If you're a government - or a brand - how do you get people to spend during a recession? This stimulating piece by Virginia Postrel in the Atlantic focuses on our inherently schizo natures:
Behavioral economists, whose work combines the techniques and ideas of economics and psychology, have long focused on what Thomas Schelling, the 2005 Nobel laureate, called the “intimate contest for self-command”—the all-too-familiar inner conflict between the would-be disciplined self who wants to get up early, exercise, and lose weight and the pleasure-seeking self who prefers to sleep in, watch TV, and eat chocolate. These two selves, Schelling noted, don’t necessarily exist at the same time. The disciplined self imagines future virtues, while the pleasure-seeking self succumbs to present urges. “If the person could make the final decision about that action at the earlier time, precluding a later change in mind,” Schelling wrote in 1983, “he would make a different choice from what he knows will be his choice on that later occasion.”
