One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.

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.

But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?

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.

If you think of people as making decisions actively, every time we think about the cup of coffee, we say, "How much will I enjoy the cup of coffee, what else could I not do in the future because I buy this cup of coffee?

Interesting thing that is happening in American society is that people are starting to talk about money. I don't know how you feel about this, but for a long time, nobody was talking about money. It was a secret. And it's kind of very interesting because we do lots of stuff to portray to people about how much money we have, the clothes we wear and the cars we have and the house - they all kind of depict to other people, signal how much money we make, but we don't talk about it specifically.

The experiments show quite clearly that, as you resist more and more temptation, you're actually more and more likely to fail.