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

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."

The same with the mortgage brokers that were selling people mortgages they couldn't afford. We shouldn't pay them on each mortgage they write. They should have what they call "skin in the game," where they've got to reimburse us if the guy who sold the mortgage defaults.

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.

Every American worker should be able to save for retirement via payroll deductions.

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.

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.