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.

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

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

Economics is (now) about emotion and psychology.

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.

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.

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.