“Freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them.”

“We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.”

“If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.”

“You know, the standard state for people is 'mildly pleasant.' Negative emotions are quite rare, and extremely positive emotions are rare. But people are mildly pleased most of the time, they're mildly tired a lot of the time, and they wish they were somewhere else a substantial part of the time - but mostly they're mildly pleased.”

“It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.”

“People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.”

“It's clear that policymakers and economists are going to be interested in the measurement of well-being primarily as it correlates with health they also want to know whether researchers can validate subjective responses with physiological indices. ”

“Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don't know the odds. It's a big difference.”

“True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.”

“By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.”

“I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.”