This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I am your host Tom Church and I'm joined as always by the Libertarian Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Lawrence A Tisch Professor of Law at NYU, and he's a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Richard, I think we've got a little bit of a different show today because I'd like to hear more

about Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and author of Thinking Fast and Slow

who died last week. And I'll admit something to you Richard

I'm a bit of an econ sympathizer meaning when I start my analysis you know I go from the

point of view of a rational actors working according to utility functions,

ordering things in an ordinal fashion so I can make the math work out.

In other words, I'm, you know, I like Becker, I like Coast, that's my mindset.

Now is it right to say that that's not how Kahneman saw things?

Oh, it certainly is correct to say that, and if you look at what the claims are both by him and more importantly

claims that are even more extravagant by many of his supporters and defenders including Richard

Thaler and Class Sunstein.

What he has done is known as a complete revolution

in the way in which we ought to think about human behavior,

which shows that the anomalies of classical liberalism

turn out to be the dominant

tropes when you try to put the overall system together.

I was exposed to this very early on, and let me tell you

the two strands that came together. The first one was

...