Nobel winner's lonely, savvy and funny route to the Prize

THERE is no shortage of people who think mainstream economics is a wrongheaded endeavour overdue for overthrow. Their insurrectionist noises grew louder after the financial crisis of 2008, but they've been around for much longer than that, and have been heard pretty much constantly since the modern mainstream was formalised with the Bank of Sweden's 1969 creation of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

This year's winner of that prize was once one of those people - sort of. In the late 1970s, Richard Thaler thought most of his fellow economists deeply misunderstood how actual people make actual economic decisions, and his renegade ideas risked derailing his career. But they didn't. Thaler's was a lonely struggle for a while, but it evolved into a savvy, calculating operation. And it was successful - not in overthrowing the mainstream, but in changing it.

This relatively cautious approach has occasioned some sneering. As a then-colleague at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, John Cochrane, put it in 2015 after the publication of Thaler's memoir, Misbehaving: Really, now, complaining about being ignored and mistreated is a bit unseemly for a Distinguished Service professor with a multiple-group low-teaching appointment at the very University of Chicago he derides, partner in an asset management company running US$3 billion, recipient of numerous awards including AEA vice-president, and so on.