Robert H. Frank > Quotes

“the average number of legs in any human population is slightly less than two. So most people actually do have “more legs than average.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“In short both the things we feel we need and the things available for us to buy depend largely—beyond some point, almost entirely—on the things that others choose to buy.”
― Robert H. Frank, Luxury Fever

“As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“Paul Samuelson once said, “Never underestimate the willingness of a man to believe flattering things about himself.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“Concerns about relative position are a hard fact of human nature. No biologist is surprised that they loom so large in human psychology, since relative position was always by far the best predictor of reproductive success. People who didn’t care how well they were doing in relative terms would have been ill-equipped for the competitive environments in which we evolved. Few parents, on reflection, would want their children to be stripped of positional concerns completely.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“The nudge movement spawned by Thaler and Sunstein has been spectacularly successful around the globe. A 2017 review in the Economist described how policy makers were beginning to embrace insights from behavioral science: In 2009 Barack Obama appointed Mr Sunstein as head of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The following year Mr Thaler advised Britain’s government when it established BIT, which quickly became known as the “nudge unit”. If BIT did not save the government at least ten times its running cost (£500,000 a year), it was to be shut down after two years. Not only did BIT stay open, saving about 20 times its running cost, but it marked the start of a global trend. Now many governments are turning to nudges to save money and do better. In 2014 the White House opened the Social and Behavioural Sciences Team. A report that year by Mark Whitehead of Aberystwyth University counted 51 countries in which “centrally directed policy initiatives” were influenced by behavioural sciences. Nonprofit organisations such as Ideas42, set up in 2008 at Harvard University, help run dozens of nudge-style trials and programmes around the world. In 2015 the World Bank set up a group that is now applying behavioural sciences in 52 poor countries. The UN is turning to nudging to help hit the “sustainable development goals”, a list of targets it has set for 2030.32”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“In this view of the problem, regulations that limit exposure to ionizing radiation are not really contrary to the will of those affected by them. Dworkin and others are arguing, in effect, that with the wisdom of hindsight, people would often resent not having been prevented from behaving in self-destructive ways when they were younger. Regulators who respect Mill’s plea must still decide whose will deserves greater weight—that of the current self or that of the future self? To rule in favor of the future self is to limit the current self’s freedom of action, yes. But failure to restrict the current self ignores the future self’s well-considered wish to be protected against being harmed by his current self’s myopic choices.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“If tax remedies are so advantageous, why would they provoke the ire of voters? Here I will suggest that voters generally, and prosperous voters in particular, suffer from what I call the mother of all cognitive illusions: they believe that having to pay higher taxes would make it more difficult to buy what they want. Like many illusory beliefs, this one may strike most people as self-evidently true. And yet, as I will explain, it is completely baseless.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“In one large sample of women, for instance, the annual probability of divorce among those whose weddings cost more than $20,000 was more than three times that of those whose weddings cost between $5,000 and $10,000.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence. Me? I study natural stupidity.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“Concerns about relative position also appear to affect labor force participation by much more than traditional economic factors. The economists David Neumark and Andrew Postlewaite, for example, investigated the labor force status of three thousand pairs of full sisters, one of whom in each pair did not work outside the home. Their aim was to discover what determined whether the other sister in each pair would seek paid employment. None of the usual economic suspects mattered much—not the local unemployment, vacancy, and wage rates, not the other sister’s education and experience. A single variable in their study explained far more of the variance in labor force participation rates than any other: a woman whose sister’s husband earned more than her own husband was 16 to 25 percent more likely than others to seek paid employment.43 As the essayist H. L. Mencken observed, “A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“They like the tax because they believe, correctly, that it will stimulate much needed savings and investment. But it’s an even better policy instrument than they think.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“The psychologists Matthew Baldwin and Joris Lammers have shown, for example, that temporal framing can dramatically affect how liberals and conservatives evaluate different environmental policy options.18 Their work starts with the observation that conservatives tend to focus on the past, while liberals are more likely to focus on the future. As an exaggerated, but informative, characterization of this difference might put it, conservatives think that because the present is worse than the past, we need to restore earlier policies, whereas liberals think that because the future will be worse than the present, we need to change existing policies.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“Working fifty hours a week instead of forty would significantly reduce a worker’s leisure time in relative terms, but would also increase that worker’s income in relative terms. From any individual’s perspective, this would count as a net gain, since survey evidence reveals relative leisure to be less important than relative income.41 But others could of course follow suit, causing that advantage to prove ephemeral. Further support for this interpretation comes from survey evidence regarding the preferences of professional workers, who are not subject to the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The economists Renée Landers, James Rebitzer, and Lowell Taylor asked associates in large law firms which they would prefer: their current situation, or an otherwise similar one with an across-the-board cut of 10 percent in both hours and pay.42 By an overwhelming margin, respondents chose the latter. But they were not willing to choose that option unless their colleagues also did so.