The problem with opportunity cost is that opportunity cost is divided among many, many things.

What reminds you in your environment about saving? Nothing.

Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time.

What people do is they pay the small loans first. Why? Because they enjoy making the number of loans smaller. But of course it is a very ineffective way to pay debt down.

Money is a great way to get happiness. Right? Lots of wonderful things you can do with money. The question is, are we really optimizing on that? So, if you think about getting lattes and getting cable. Which one of those is actually giving you a greater happiness, and if you have to cut on one of those, which one would you cut? So, I think thinking in terms of concrete terms would help us a great deal.

In the U.S., I think there is an ideology of not telling kids what to do. Nobody to tell you who to marry, not tell you what job to pick. You're your own person. You have the freedom to choose, including the freedom to fail in magnificent ways. And I think that's the big difference. In other countries there is basically a social norm about saving that is passed from generation to generation. In the U.S. there isn't.

The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don’t see how our conflicts of interest work on us.