Richard H Thaler - Misbehaving- The Making of Behavioral Economics (epub)

5
California Dreamin’
Sherwin Rosen was planning to spend the summer of 1977 at Stanford and
invited me to join him out west to do some more work on the value of a life. At
some point that spring I learned that Kahneman and Tversky were planning to
spend the academic year at Stanford. After all the inspiration their work had
provided me, I could not bear the thought of leaving town just before they
arrived in September.
Over spring break I flew to California to investigate housing for the summer,
and at the same time try to finagle a way to stay around Stanford during the fall
semester. I hoped I might get to spend some time with the complete strangers
who had become my new idols. I had sent Tversky an early draft of my first
behavioral paper, which at the time carried the title “Consumer Choice: A
Theory of Economists’ Behavior,” with the implicit suggestion that only
economists behave like Econs. He had sent a short but friendly reply saying we
were clearly thinking along similar lines, but that was it. In the days before
email, it was much more difficult to initiate a long-distance conversation.
I spent a few days begging and pleading around campus for some kind of
visiting position, but after two days I had nothing. I was about to give up when I
had a conversation with the storied health economist Victor Fuchs, who was the
director of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) office, where
Sherwin and I would be working. I gave Victor my best song and dance about
the List, heuristics and biases, prospect theory, and the Israeli gods who were
about to descend on Stanford. Victor either got intrigued or just took pity on me
and offered to put me on his grant for the fall semester. After I arrived at
Stanford in July, Victor and I had frequent discussions about my deviant
thoughts, and in time he would extend his offer to pay my salary until the
following summer.