Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

Why tie to gold? Why not 1982 Bordeaux?

I'm all for empowerment and education, but the empirical evidence is that it doesn't work. That's why I say make it easy.

When should we nudge and when should we shove, I think, it's a political judgment. Obviously in some situations we need shoves, we need laws. Fraud is against the law, murder is against the law, drunk-driving is against the law. We don't need just nudges.

I think the people who've been the most overconfident in our business in the last decade have been the people that called themselves risk managers.

Retirement savings is probably behavioral economists' greatest success story. It is a prototypical behavioral-economics problem because saving for retirement is cognitively hard - figuring out how much to save - and requires self-control.

There's a second component of a good savings plan, which is something that a colleague of mine called Schlomo Benartzi and I developed many years ago, that we call "save more tomorrow."