It was shocking to realize how many low-income Americans don't have savings accounts.

We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.

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.

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.

When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it - meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.

When people are in severe pain, there's an expression, you're a "pain person," and what that means is that nothing else matters.

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