We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things — our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we’re not going to do better.

Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.

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.

I don't know what exactly the translation is but when we do consume something now, something else has to give at some point.

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 can think about how we reduce the pain in paying. So, for example, credit cards are wonderful mechanisms to reduce the pain of paying. If you go to a restaurant and you are paying cash, you would feel much worse than if you were paying with credit card. Why? You know the price, there's no surprise, but if you're paying cash, you feel a bit more guilt.

With money we really fool ourselves. We are our biggest enemies with money and there are some things we can do about it. Automatic deductions are a wonderful thing. But ideally, you should wait until the end of the month, you can see how much extra money you had, and you should put that in your savings account. We don't do that too well, and if we did that, we would never save. So, what we do, is we take money out of our pocket into the saving account at the beginning of the month, take it outside of our control and as a consequence, we spend less and we save more.