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.

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

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.

Economics is (now) about emotion and psychology.

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.

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.

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