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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.