Some Personal GOATS

A List of Six

I have just finished a book tour in the UK, focused on my new book on Manipulation, and several people asked me this question: Which scholars have most influenced you? I am not sure that the answers are of general interest, but just in case, here is a list. I restrict myself to people whom I have been lucky enough to know well. I list them in chronological order, in terms of when I first got to know them:

1. Richard Posner. When I started teaching at the University of Chicago in the early 1980s, I knew very little about economics. I had studied literature in college. Posner was one of Chicago’s giants. He seemed ten feet tall. He seemed to know everything. Even so, he was generous enough to attend to young faculty members (a lot). He read our papers in draft, and he often told us they were terrible - but still, he was interested! (The great Posner was interested!) He taught me some economics, as much as he could, and even better, he taught me to focus insistently on this question: What are the actual consequences of law and legal reform? His form of consequentialism was a terrific jolt. Posner launched thousands of ships, and though I disagreed with him on countless things, I like to think that I am one of them.

2. John Rawls. Rawls was a hero of mine as an undergraduate, even though I understood so little. I got to know him over the years, and while our interactions were not so frequent, they left an indelible mark (not least because he helped me to understand the idea of deliberative democracy). He was unfailingly generous and kind. In one of my very first conversations with him, I made, in an animated way, what I thought was a serious objection to something he said. Of course I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about. Rawls offered, softly and quietly, a devastating response to my objection, and then looked at me and ended this way: “But I take your point.” I cherished the rare occasions when he displayed a slight edge. At a conference on political liberalism, he was under intense (unfair) attack, and at the break, he took a little walk with me, where he said, “Sometimes I wonder whether it is even worth trying to be clear.” He once said about a distinguished law professor: “He is extraordinary, and so quick, but he could not be a philosopher. He lacks one thing: Curiosity.” Rawls was endlessly curious (and humble, and full of grace).

3. Jon Elster. At Chicago, Elster was like a sunburst, or (better) dozens of sunbursts. I have never had a better colleague. Ulysses and the Sirens, sour grapes, methodological individualism, functional explanations, dissonance reduction, wishful thinking - he was, and is, a source of fundamental insights, for me as for countless others. And there was something else: Unfailingly high standards and a kind of stringency. I asked him once about a famous and distinguished philosopher, whom I was inclined to admire, and Elster responded: “Is it analysis, or it is rhetoric?” Oh. (It was rhetoric.) Elster’s work on obscurantism is, well, awesome: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0392192112444984

4. Edna Ullmann-Margalit. Back in the late 1980s, there was a superb conference at Chicago on norms, with Elster, Russell Hardin, Ullmann-Margalit, and many others. I gave a paper on norms in interpretation, which was embarrassingly off-topic. The conference was about social norms, a different matter. But Ullmann-Margalit’s terrific work on picking and choosing seemed profoundly important to me, and our discussions at the conference ultimately led to our paper, Second-Order Decisions, and to two other papers, and other planned projects, which we could not complete (she died in 2010). I learned a ton from her about invisible hand explanations, presumptions, big decisions, norms and revisions of norms, not wanting to know, trust, and considerateness (she did defining work on all of these). Long after her death, we have a coauthored book coming in 2026: https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/decisions-and-social-norms-9781035397464.html

5. Richard Thaler. Oh gosh. I first heard Thaler’s name in a locker room after a game of squash, when my friend Steve Shavell asked me about a paper I was writing (under Elster’s influence) about precommitment strategies and endogenous preferences, and how they bear on law. Shavell responded: “That sounds like a terrible paper. But there’s a guy at Cornell working on similar topics, and you should read him. His name is Thaylor.” I couldn’t find any “Thaylor,” but eventually I found Thaler, and his work seemed to me like a key, unlocking a stubborn door. Early in his career, he was all over what are now defining ideas: the endowment effect, planners and doers, mental accounting, precommitment strategies, loss aversion. Nowadays, I talk to him all the time, and he keeps providing me with keys, helping with small problems and big ones. He’s also hilariously funny. He’s one of my best friends. He makes me smarter, and he makes me better, and makes me smile-r. He insists that the 2021 edition of Nudge is the final edition, and I almost forgive him. (It would be fun to write a book about Thaler.)

6. Daniel Kahneman. Has anyone ever had as many ideas as Kahneman? (Not in my acquaintance. Not close.) Has anyone been as careful as Kahneman? (Same parenthetical.) Has anyone ever loved being wrong as much as Kahneman did? (He loved being wrong, because then he could get it right.) Has anyone been as lovable as Kahneman, and as (let’s say) challenging to work with? (Maybe not.) I discovered Kahneman’s work through Thaler’s, and when I did, more sunbursts. Heuristics and biases (wow). Prospect theory (wow again). Kahneman called me out of the blue one day, in the late 1990s, with his inimitable voice, and I couldn’t help blurting out, “You’re my hero.” He said that he wanted to work with me on punitive damages, and we embarked on a multiyear research project on outrage, punishment, noise, coherence, anchoring, and scaling without a modulus. Can you get the equivalent of twenty years of education by being a coauthor? I am here to say that you can. More than a decade after that research project, Kahneman (and Olivier Sibony, a fabulous person and coauthor) asked me to join their book on Noise, which turned out to be Kahneman’s last major work. He was in late 80s, and he hadn’t lost a step. He was as critical of himself as ever (and almost as critical of his coauthors). Producing the book was (let’s say) an obstacle course, and also a joy. No one in my life has been GOAT-er than Danny.