Who to nudge next

‘For ten years or so, my name was “that jerk”,’ says Professor Richard Thaler, president of the American Economics Association and principal architect of the behavioural economics movement. ‘But that was a promotion. Before, I was “Who’s he?”’

Thaler has had to get used to putting noses out of joint. His academic research, initially controversial, sparked an entirely new branch of economics, and now governments are adopting his theories across the globe. But he met plenty of resistance along the way. ‘You get your ideas straight when you argue with those whose views are most different from yours,’ he says.

Struggling with his doctorate in the early 1970s, Thaler faced an economics discipline focused on mathematical models that assumed people always behave rationally, driven entirely by market incentives. He fought back, insisting economics should resist too much maths, opening up instead to other social sciences and acknowledging emotion, bias and whim.

‘It’s tough to change people’s minds about their breakfast cereal, let alone economic models they’ve worked on all their lives,’ says Thaler, reflecting on an career that’s taken him from undergraduate studies in Ohio to Stanford and Cornell.