#but so many articles now are written with very obvious biases in favor of the ship

[userautumn]

I know and understand that Buddie gets engagement but the Buddie dicksucking the press has been doing is really, umm... it's really something!

[themoneybuff-blog]

The psychology of passive barriers

A surprising thing happens to people in their forties. After working hard, buying a house, and starting a family, they suddenly realize that they'd better start being responsible with their money. They begin reading financial books and trying to learn how to set up a nest egg for themselves and their families. It's a natural part of growing older. If you ask these people in their forties what their biggest life worry, the answer often is, quite simply, money. They want to learn to manage their money better, and they'll tell you how important financial stability is to them. Yet the evidence shows something very different. In the table below, researchers followed employees at companies that offered financial-education seminars. Despite the obvious need to learn about their finances, only 17% of company employees attended. This is a common phenomenon.

As Laura Levine of the Jump$tart Coalition told me and I paraphrase Bob doesn't want to attend his 401(k) seminar because he's afraid he'll see his neighbor thereand that would be equivalent to admitting he didn't know about money for all those years. They also don't like to attend personal-finance events because they don't like to feel bad about themselves. But of those who did attend the employer event, something even more surprising happens. Of the people who did not have a 401(k), 100% planned to enroll in their company's 401(k) offering after the seminar. Yet only 14% actually did. Of those who already had a 401(k), 28% planned to increase their participation rate. 47% planned to change their fund selection (most likely because they learned they had picked the default money-market plan, which was earning them virtually nothing). But less than half of people actually made the change. This is the kind of data that drives economists and engineers crazy, because it clearly shows that people are not rational. Yes, we should max out our 401(k) employer match, but billions of dollars are left on the table each year because we don't. Yes, we should start eating healthy and exercising more, but we don't. Why not? Why wouldn't we do something that's objectively good for us? Barriers are one of the implicit reasons you can't achieve your goals. These barriers can be psychological or profoundly physical, like something as simple as not having a pen when you need to fill out a form. But the underlying factor is that they are breathtakingly simple and if I pointed them out to you about someone else, you would be sickened by how seemingly obvious they are to overcome. It's easy to dismiss these barriers are trivial, and say, Oh, that's so dumb! when you realize that not having an envelope nearby could cost someone over $3,000. But it's true. And by the end of this article, you'll be able to identify at least three barriers in your own life whether you want to or not.

Why People Don't Participate in Their 401(k)s If you're like me, whenever you hear that one of your co-workers doesn't participate in their 401(k) especially if there's an employer match you scratch your head in confusion. Even though this is free money, many people still don't participate. Journalists will cite intangibles like laziness and personal responsibility, suggesting that people are getting less responsible with their money over time. Hardly. It turns out that getting people to enroll in their 401(k) is just plain hard. Using simple psychological techniques, however, we can dramatically increase the number of people who participate in their company's retirement plan. One technique, automatic enrollment, automatically establishes a retirement plan and contribution. You can opt out at any time, but you're enrolled by default. Here's how it affects 401(k) enrollment. (AE = automatic enrollment.)

From 40% participation to nearly 100% in one example. Astonishing. Today, J.D. has given me the opportunity to talk about one of the ways to drive behavioral change when it comes to your money. I call them barriers. While I do this, I'm going to ask you for a favor. You'll see examples of people who lost thousands of dollars because they wouldn't spend one hour reading a form. It's easy to call these people lazy and there's certainly an element of that but disdainfully calling someone lazy doesn't explain the whole story. Getting people to change their behavior is extraordinarily hard even if it will save them thousands of dollars or save their lives. If it were easy, you would have a perfect financial situation: You'd have no debt, your asset allocation would be ideal and rebalanced annually, and you'd have a long-term outlook without worrying about the current economic crisis. You'd be at your college weight, with washboard abs and tight legs. You'd have a clean garage. But you don't. None of us are perfect. That's why understanding barriers is so important to changing your own behavior. Just Spend Less Than You Earn! There's something especially annoying about comments on personal-finance blogs. On nearly every major blog post I ever made, someone left a comment that goes like this: Ugh, not another money tip. All you need to know is: spend less than you earn. Actually, it's not that simple. If that were the case, as I pointed out above, nobody would be in debt, overweight, or have relationship problems of any kind. Simply knowing a high-level fact doesn't make it useful. I studied persuasion and social influence in college and grad school, for example, but I still get persuaded all of the time. These commenters make the common mistake of assuming that people are rational actors, meaning they behave as a computer model would predict. We know this is simply untrue: Books like Freakonomics and Judgment in Managerial Decision Making are great places to get an overview of our cognitive biases and psychological motivations. For example, we say we want to be in shape, but we don't really want to go to the gym. (J.D. is a prime example of this, and he'll be the first to admit it.) We believe we're not affected by advertising, but we're driving a Mercedes or using Tupperware or wearing Calvin Klein jeans. There are dramatic differences in what we say versus what we do. Often, the reason is so simple that we can't believe it would affect us. I call these barriers, and I've written about them before: Last weekend, I went home to visit my family. While I was there, I asked my mom if she would make me some food, so like any Indian mom would, she cooked me two weeks' worth. I came back home skipping like a little girl. Now here's where it gets interesting. When I got back to my place, I took the food out of the brown grocery bag and put the clear plastic bags on the counter. I was about to put the bags in the fridge but I realized something astonishing:

