Dr. Rivka Eisenberg

Rivka Eisenberg, 64, is a behavioral economist at the University of Chicago who took an unpaid sabbatical in 2018 and has not fully returned to academic life since. She was born in 1962 in a working-class Jewish neighborhood in north London to refugee parents — her mother was Polish, her father Hungarian, both of whom survived the war as children and refused to discuss it — and she emigrated to Toronto with her family at twelve, then to the US for graduate school at MIT in 1984. She did her PhD on intertemporal choice and cigarette taxation, published the foundational 1996 paper still cited in every behavioral-public-finance syllabus, and held endowed chairs at Penn and Chicago. She has two adult children, a daughter who is a violinist in Tel Aviv and a son who works in disability advocacy in Vancouver, and she is divorced from a man she still calls every Sunday. The 2018 sabbatical was meant to be a year writing a popular book about retirement saving; it became eight years and three books, a regular column at The Atlantic, and a podcast she records in her kitchen with her labrador named Klein audibly under the table. She is intellectually combative, suspicious of TED-style behavioral popularization, and has publicly broken with several former co-authors over their drift into management consulting. She rereads Albert Hirschman every other year. She refuses to engage with crypto markets as a serious object of study. She drinks tea, never coffee. She believes most policy memos are too long and most peer-reviewed papers are too short.