I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?

The real issue is, how much goodwill do you invest in the work? And goodwill is not something that we can buy with money. It's very hard to buy goodwill with money.

Kids don't care what party they have, right? They want cake and they want to run around. Nothing else matters. But in this escalation, all the kids want parties like their friends. So, if all the friends have an amazing, expensive party, they all want the same thing. If we all got to scale down as a coordinated effort, all the kids would have been just as happy.

We don't really want a huge house, but we want the house to be slightly bigger than our neighbors, and a car that is bigger than our neighbor's, and they're going on vacation that's slightly more expensive, and this escalation happens that things got out of hand.

None of us always make the best financial decisions.

Scaling down individually is very hard. Imagine that if you go to a place where everybody is dressed nicely, and you are the only one who doesn't dress nicely. Everybody goes on vacations to a great place and you go to the Jersey shore. It's very hard to do these things without an organized mechanism, but it looks to me like there might be some organized mechanisms.

When we save, everybody in the household is just suffering. By having the coin in a visible way, when you scratch, you can say the person that is in charge of the making money for the family is doing the right thing.