if I got hungry, I'd probably go to the fridge, see the plastic bags, and realize that I'd have to (1) open them up and then I'd have to (2) open the Tupperware to (3) finally get to the food. And the truth was, I just wouldn't do it. The clear plastic bags were enough of a barrier to ignore the fresh-cooked Indian food for some crackers!! Obviously, once I realized this, I tore the bags apart like a voracious wolf and have provided myself delicious sustenance for the past week. I think the source of 95%+ of barriers to success isourselves. It's not our lack of resources (money, education, etc). It's not our competition. It's usually just what's in our own heads. Barriers are more than just excuses they're the things that make us not get anything done. And not only do we allow them to exist around us, we encourage them. There are active barriers and passive barriers, but the result is still the same: We don't achieve what we want to. I believe there are two kinds of barriers. Active barriers are physical things like the plastic wrap on my food, or someone telling me that it'll never work, etc. These are hard to identify, but easy to fix. I usually just make them go away.Passive barriers are things that don't exist, so they make your job harder. A trivial example is not having a stapler at your desk; imagine how many times a day that gets frustrating. For me, these are harder to identify and also harder to fix. I might rearrange my room to be more productive, or get myself a better pen to write with. Today, I want to focus on passive barriers: what they are and how to overcome them. How to Destroy Passive Barriers Psychologists have been studying college students for decades to understand how to reduce unprotected sex. Among the most interesting findings, they pointed out that it would be rational for women to carry condoms with them, since often the sexual experiences they had were unplanned and these women can control the use of contraceptives. Except for one thing. When they asked college women why they didn't carry condoms with them, one young woman typified the responses: I couldn't do thatI'd seem slutty. As a result, she and others often ended up having unprotected sex because of the lack of a condom. Yes, technically they should carry condoms, just as both partners should stop, calmly go to the corner liquor store, and get protection. But often they don't. In this case, the condom was the passive barrier: Because they didn't have it nearby and conveniently available, they violated their own rule to have safe sex. Passive barriers exist everywhere. Let's look at some examples. Passive Barriers in E-mail I get emails like this all the time: Hey Ramit, what do you think of that article I sent last week? Any suggested changes? My reaction? Ugh, what is he talking about? Oh yeah, that article on savings accountsI have to dig that up and reply to him. Where is that? I'll search for it later. Marks email as unread Note: You can yell at me for not just taking the 30 seconds to find his email right then, but that's exactly the point: By not including the article in this followup email, he triggered a passive barrier of me needing to think about what he was talking about, search for it, and then decide what to reply to. The lack of the attached article is the passive barrier, and our most common response to barriers is to do nothing. Passive Barriers on Your Desk A friend of mine lost over $3000 because he didn't cash a check from his workplace, which went bankrupt a few months later. When I asked him why he didn't cash the check immediately, he looked at me and said, I didn't have an envelope handy. What other things do you delay because it's not convenient? Passive Barriers to Exercise I think back to when I've failed to hit my workout goals, and it's often the simplest of reasons. One of the most obvious barriers was my workout clothes. I had one pair of running pants, and after each workout, I would throw it in my laundry basket. When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I would think is: Oh god, I have to get up, claw through my dirty clothes, and wear those sweaty pants again. Once I identified this, I bought a second pair of workout clothes and left them by my door each day. When I woke up, I knew I could walk out of my room, find the fully prepared workout bag and clothes, and get going. Passive Barriers to Healthy Eating Too many people create passive barriers to healthy eating. You're sitting at your desk at work and you get hungry. Rather than reach for a healthy snack (because you don't have one with you a passive barrier), you go to the vending machine for a bag of Cheetos. Here's a real-life example of passive barriers preventing J.D. from eating healthy. We were in Denver together in 2013 for a conference. During a long day with no breaks, he didn't have a healthy snack with him. But he did have Hostess Sno-Balls. Bad J.D. That's not even food.

