Daniel Kahneman

Below an income of ... $60,000 a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. ... Money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.

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.

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.

People's mood is really determined primarily by their genetic make-up and personality, and in the second place by their immediate context, and only in the third and fourth place by worries and concerns and other things like that.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.

People should be conscious of the large contribution made by anything that gets people together easily in the reduction of loneliness and emotional well-being.

Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they're very likely to be wrong.

There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.

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

Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.

Most of the time, we think fast. And most of the time we're really expert at what we're doing, and most of the time, what we do is right.

Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast.

There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.

My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision making - from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy.

All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.

If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.