A company invites their employees to sign up for a plan where every time they get a raise, some part of that raise goes to increasing their contribution rate to the 401k plan. In the first company we convinced to adopt this plan, saving rates tripled.

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.

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.

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.

A company invites their employees to sign up for a plan where every time they get a raise, some part of that raise goes to increasing their contribution rate to the 401k plan. In the first company we convinced to adopt this plan, saving rates tripled.

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.

Most economists, including me, agree that longevity insurance would make sense for a lot of people.