J.D. needs to remove passive barriers to healthy eating If you find yourself snacking on Cheetos (or Sno-Balls) all day at work, try this: Dont take any spare change in your pockets for the vending machine. Even if you leave quarters in your car, that walk to the parking lot is barrier enough not to do it. Give yourself an alternative. Carry a healthy snack with you, like apple slices. Remove the passive barrier to eating healthy. Applying Passive Barrier Theory to Your Own Life As we've seen, the lack of having something nearby can have profound influences on your behavior. Imagine seeing a complicated mortgage form with interest rates and calculations on over 100 pages. Sure, you should calculate all of it, but if you don't have a calculator handy, the chances of your actually doing it go down dramatically. Now, we're going to dig into areas where passive barriers are preventing you from making behavioral change sometimes without you even knowing it. Fundamentally, there are two ways to address a passive barrier. You're missing something, so you add it to achieve your goals. For example, cutting up your fruit as soon as you bring it home from the grocery store, packing your lunches all at once, or re-adding the attachment to a followup email so the recipient doesn't have to look for it again.Causing an intentional passive barrier by deliberately removing something. You put your credit card in a block of ice in the freezer to prevent overspending. (That's not addressing the cause, but it's immediately stopping the symptom.) Or you put your unhealthiest food on the other side of the house, so you have to walk to them. Or you install software like Freedom to force yourself not to browse Reddit three hours a day. Personally, here are a few passive barriers I've identified (and removed) for myself: I keep my checkbook by my desk, because for the few bills I receive in the mail, I tend to never mail them in. I keep a gym bag of clothes ready to work out. And I cut up my fruit when I bring it home from the store, because I know I'll get lazy later. Now let's see how this can work for you. Here's an exercise I'd like you to do: Get a piece of paper and a pen or open the note-taking app on your phone.Identify ten things you would do if you were perfect. Don't censor. Just write what comes to mind. And focus on actions, not outcomes. Examples: I'd work out four times per week, clean my garage by this Sunday, play with my daughter for 30 minutes each day, and check my spending once per week.Now, play the Five Whys game: Why aren't you doing each of these things? Let's play out the last step with the example of exercising regularly. Let's assume I say that I want to exercise three times per week, but I only go twice per month. Let's do the Five Whys: Why do I excercise only twice per month? Because I'm tired when I get home from work.Why? Because I get home from work at 6 p.m.Why? Because I leave late for work, so I have to put in eight hours.Why? Because I don't wake up in time for my alarm clock.Why? HmmBecause when I get in bed, I watch Netflix for a couple of hours. Here's a possible solution: Put the computer in the kitchen before you go to sleep sleep earlier come home from work at an earlier time feel more rested work out regularly. That's a gross oversimplification, but you see what I mean. Homework: Pick ten areas of your life that you want to improve. Force yourself to understand why you haven't done so already. Don't let yourself cop out: I just don't want to isn't the real reason. And once you find out the real reasons you haven't been able to check your spending, or cook dinner, or call your mom, you might be embarrassed at how simple it really was. Don't let that stop you. Passive barriers are valued in their usefulness, not in how difficult they are to identify. The Bottom Line Passive barriers are subtle factors that prevent you from changing your behavior. Unlike active barriers, passive barriers describe the lack of something, making them more challenging to identify. But once you do, you can immediately take action to change your behavior. You can apply barriers to prevent yourself from spending money, cook and eat healthier, exercise more, stay in touch with your friends and family, and virtually any other behavior. You can do this with small changes or big ones. The important factor is to take action today. A caveat: Sometimes people take this advice to mean, The reason I haven't been sticking to my workout regimen is that I don't have the best running shoes. I should really go buy those $150 shoes I've been eyeingthat will help me change my behavior. Resolving passive barriers is not a silver bullet: Although they help, you'll be ultimately responsible for changing your own behavior. Instead of buying better shoes immediately, I'd recommend setting a concrete goal Once I run consistently for 20 days in a row, I'll buy those shoes for myself before spending on barriers. Most changes can be done with a minimum of expense. J.D.'s note: This is one of my favorite guest articles in the history of Get Rich Slowly. It had a profound effect on me, my life, and my work. This piece was originally published on 17 March 2009. I'm reprinting it today to celebrate the newly-published second edition of Ramit's book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich [my review].

[the-merricatherine]

The term “one-drop rule”has its own rather curious history. It was used repeatedly in scholarly works on race relations more than a generation ago. Today, it can be found in a wide variety of publications that deal with race relations in the United States. Yet the lexical community has been either negligent or resistant about the term, for as of a very few years ago, allthe purportedly unabridged dictionaries of the English language and their updated collegiate versions did not include it. These dictionaries have begun to catch up as dictionaries and facsimiles like Wikipedia have become ubiquitous online. Even the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, which is supposedly based on historical principles, has an online version that now includes the term. The phrase currently appears in many books, magazines, and on the Internet, firmly supported by its conciseness in referring to a powerful social rule. 

African Americans have necessarily had a different experience than whites with this rule. After the Civil War and prior to the mid-1960’s, many people then called “Negroes”—at least those middle-class people who could—adopted white values about complexion and hair, and many older African Americans can still remember battling with chemical lighteners and straighteners. As iswell known, however, with the second civil rights movement, many African Americans embraced Negroid appearance as an emblem of their commitment to that battle. As will become clear, however, this sense of common interest among African Americans is far older than the recent civil rights era, for it first appeared in parts of the American colonies prior to the American Revolution and showed signs of strengthening in the young republic in the years following. Following the more radical years of the late 1960s and 1970s, the pendulum swung back. Since the 1980s African Americans and others have placed substantial value on light coloring, straight hair, and European-derived facial features, to the point where sales of skin and hair products, and even cosmetic surgery, have skyrocketed. 

For mixed-race people, individual personal struggles with the color line also have a long history. Frederick Douglass recorded his handling of its difficulties in 1848 while on his way to a Negro convention in Buffalo. After boarding a lake steamer, Douglass accepted a spontaneous invitation by his fellow passengers to give a speech. Afterwards he learned that a certain white passenger had announced his disagreement with a point made by Douglass and had declared that he would not “discuss this question with a nigger.”In response, Douglass passed word to this critic “that he was much mistaken in supposing me to be a nigger, that I was but a half negro—that my Dear Fatherwas as white as himself, and if he could not condescend to reply to negro blood, to reply to the Europeanblood.”In such instances, however, the one-drop rule itself was not in dispute; indeed at times many American blacks have actually reinforced its dominance as a social norm. 

