It's on You summary

While the climate crisis is a prime example, it’s far from the only one. So in the next couple sections we’re going to quickly look at a few more impactful areas of life – including obesity, retirement, and health care – and how they’ve been reshaped, at the system level, into problems that individuals are expected to solve on their own.

In the US, obesity is an epidemic, affecting around 40 percent of the adult population – and that’s just adults. As with climate change, the dominant story once again puts the onus on personal discipline. It states that people simply need to eat less and move more.

For much of the twentieth century, workers relied on what we call defined-benefit pensions, which guaranteed a stable income in old age. These plans pooled risk and placed responsibility on employers. It worked pretty well for a while, but over time, that system has been dismantled. Companies downsized and moved toward defined-contribution plans. This was a major change as it shifted the burden of saving, investing, and managing risk away from them and onto individuals.

Behavioral economics and nudging stepped in to help steer people with practices like making automatic enrollment into certain plans a default choice. While these policies can help, on average, people are losing around 40 percent of their savings prior to retirement. Most, of course, don’t realize this; nudging is being used to influence employees who are being asked to make complex decisions that are beyond their comprehension.

Okay, now that we’ve looked at a number of the issues, let’s zoom out and look at things from a more macro perspective, to better understand how we got here.

Ever since the US recovered from the Great Depression, a strong narrative has taken hold about how the world is supposed to work. The authors refer to it as the Big Myth. To put it very succinctly, influential economists convinced the nation’s leadership that markets are inherently efficient, individuals are responsible, and government is the problem. 

What would it actually look like to design systems that work with human behavior instead of against it?

While we’ve pointed out a lot of its failings so far, behavioral economics could be used for good – especially given new technologies. Speed limitations could be placed in cars to prevent reckless driving, much in the way ignition locks currently stop drunk drivers. These approaches don’t try to “fix” behavior – they acknowledge the issue and change the system itself.

To put it simply, people are naturally resistant to change. Even when that change would clearly make things better, it can be a hard sell. And the reason has a lot to do with how our minds work.

Humans are actually great at adapting. But this is a double-edged sword. On one side we can quickly adjust to whatever world we’re living in, but on the other side, it means we grow accustomed to systems that are inefficient, unfair, or even harmful. For us, it becomes the new normal and any disruption to it can feel risky or uncomfortable, even if the new system would be a huge improvement.