But because human being tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently .

When you get a checking account, you should have a savings account, and the number for the savings account should be one off of your checking account.

Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.

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.

I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier. We're less productive as individuals. We're less productive as companies, and we're more miserable.

When parents have college savings accounts for their kids, their kids show higher social and cognitive performance.

While we somehow understand revenge on an intuitive level between individuals, I do suspect that companies, assuming that people are rational, completely miss and underestimate the motivation people have for revenge.