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“As Warren Buffett once said, “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“Before Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren went into politics, she and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, coauthored a book in which they asked why most one-earner couples could live comfortably within their budgets in the 1950s, yet the two-earner couples that had become the norm by the 1990s often struggled to make ends meet.9 Their answer was that the second paycheck went largely to fuel a bidding war for houses in better school districts.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“In one experiment, subjects who were asked to imagine having been exposed to a rare fatal disease—there was a 1 in 1,000 chance they had caught it—were willing to pay only $2,000 for the only available dose of the antidote.19 The same subjects said that, under identical conditions, they would have to be paid 250 times as much to induce them to voluntarily expose themselves to the disease if there was no available antidote. This asymmetry is striking, since in both cases, people would be buying a one-in-a-thousand reduction in their likelihood of death.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“Homo economicus would cheat only if he stood to benefit by enough and if the odds of being caught were sufficiently low. So the mere fact that he does not have a reputation for being a cheat tells us only that he’s been prudent.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“As most prosperous people would themselves be quick to concede, they have everything anybody might reasonably be said to need. If higher taxes pose any threat, it would be to make it more difficult for them to buy life’s special extras. But “special” is an inescapably relative concept. To be special means to stand out in some way from what is expected. And almost without exception, special things are in limited supply. There are only so many penthouse apartments with sweeping views of Central Park, for instance. To get one, a wealthy person must outbid peers who also want it. The outcomes of such bidding contests depend almost exclusively on relative purchasing power. And since relative purchasing power is completely unaffected when the wealthy all pay higher taxes, the same penthouses end up in the same hands as before.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“A 2018 meta-analysis of sixty-four earlier studies involving more than five thousand subjects confirms that students learn more effectively if they are asked to explain a concept to themselves than if it is presented to them in other ways. The included studies compared learning outcomes from prompted self-explanation to those produced by a variety of other instructional approaches, including lectures by instructors, solving problems, studying worked problems, and studying text.17”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“the effects of a decline in any one person’s after-tax income are dramatically different from those of an across-the-board decline. If you alone experience an income decline, you’re less able to buy what you want. But when everyone’s income declines simultaneously, relative purchasing power is unaffected. And it’s relative purchasing power that determines who gets things that are in short supply.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“*Hong Kong’s maximum tax (the “standard rate”) has normally been 15 percent, effectively capping the marginal rate at high income levels (in exchange for no personal exemptions).”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“So even when luck has only a minor influence on performance, the most talented and hardworking of all contestants will usually be outdone by a rival who is almost as talented and hardworking but also considerably luckier.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“More important, such events share a second feature, one that is absent from an increase in taxes: they reduce our own incomes while leaving others’ incomes unaffected. Higher taxes, in contrast, reduce all incomes in tandem. This difference holds the key to understanding the mother of all cognitive illusions.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“The Music Lab findings suggest that many songs (or books or movies) that go on to become hits owe much of their success to the fact that the first people to review them just happened to like them.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

“Cartoons are data. If people find them funny, that tells us something about the world.”
― Robert H. Frank

“The other side of that coin, of course, is that our strongest motive for altering our choices will also be that others like us are doing so.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“When both males and females were considered as a single group, the impact of having a roommate classified as a frequent or occasional precollege drinker was to reduce a student’s end-of-year GPA by more than a tenth of a point on a four-point scale. But the effect was dramatically larger for males than for females. Relative to males whose roommates were nondrinkers, those whose roommates were frequent precollege drinkers had end-of-year GPAs that were 0.28 lower; for those whose roommates were occasional drinkers, the corresponding deficit was almost as great, 0.26 lower. These effects are comparable to the effect of a student’s own high school GPA being lower by half a point, or to having scored fifty points lower on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.27 By far the most dramatic impact observed in this study was for males who were themselves frequent precollege drinkers and were randomly assigned to a roommate who was also a frequent precollege drinker. Relative to the overall sample GPA, these males had end-of-year GPAs that were almost a full point lower.28”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

“CEO compensation at large companies grew sixfold between 1980 and 2003, roughly the same as the market-cap growth of these businesses.”
― Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy