Future self-continuity: how conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice
With life expectancy dramatically increasing throughout much of the world, people have to make choices with a longer future in mind than they ever had to before. Yet, many indicators suggest that undersaving for the long term often occurs: in America, for instance, many individuals will not be able to maintain their preretirement standard of living in retirement. Previous research has tried to understand problems with intertemporal choice by focusing on the ways in which people treat present and future rewards. In this paper, the author reviews a burgeoning body of theoretical and empirical work that takes a different viewpoint, one that focuses on how perceptions of the self over time can dramatically affect decision making. Specifically, when the future self shares similarities with the present self, when it is viewed in vivid and realistic terms, and when it is seen in a positive light, people are more willing to make choices today that may benefit them at some point in the years to come.Keywords: future self-continuity, behavioral economics, intertemporal choice, temporal discounting, retirement saving
Pretty cool. Also, possibly, reassurance that I'm not being overly cautious or conservative, just unusually so.
Note here a known tendency to want to have the cake and eat it too
as far as typical liberal-conservative tradeoffs go.
(And, more, generally, as elegance-effectiveness tradeoffs go? Fast way-Right way?)
It might be worth being more sensitive to problems of this description, and possibly creating or fining tools to deal with them.
todo think about tradeoff-style problems and what tools you have for them
(Draw the curve? Figure what would constitute curve-pushing? Find a wedge (possibly nonlinear) to occupy, invariant of the curve?)
todo lookup nonlinear wedges.
those sound pretty cool, and useful for payoff matrices.