Discerning the historical reasons underlying the one-drop rule raises important evidentiary and conceptual problems. The brief explications in this article deal with various facets of the rule in hopes that this discussion will collectively and tentatively suggest why it came into being. One crucial dimension of the one-drop rule is its uniqueness (with a single exception as will become clear). Today, many foreign observers from other parts of the Americas are so differently socialized that they find the rule nearly impossible to understand. We do indeed need to inquire why the rule developed in the United States and not elsewhere in the Caribbean and in Latin America, that is, in other colonies and later in independent nations that were all part of the overall European and African settlement of the New World after Columbus.Another important attribute of this social classification is so obvious that it has often been overlooked, though it needs only a brisk statement here. The rule applies primarily to people of mixed African-European background, and not to other patterns of so-called “racial intermixture.” It does not apply to people whose apparent heritage is confined to some combination of Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American ancestry. It applies only to Americans of entirely or partially African descent. Race in the United States has never been just about white and black. But to make the task of this essay manageable, the discussion here will attend mainly to European- and African-descended Americans—the ones on whom the one-drop rule has fallen most heavily.16A far more complex facet of the rule concerns the apparently simple matter of dating its beginnings. Here we run into serious difficulties, primarily because extant references to its existence are uncommon and appear in few widely scattered sources. Indeed this brief study depends on a mere handful of such references, and the likelihood of others having escaped the author’s attention is virtually guaranteed. Color is viewed as the most predominant physiognomic feature of racial distinction. After all, we have been using either a Portuguese/Spanish or an English designation of color—Negro/black—in connection  with  Africans  for  many  centuries.  While  differences  in  hair  and  facial  features  are recognized, they are not frequently commented upon in public in the dominant white society; skin color has been and remains the most important social marker, with the configuration of hair, nose width, lips and other features often used as secondary reinforcements. All these markers are facial, a fact that underscores the importance of sheer public appearance in social situations.  The anomalies for personal identity resulting from the one-drop rule are apparently never-ending. It has meant our having had a Miss America, Vanessa Williams, who was called “black” even though her ancestry was apparently much more European than African. The same might be said of General Colin Powell, who remains “African American” largely by his own assertion. This particular personal choice is not new: the prominent nineteenth-century abolitionist, Robert Purvis, who was born and raised in South Carolina and moved to Philadelphia. There he was often told that he was light enough to pass for white, but he continued to live as a black man in both his private and public life.19 The complexion and features of actress-model Halle Berry are such that her visually perceived race can vary greatly depending on lighting, makeup, and camera angle. The same rule has also operated with a professional golfer, Tiger Woods, who has mounted a losing personal battle to resist it. His mixed ancestry is Thai, Chinese, American Indian, Dutch, and African American. Yet in this country he has been hailed as “black”  throughout his career. Without hesitancy the US media, both white and African American, have described him consistently with such phrases as “the Great Black Hope,” “the first Black to win the U.S. Amateur,”  and “a 19-year-old who just happens to be black.” Woods has fought this designation with public objections, by checking “Asian”  on his census form, and by inventing his own term—“Cablinasian” (for Caucasian, Black, Indian and Asian). Such battles are very old. Two hundred years after their alleged long-term liaison, the numerous descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson (or possibly one of his male relatives) are today grouped in two categories both by the media and by themselves—the “black” descendants and the “white” ones.

It is also important to recognize that the rule has frequently been violated. There have been a rather small number of isolated local pockets occupied by people who were openly acknowledged to be  of  two-or  three-way  intra-mixtures. In  more  heavily  settled  areas,  sheer  reputation  has occasionally overridden the rule. The courts at many levels have treated it gingerly and with stunning inconsistency, and state statutes have variously tried to skirt it or to reinforce it with fractional exactitudes that themselves have varied greatly over time. In general, however, the law has tended increasingly either to tighten the rule or to give up trying to define it with a written definition. Nonetheless, the rule has operated socially with a power not seen in any other country, with a revealing exception in the British West Indies that will need our attention.  The  appalling  dissonances  in  this social  system  have  affected  both  blacks  and  whites. Preferences in skin color (as well as hair form) have been and remain so complex for both groups that they can only be summarized here, without more than alluding to the dimensions of gender that so strongly affect their operation. As most Americans are aware, a relatively light complexion has had positive personal and social value, especially among African Americans but also among whites. In many black families and communities, there remain personal biases in favor of lightness, a long-established, flexible set of preferences that have not been entirely destroyed by 1960s–1970s public and personal campaigns summed up by the slogan “black is beautiful.”Nor have whites entirely lost their traditional biases for a light complexion among black people and, indeed, among themselves at least among those still committed to a muted version of old-fashioned Nordicism. Less studied and commented upon is a common but far from universal negative response among AfricanAmericans to whites with very light complexions. Indeed, a great many African Americans are far more sensitive than most whites to gradations in color in all people, and out of necessity for many years they have had to deal with the social rule about race imposed by the dominant culture. For present purposes this paper will avoid these and other complications, for there is danger here of veering off into an exceedingly  swampy  field  of  idiosyncratic,  elusive,  and  highly  variable  valuations,  a  place  long populated  by  popular  magazines,  curious  social  scientists,  ambitious  advertising  agencies,  and assorted myth-and trouble-makers, as they all speculate knowingly about such weighty icons as Aunt Jemima, Lady Clairol, and “good”hair. 

All these valuations exist within a confined space of social definition. As a pasture of changing ambiguities, they are fenced in rigidly by the one-drop rule. Yet they are far from being the sole aspect of that rule’s dissonant nature. At a theoretical level, the rule unsteadily perches on a rigid and arbitrary dividing line between the social and the biological sciences. Until a century ago, almost everyone assumed that “blood”was the conveyor of physical inheritance. In this genetic age, it is almost astonishing that the term blood has moved back into scholarly discourse when the very people who use it know perfectly well that blood is not the transmitter of inherited characteristics in human or other living beings. 

