Quote

We usually think of ourselves as sitting the driver's seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we made and the direction our life takes but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires-with how we want to view ourselves, than with reality.

Dan Ariely

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Dan Ariely
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 29
Economist
Pedagogue
Professor
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Desire
Ultimate
Seat
Reality
Sitting
Alas
Made
View
Drivers
Think
Usually
Seats
Thinking
Views
Desires
Life
Control
Direction
Takes
Decisions
Decision
Perception
Driver

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The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don’t see how our conflicts of interest work on us.
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The problem is that people basically dangle debt in front of us. And the cost for the poor of course is much higher than for the wealthy.
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We need to believe that we're good people, and we'll do just about anything to maintain that perception.
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But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?
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Not all debt is bad. From time to time we should get into debt when there's a good reason for that.
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In life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces.
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You can think about life as a battle between you and a doughnut shop. The doughnut shop wants you to eat another doughnut and pay the money, and you want to do it in the short term, but in the long term it's not good for you either financially or from a health perspective.
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When it comes to the mental world, when we design things like health care and retirement and stock markets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations … we could design a better world.
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If I gave you now, $10 as a gift, how happy would you be? Would you be happy, is the marginal $10, the best use of $10 you can use? Of course not. If I have you a CD, you know exactly what you are getting and you will have a value for it. So, money has lots of problems with it.
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One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.
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I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier. We're less productive as individuals. We're less productive as companies, and we're more miserable.
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