Thirty-nine million Americans work for an employer without a payroll-deduction retirement savings plan, and many of them are saving little or nothing. With individual retirement accounts – something called the “Automatic I.R.A.” – there can be a program to make things as easy and inexpensive as possible for both employers and workers.

By using behavioral economics, a fix is possible: while giving workers the ability to opt out from these programs, automatically enroll them in a plan and increase contributions over time, and offer a sensible low-cost default investment fund. All of that makes saving easy and increases workers’ savings rates substantially.

Not perfect but something to consider further… see article below.

Fascinating article …

The key point here is not that people are irrational; it’s that this irrationality comes from a very rational place. People fail to distinguish what they know from what others know because it is often impossible to draw sharp boundaries between what knowledge resides in our heads and what resides elsewhere.

That individual ignorance is our natural state is a bitter pill to swallow. But if we take this medicine, it can be empowering. It can help us differentiate the questions that merit real investigation from those that invite a reactive and superficial analysis. It also can prompt us to demand expertise and nuanced analysis from our leaders, which is the only tried and true way to make effective policy.

A better understanding of how little is actually inside our own heads would serve us well.