Another anomaly in this concept is more ironic. The conclusions of archeology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology join in the finding that it is highly probable that all human beings are of African descent. The species Homo sapiens originated in the northeastern part of Africa, along the Great Rift Valley, with some possibility of emergence also in the southern regions of the continent. Those parts of the continent were no more the direct cradles of African Americans than of Euro-Americans or Native Americans, since only a small number of the people living in eastern and southern Africa were caught up in the Atlantic slave trade that began in the sixteenth century. Except in the very early years of the trade, almost all the forced migrants from Africa to the Americas originally came from the western portions of the African continent, a huge expanse of coastal and near-coastal regions that stretched for some three thousand miles from the Sahara desert in the north to  the  Namibian  desert  in  the  south.  Only  a  small  proportion—some  five  percent—came  from homelands onthe huge island of Madagascar and along the southeastern African coast. Yet if one goes back far enough in time, all Americans, including the first settlers from Asia whom Columbus called “Indians”and the more numerous later immigrants from Africa, Europe, and Asia, may also be accurately described as being—very distantly in time—“of African descent.” 

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https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91g761b3

[andrewdburton]

The psychology of passive barriers

A surprising thing happens to people in their forties. After working hard, buying a house, and starting a family, they suddenly realize that they'd better start being responsible with their money. They begin reading financial books and trying to learn how to set up a nest egg for themselves and their families. It's a natural part of growing older.

If you ask these people in their forties what their biggest life worry, the answer often is, quite simply, “money”. They want to learn to manage their money better, and they'll tell you how important financial stability is to them.

Yet the evidence shows something very different.

In the table below, researchers followed employees at companies that offered financial-education seminars. Despite the obvious need to learn about their finances, only 17% of company employees attended. This is a common phenomenon.

As Laura Levine of the Jump$tart Coalition told me — and I paraphrase — “Bob doesn't want to attend his 401(k) seminar because he's afraid he'll see his neighbor there…and that would be equivalent to admitting he didn't know about money for all those years.”

They also don't like to attend personal-finance events because they don't like to feel bad about themselves. But of those who did attend the employer event, something even more surprising happens.

Of the people who did not have a 401(k), 100% planned to enroll in their company's 401(k) offering after the seminar. Yet only 14% actually did.

Of those who already had a 401(k), 28% planned to increase their participation rate. 47% planned to change their fund selection (most likely because they learned they had picked the default money-market plan, which was earning them virtually nothing). But less than half of people actually made the change.

This is the kind of data that drives economists and engineers crazy, because it clearly shows that people are not rational. Yes, we should max out our 401(k) employer match, but billions of dollars are left on the table each year because we don't. Yes, we should start eating healthy and exercising more, but we don't.

Why not? Why wouldn't we do something that's objectively good for us?

Barriers are one of the implicit reasons you can't achieve your goals. These barriers can be psychological or profoundly physical, like something as simple as not having a pen when you need to fill out a form. But the underlying factor is that they are breathtakingly simple — and if I pointed them out to you about someone else, you would be sickened by how seemingly obvious they are to overcome.

It's easy to dismiss these barriers are trivial, and say, “Oh, that's so dumb!” when you realize that not having an envelope nearby could cost someone over $3,000. But it's true. And by the end of this article, you'll be able to identify at least three barriers in your own life — whether you want to or not.

Why People Don't Participate in Their 401(k)s

If you're like me, whenever you hear that one of your co-workers doesn't participate in their 401(k) — especially if there's an employer match — you scratch your head in confusion.

Even though this is free money, many people still don't participate. Journalists will cite intangibles like laziness and personal responsibility, suggesting that people are getting less responsible with their money over time. Hardly.

It turns out that getting people to enroll in their 401(k) is just plain hard. Using simple psychological techniques, however, we can dramatically increase the number of people who participate in their company's retirement plan. One technique, automatic enrollment, automatically establishes a retirement plan and contribution. You can opt out at any time, but you're enrolled by default.

Here's how it affects 401(k) enrollment. (“AE” = automatic enrollment.)

From 40% participation to nearly 100% in one example. Astonishing.

Today, J.D. has given me the opportunity to talk about one of the ways to drive behavioral change when it comes to your money. I call them barriers.

While I do this, I'm going to ask you for a favor. You'll see examples of people who lost thousands of dollars because they wouldn't spend one hour reading a form. It's easy to call these people “lazy” — and there's certainly an element of that — but disdainfully calling someone lazy doesn't explain the whole story. Getting people to change their behavior is extraordinarily hard — even if it will save them thousands of dollars or save their lives.

If it were easy, you would have a perfect financial situation: You'd have no debt, your asset allocation would be ideal and rebalanced annually, and you'd have a long-term outlook without worrying about the current economic crisis. You'd be at your college weight, with washboard abs and tight legs. You'd have a clean garage.

But you don't.

None of us are perfect. That's why understanding barriers is so important to changing your own behavior.

“Just Spend Less Than You Earn!”

There's something especially annoying about comments on personal-finance blogs. On nearly every major blog post I ever made, someone left a comment that goes like this: “Ugh, not another money tip. All you need to know is: spend less than you earn.”

