I watched a Ted Talk by Dan Airely about behavioral economics. He starts off by saying that in the US, we spend between seven and eight hundred million dollars a year on what’s called “financial literacy.”There was recently a study that looked at all the research ever to be conducted on financial literacy. They found that when you tell people, you teach them financial literacy, they learn and they remember. But people don’t execute. The improvement is about three or four percent immediately after the course, and then it goes down. And at the end of the day, the improvement is about 0.1 percent — not zero, but as humanly close to zero as possible. He is basically trying to make the point that giving information to people is just not a good recipe to change behavior. Social science makes the argument that the basic insight is that if we want to change behavior, we have to change the environment. The right way is not to change people, it’s to change the environment. In order to have behavioral change first we have to reduce friction. And the second thing is we want to load as much fuel as possible, to give it the most amount of motivation. This made me think of my senior project and my essential question. I started focusing on business in behavioral economics, while not taking into account the consumer side of things. This Ted Talk was a great way to bridge the two.