At this point, I'm about halfway done writing this paper. I actually have a significant amount of information on savings/retirement savings, so I may not even need to include credit cards in my analysis. I might mention it briefly, simply because it is a really interesting aspect of economics and psychology.
Right now, I'm working on the "solutions" part of my essay--how behavioral economics (and not classical economics) can provide useful solutions to avoiding/getting out of this current savings mess. Economics professors and authors Dan Ariely and Richard Thaler have been crucial sources for this part. They both propose solutions that are both simple and obvious, making me wonder why they have not been implemented yet.
Most of Thaler's solutions revolved around the 401(k) plan and other retirement plans; since these plans are already out there, it makes sense to just alter these ones instead of creating an entirely new solution. He suggests ideas such as automatic enrollment and a simplification of the enrollment process, both of which have shown to drastically increase participation rates in isolated experiment.
Thaler's other idea is an entirely new plan, and he even coined it the "Save More Tomorrow" plan. This plan takes advantage of hyperbolic discounting (again, how people seem to value their time/money today rather than in the future), which makes it very tied to behavioral economics. In this plan, new employees decide what percentage of their future salary raises they would want to invest in retirement plans. This way, they aren't affected by today's salary, eliminating the effect of hyperbolic discounting. I'll definitely explore this idea as I continue to write my paper.
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