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.

My mantra is if you want to help people accomplish some goal, make it easy.

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

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.

I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.

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.

One simple step firms can take is make sure that people that are getting paid a lot of money, say more than a million or two, that a big chunk of that money is deferred. That's going to change the whole ballgame.