“I once asked a roomful of economists — all of whom were gathered to discuss household personal finance — to answer, on the fly, the consumption-smoothing question for a hypothetical forty-year-old. I gave them the pertinent information and watched their faces. They weren’t happy. They knew they were about to produce a very wrong answer. Right then and there, they seemed to realize that even financially literate people like themselves couldn’t make proper financial decisions via introspection.” (p. 6)

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