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It is very difficult to make really big, important, life-changing decisions because we are all susceptible to a formidable array of decision biases. There are more of them than we realize, and they come to visit us more often than we like to admit.

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
Really
Realize
Biases
Make
Realizing
Array
Life
Decision
Susceptible
Like
Bigs
Formidable
Difficult
Visit
Often
Admit
Come
Changing
Important
Decisions

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...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.
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It was shocking to realize how many low-income Americans don't have savings accounts.
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that when given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat.
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For all of us, it's very hard to think about money, and because of that, we need help. In the same way that for all of us, it is hard to eat well, and we need some help. The poor have a particular challenge, which is that their life is actually much more complex - and they're much more complex cognitively.
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When we save, everybody in the household is just suffering. By having the coin in a visible way, when you scratch, you can say the person that is in charge of the making money for the family is doing the right thing.
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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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The companies that provide debt, what do you think their goal is? Is their goal for you to fully understand the cost of your debt? No. So they're basically creating these approaches to make you feel like it is incredibly cheap or just to think about the cost per day rather the cost per year or cost for a lifetime. So debt is very simple mistake.
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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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Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.
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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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The people that lend you money basically give you an answer based on the risk that they are willing to take. But just because a bank is willing to take a particular risk doesn't mean that that is the right amount for me to spend.
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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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Companies, however unintentionally, choke the motivation out of their employees.
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