It would be much more consumer friendly for them to beep you when you swipe your card that says, uh-oh you're over your limit, are you sure you want to use that?

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.

In a typical 401k plan, when you first become eligible you get a big pile of forms and you're told, fill out these forms if you want to join. Tell us how much amount you've saved and how you want to invest the money. In, under automatic enrollment you get that same pile of forms but the top page says, if you don't fill out these forms, we're going to enroll you anyway and we're going to enroll you at this saving rate and in these investments.

If people just put away what's left at the end of the month, that's a recipe for failure.

So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.

It turns out, that men, when they're taking care of their business, they're not fully attending to the task at hand, but, I'm sure there's an evolutionary explanation for this, if you give them a target, they will aim.

It would be much more consumer friendly for them to beep you when you swipe your card that says, uh-oh you're over your limit, are you sure you want to use that?