Really looking forward to a weeklong series starting today on NPR focusing on Debt. I think along with energy, the issue of the amount of debt we have both as a nation, and as a nation of individuals is going to compound with the future of energy problems.

In the first episodethere is an excellent interview with Tim Harford who brings up some very interesting things, including:

• The problem of people saving less is not that we are less virtuous, its that back when people saved more, there was less credit available.
• The brain is hardwired to make irrational decisions in the short term. He talked of an economics experiment where people were offered a snack: Chocolate or Fruit. People chose fruit if you told them the snack was for a week from today, or chocolate if it were immediate. When the experimenter came back and offered that a person could change their mind, they would switch to chocolate. I think the brain works this same way for many many things, and it gets in the way of "solutions" that depend on people "doing the right thing".

There was also an interesting pitch to increase savings by letting people commit future raises to their 401K.

Worth checking out.