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
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
On the lower at the end timescale, europe attacks out of office osha welfare programs. I think very few individuals accurately and that tax incentives that they are facing. I think this savers credit, the motivation behind not to give lowincome families and incentives to save his wellintentioned, but if you cant sit down as someone with a phd in economics cant sit down and figure it out in 10 minutes, it is too complicated. I think the fact we have so many different tax favored ways to save makes it complicated. So you know, am i better off in saving, not just the retirement system. If i am an employee and my employer offers a purchase plan, a 401 k plan and a Health Savings account and have a limited budget for how much i can say is, its complicated to figure out where should i put that money, plus we have 529 plans. Weve got lots of tax favor ways to save. I think some simplification and some consistency across these different plans would be helpful. The wire for a three b. Plan has
Challenging. And if you could visualize an educational system where a child is continuously challenged if they cant achieve a level theyre shunted off to a different challenge or theyre asked to do it over again. You now have education thats tailored to the individual. And i am absolutely convinced that that is going to create a class of smarter people. Our children are going to be smarter than we are and their children will be smarter than they are. And is that a good thing . Yeah, i think so. Smarter people do everything better. Ask we could solve some and we could solve some really important problems like eliminating war. So ive gone on a little bit from the spectrum issue. Host and finally, what kind of cell phone are you using today . Guest well, i, you know, i always have the latest cell phone you better. Guest peter. [laughter] the difficulty with cell phones today is they are really aimed at techies. And i want to have a cell phone that anticipates my needs may ask me a few que