was fascinated by any branch of physical or biological science. Even today, I find great excitement in discovering the complexity and variability of the world we live in, getting a glimpse into the deeper reality that we mostly ignore in our everyday human activities.
I often tend to think that things are not what they seem.
The desperately poor may accept handouts, because they feel they have to. For those who consider themselves at least middle class, however, anything that smacks of a handout is not desired. Instead, they want their economic power back.
I think we do need to try to not just rely on the central bank to, in its wisdom, adjust interest rates, but allow for people to avoid being exposed to inflation risk.
Diversify, because that helps reduce risk. And you can diversify outside the United States. Some people would never invest in Europe – I think that’s a mistake.
When valuation confidence falls, it means that stock markets are perceived as overpriced.
One should have a wide variety of assets in one’s portfolio. And oil, by the way, is a particularly important asset to have in one’s portfolio because we need it, and the economy thrives on it.
Some of the best theorizing comes after collecting data because then you become aware of another reality.
People might just decide, ‘Yeah, I’ll diversify my portfolio. I’ll live in a rental.’ That is a very sensible thing for many people to do.
In my first few years of elementary school at the Edison School in Detroit, I did poorly. I remember worrying that I might fail the second grade and be held back.
A lot of people aren’t saving enough. And incidentally, people are living longer now, and health care is improving. You might end up retired for 30 years – people are not really preparing for that.