Actually, it's not that simple. If that were the case, as I pointed out above, nobody would be in debt, overweight, or have relationship problems of any kind. Simply knowing a high-level fact doesn't make it useful. I studied persuasion and social influence in college and grad school, for example, but I still get persuaded all of the time.

These commenters make the common mistake of assuming that people are rational actors, meaning they behave as a computer model would predict. We know this is simply untrue: Books like Freakonomics and Judgment in Managerial Decision Making are great places to get an overview of our cognitive biases and psychological motivations.

For example, we say we want to be in shape, but we don't really want to go to the gym. (J.D. is a prime example of this, and he'll be the first to admit it.) We believe we're not affected by advertising, but we're driving a Mercedes or using Tupperware or wearing Calvin Klein jeans.

There are dramatic differences in what we say versus what we do. Often, the reason is so simple that we can't believe it would affect us. I call these barriers, and I've written about them before:

Last weekend, I went home to visit my family. While I was there, I asked my mom if she would make me some food, so like any Indian mom would, she cooked me two weeks' worth. I came back home skipping like a little girl.

Now here's where it gets interesting. When I got back to my place, I took the food out of the brown grocery bag and put the clear plastic bags on the counter. I was about to put the bags in the fridge but I realized something astonishing:

…if I got hungry, I'd probably go to the fridge, see the plastic bags, and realize that I'd have to (1) open them up and then I'd have to (2) open the Tupperware to (3) finally get to the food. And the truth was, I just wouldn't do it. The clear plastic bags were enough of a barrier to ignore the fresh-cooked Indian food for some crackers!!

Obviously, once I realized this, I tore the bags apart like a voracious wolf and have provided myself delicious sustenance for the past week.

I think the source of 95%+ of barriers to success is…ourselves. It's not our lack of resources (money, education, etc). It's not our competition. It's usually just what's in our own heads. Barriers are more than just excuses — they're the things that make us not get anything done. And not only do we allow them to exist around us, we encourage them. There are active barriers and passive barriers, but the result is still the same: We don't achieve what we want to.

I believe there are two kinds of barriers.

Active barriers are physical things like the plastic wrap on my food, or someone telling me that it'll never work, etc. These are hard to identify, but easy to fix. I usually just make them go away.

Passive barriers are things that don't exist, so they make your job harder. A trivial example is not having a stapler at your desk; imagine how many times a day that gets frustrating. For me, these are harder to identify and also harder to fix. I might rearrange my room to be more productive, or get myself a better pen to write with.

Today, I want to focus on passive barriers: what they are and how to overcome them.

How to Destroy Passive Barriers

Psychologists have been studying college students for decades to understand how to reduce unprotected sex. Among the most interesting findings, they pointed out that it would be rational for women to carry condoms with them, since often the sexual experiences they had were unplanned and these women can control the use of contraceptives.

Except for one thing.

When they asked college women why they didn't carry condoms with them, one young woman typified the responses: “I couldn't do that…I'd seem slutty.” As a result, she and others often ended up having unprotected sex because of the lack of a condom. Yes, technically they should carry condoms, just as both partners should stop, calmly go to the corner liquor store, and get protection. But often they don't.

In this case, the condom was the passive barrier: Because they didn't have it nearby and conveniently available, they violated their own rule to have safe sex.

Passive barriers exist everywhere. Let's look at some examples.

Passive Barriers in E-mail

I get emails like this all the time:

“Hey Ramit, what do you think of that article I sent last week? Any suggested changes?”

My reaction? “Ugh, what is he talking about? Oh yeah, that article on savings accounts…I have to dig that up and reply to him. Where is that? I'll search for it later. Marks email as unread”

Note: You can yell at me for not just taking the 30 seconds to find his email right then, but that's exactly the point: By not including the article in this followup email, he triggered a passive barrier of me needing to think about what he was talking about, search for it, and then decide what to reply to. The lack of the attached article is the passive barrier, and our most common response to barriers is to do nothing.

Passive Barriers on Your Desk

A friend of mine lost over $3000 because he didn't cash a check from his workplace, which went bankrupt a few months later. When I asked him why he didn't cash the check immediately, he looked at me and said, “I didn't have an envelope handy.” What other things do you delay because it's not convenient?

Passive Barriers to Exercise

I think back to when I've failed to hit my workout goals, and it's often the simplest of reasons. One of the most obvious barriers was my workout clothes. I had one pair of running pants, and after each workout, I would throw it in my laundry basket. When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I would think is: “Oh god, I have to get up, claw through my dirty clothes, and wear those sweaty pants again.”

Once I identified this, I bought a second pair of workout clothes and left them by my door each day. When I woke up, I knew I could walk out of my room, find the fully prepared workout bag and clothes, and get going.

Passive Barriers to Healthy Eating

Too many people create passive barriers to healthy eating. You're sitting at your desk at work and you get hungry. Rather than reach for a healthy snack (because you don't have one with you — a passive barrier), you go to the vending machine for a bag of Cheetos.

Here's a real-life example of passive barriers preventing J.D. from eating healthy. We were in Denver together in 2013 for a conference. During a long day with no breaks, he didn't have a healthy snack with him. But he did have Hostess Sno-Balls. Bad J.D. That's not even food.

