It was always assumed I would be a professor. I grew up thinking it.

If there was one ubiquitous recommendation about marriage it was this: "Don't go to bed angry."

When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

It's clear that policymakers and economists are going to be interested in the measurement of well-being primarily as it correlates with health; they also want to know whether researchers can validate subjective responses with physiological indices.

One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.

However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.