None of us always make the best financial decisions.
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.
A very simple bad decision is to get into debt. And that is very expensive.
Linking financial element to energy consumption I think has a huge role if you think about a display instrument that could teach us about what we are using, how much it costs us, how much it is saving, and therefore change our decisions.
I don't want to say that the poor are inherently cognitively diminished, but at the end of the day of making difficult, tough decisions, it's very hard to have the energy to think about things with the right mindset.
We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions.
The idea that you will make the right decision every time is very unlikely.
We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.
One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.