J.D. needs to remove passive barriers to healthy eating

If you find yourself snacking on Cheetos (or Sno-Balls) all day at work, try this: Don’t take any spare change in your pockets for the vending machine. Even if you leave quarters in your car, that walk to the parking lot is barrier enough not to do it. Give yourself an alternative. Carry a healthy snack with you, like apple slices. Remove the passive barrier to eating healthy.

Applying Passive Barrier Theory to Your Own Life

As we've seen, the lack of having something nearby can have profound influences on your behavior. Imagine seeing a complicated mortgage form with interest rates and calculations on over 100 pages. Sure, you should calculate all of it, but if you don't have a calculator handy, the chances of your actually doing it go down dramatically.

Now, we're going to dig into areas where passive barriers are preventing you from making behavioral change — sometimes without you even knowing it.

Fundamentally, there are two ways to address a passive barrier.

You're missing something, so you add it to achieve your goals. For example, cutting up your fruit as soon as you bring it home from the grocery store, packing your lunches all at once, or re-adding the attachment to a followup email so the recipient doesn't have to look for it again.

Causing an intentional passive barrier by deliberately removing something. You put your credit card in a block of ice in the freezer to prevent overspending. (That's not addressing the cause, but it's immediately stopping the symptom.) Or you put your unhealthiest food on the other side of the house, so you have to walk to them. Or you install software like Freedom to force yourself not to browse Reddit three hours a day.

Personally, here are a few passive barriers I've identified (and removed) for myself: I keep my checkbook by my desk, because for the few bills I receive in the mail, I tend to never mail them in. I keep a gym bag of clothes ready to work out. And I cut up my fruit when I bring it home from the store, because I know I'll get lazy later.

Now let's see how this can work for you. Here's an exercise I'd like you to do:

Get a piece of paper and a pen — or open the note-taking app on your phone.

Identify ten things you would do if you were perfect. Don't censor. Just write what comes to mind. And focus on actions, not outcomes. Examples: “I'd work out four times per week, clean my garage by this Sunday, play with my daughter for 30 minutes each day, and check my spending once per week.”

Now, play the “Five Whys” game: Why aren't you doing each of these things?

Let's play out the last step with the example of exercising regularly. Let's assume I say that I want to exercise three times per week, but I only go twice per month. Let's do the Five Whys:

Why do I excercise only twice per month? Because I'm tired when I get home from work.

Why? Because I get home from work at 6 p.m.

Why? Because I leave late for work, so I have to put in eight hours.

Why? Because I don't wake up in time for my alarm clock.

Why? Hmm…Because when I get in bed, I watch Netflix for a couple of hours.

Here's a possible solution: Put the computer in the kitchen before you go to sleep → sleep earlier → come home from work at an earlier time → feel more rested → work out regularly.

That's a gross oversimplification, but you see what I mean.

Homework: Pick ten areas of your life that you want to improve. Force yourself to understand why you haven't done so already. Don't let yourself cop out: “I just don't want to” isn't the real reason. And once you find out the real reasons you haven't been able to check your spending, or cook dinner, or call your mom, you might be embarrassed at how simple it really was. Don't let that stop you. Passive barriers are valued in their usefulness, not in how difficult they are to identify.

The Bottom Line

Passive barriers are subtle factors that prevent you from changing your behavior. Unlike “active” barriers, passive barriers describe the lack of something, making them more challenging to identify. But once you do, you can immediately take action to change your behavior.

You can apply barriers to prevent yourself from spending money, cook and eat healthier, exercise more, stay in touch with your friends and family, and virtually any other behavior. You can do this with small changes or big ones. The important factor is to take action today.

A caveat: Sometimes people take this advice to mean, “The reason I haven't been sticking to my workout regimen is that I don't have the best running shoes. I should really go buy those $150 shoes I've been eyeing…that will help me change my behavior.”

Resolving passive barriers is not a silver bullet: Although they help, you'll be ultimately responsible for changing your own behavior. Instead of buying better shoes immediately, I'd recommend setting a concrete goal — “Once I run consistently for 20 days in a row, I'll buy those shoes for myself” — before spending on barriers. Most changes can be done with a minimum of expense.

J.D.'s note: This is one of my favorite guest articles in the history of Get Rich Slowly. It had a profound effect on me, my life, and my work. This piece was originally published on 17 March 2009. I'm reprinting it today to celebrate the newly-published second edition of Ramit's book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich [my review].

The post The psychology of passive barriers appeared first on Get Rich Slowly.

from Finance https://www.getrichslowly.org/passive-barriers/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[benrleeusa]

[Ilya Somin] Kavanaugh and Executive Power - the Good, the Bad, and the Overblown

Much of the debate over Judge Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court focuses on his view of executive power. But the discussion here actually encompasses four separate issues: the question of when a sitting president can be investigated and tried for possible violations of criminal and civil law, judicial deference to executive branch agencies' interpretations of law, judicial deference on national security issues, and the theory of the "unitary executive." It is important to address each of these issues separately, because Kavanaugh's positions have very different implications for them. In my view, concern on the first issue is overblown, and Kavanaugh is actually likely to help constrain executive overreach on the second. On the other hand, there is good reason to worry about his record on national security and the unitary executive.

