Not doing what the technocrats wanted to do . I will have to confess i wasnt prepared to answer that question when i walked into the room. I knew who you were talking about and i have read the articles more than once that you refer to. I guess i would say. Take a swing at it. [laughter] [laughter] how about if i answer slightly different question which is i mean i guess my view is behavior economics is, what it does is it tries to expand the scope of understanding of what is driving behavior and what are the tools you could use to influence behavior . And what you want to take a light handed approach or a heavyhanded approach that is a matter of personal preference so if we were painting all behavioral economist with the same brush i think you are going to find people along an entire spectrum. That i would be happy to go back and look at that article and send you a response. I would like to have that. Mr. Chairman i have to leave but i want to mention this is an excellent panel. I have
60s are contributing at the contribution limits. Thank you mr. Chairman. Please go ahead. If i could ask a question. The behavioral economics have shown a couple of successes into some of us are concerned about it contains some who rather than providing the much to help people navigate different decisionmaking would provide a fullfledged private citizens. It seems that some operate on the notion that academic and government technocrats are infallible and they tell how they should leave their wives and allocated to the resources. The former oversoul in the Environment Administration along with a harvard the harvard professor who pretend about the behavior of informed Financial Services regulations. One of the proposed schemes is to nationalize on the credit cards to get card issues the government technocrats and use the funds for the Financial Education and other ways to help the private citizens. What do you feel about such a proposal and dvd that the government technocrats needed to e
To show them the best web site, how to show them the best information from their friends is constantly trying to assess what makes the best Information Service for you. At the same time, universities for the last 20 years as weve moved more and more social Exchange Online have been moving to think about this as a social environment. This is the public square. So there are plenty of universities, plenty of researchers like myself who have come up with, you know, over the years come up with Research Projects that have to do with studying peoples experiences online. And in both those cases theres as much interest in figuring out what it is that people do as there is in people figuring out how to navigate those spaces. So theres both wanting to know what people do and people wanting to figure out the best way to find information. Theres two different threads of research that go on. Host how sophisticated is it getting . Guest um, what part . Host the research part. Guest you know, we have,
So personal savings can only go so far for these individuals. At the same time though Social Security treat single women far less well than it does married women so they are not getting much help from that end of things either. Thats one reason i and others have proposed reforming Social Security to provide a flat universal benefit for all retirees regardless of income participation. On top of that individual would save in accounts provided through their employer or of not available through the government. This approach is qualitatively similar to that of the u. K. Australia canada and new zealand. In the u. S. Context you can affordably reduce the elderly poverty rate from todays level of roughly 9 to approximately 0 while increasing the Retirement Savings among the middle and high highincome workers who truly should be saving more. The lesson in all this is that there is no simple problem and no simple solution but a small if more complex problem is better in the retirement crisi cri
At seven pm eastern. Coming up, the Senate Finance Committee Hears testimony. Tax and retirement policy analysts speak about the gap between how much americans are saving and savings needed. This runs two hours. The finance committee will come to order. When you take a look at the state of Retirement Savings in america, america, it is clear that something is out of whack. The american taxpayer delivers 140 140 billion each year to subsidize retirement accounts, but still millions of americans nearing retirement have little or nothing saved. The fact is, the, the incentives for saving and the american tax code just are not getting to those in need them most. A pair of new studies spells out the issue. The Federal Reserve found last month that an employee with middle of the tax savings has about 59,000 set aside for retirement, yet according to the Government Accountability office some 9,000 taxpayers have ira accounts worth more than 5 million. It would take several lifetimes of work fo