I. The Overblown.

Many Democrats fear that Kavanaugh might cast votes in favor of neutering the Mueller investigation of Donald Trump's possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign, and investigations of other types of wrongdoing by Trump and his associates. It is indeed true that in a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article, Kavanaugh argued that Congress should pass a statute shielding the president from investigation and prosecution until after he has left office, because "we should not burden a sitting President with civil suits, criminal investigations, or criminal prosecutions." But as, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman and Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution explain, liberal fears are likely misplaced. And neither of them, to put it mildly, are fans of Trump. The fact that Kavanaugh argued that a congressional statute would be needed to shield the president from investigation (and possibly even prosecution) suggests that he does not believe that the Constitution forbids such investigations in and of itself. Unless and until Congress enacts the type of statute Kavanaugh advocates (which seems unlikely to happen anytime soon), he would likely vote to allow Mueller to continue his investigation, and the same for other investigations into wrongdoing by Trump.

For what it is worth, I do not agree that the sort of sweeping immunity statute Kavanaugh advocates is a good idea. There is a solid case for postponing investigations into petty illegality by the president. If, for example, evidence indicates that the president smoked a marijuana joint or committed some minor violation of tax law, there may be good reason to avoid burdening him with investigation and prosecution until he leaves office. The situation is very different in cases where he may have committed a serious violation of the law, especially one that undermines constitutional constraints on government power, or threatens national security. I am not convinced that it is safe to rely solely on impeachment as the sole remedy for such wrongdoing, until the president leaves office. But, be that as it may, this is a disagreement about policy, not about the dictates of the Constitution.

Kavanaugh's support for unitary executive theory (discussed more fully below) could potentially lead him to conclude that Mueller's appointment as special counsel is unconstitutional. But, for reasons Wittes explains, that is unlikely, because Mueller's authority is constrained in ways that fit what Kavanaugh himself has advocated in the past. Moreover, as prominent conservative lawyer George Conway (ironically, also known for being the husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway) has explained, the Mueller investigation is constitutional even under a very rigorous application of unitary executive theory, because Mueller is subject to control and removal by his superiors in the Justice Department. The question of the legality of Mueller's investigation may never reach the Supreme Court. But if it does, I think there is little reason to think Kavanaugh would vote to immunize Trump from further investigation.

II. The Good.

On the issue of Chevron deference, Kavanaugh's skepticism of judicial deference to executive agencies' interpretation of law might very well help constrain abuses of executive power. The 1984 Chevron decision states that courts must defer to agency interpretations of federal law in most cases where the law is ambiguous, and the agency's view of its meaning is "reasonable," which in practice is often a very low standard. In a 2016 Harvard Law Review article, Kavanaugh argued that, "[i] many ways, Chevron is nothing more than a judicially orchestrated shift of power from Congress to the Executive Branch" and that it encourages the executive to play fast and loose with the law because its "inherent aggressiveness is amped up significantly" by the expectation of judicial deference. He fears that "executive branch agencies often think they can take a particular action unless it is clearly forbidden." For reasons discussed here (in analyzing Justice Neil Gorsuch's similar views), I largely agree.

Kavanaugh's concerns about Chevron echo those recently expressed by Justice Anthony Kennedy; so his elevation to the Court may not change the balance on this issue much. Chevron deference has also begun to attract skepticism from many judges across the political spectrum. Cutting back on judicial deference to agencies has obvious appeal to conservative and libertarian critics of the administrative state. But it should also appeal to liberals who fear that Republican agency heads are likely to be ideologically biased, and bend the law to their own preferences. See, for example, this praise of Kavanaugh's critique of Chevron by prominent liberal legal scholar Jed Shugerman. Cutting back Chevron could also help strengthen the rule of law in ways that should appeal to people with a wide range of political preferences. As Neil Gorsuch put it in a well-know opinion written when he was a lower court judge, judicial deference to executive agencies allows the latter to "reverse its current view 180 degrees anytime based merely on the shift of political winds and still prevail [in court]." Surely there's something wrong with that.

It unlikely that Kavanaugh's confirmation would lead to the complete overruling of Chevron. But it would likely continue - and perhaps accelerate - the trend towards tighter, and less deferential judicial review of agency decisions.

III. The Seriously Problematic.

Kavanaugh's record on judicial deference to the executive on national security issues is far less reassuring. As legal scholar Stephen Vladeck explains in the Washington Post, he has extended broad deference in several cases dealing with the rights of Guantanamo detainees. In that respect, Vladeck emphasizes, he is very different from Justice Kennedy, who was much more willing to enforce legal limits on executive national security policy. Kavanaugh's deferential attitude may also come through in his concurring opinion to the DC Circuit's denial of en banc review of a decision upholding the NSA's collection of a vast amount of "bulk data" from American electronic cell phone records. While some of Kavanaugh's reasoning was based on direct application of Supreme Court precedent, he also emphasized that "[t]he Government's program for bulk collection of telephony metadata serves a critically important special need – preventing terrorist attacks on the United States.... In my view, that critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program." This argument implies that other national security justifications might well also qualify as "special needs" that justify searches that would otherwise violate the Fourth Amendment.

Wide-ranging judicial deference on national security cases is not justified by the text of the Constitution. Unlike some other constitutions, ours has very little in the way of "emergency powers" provisions that diminish or cancel out constitutional rights in time of war or other national security threats. The major exception is the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which has not been invoked in any of our current conflicts. The standard expertise-based arguments for special judicial deference are seriously flawed, and have led to severe abuses in the past.

The other area where Kavanaugh's views on executive power are potentially troubling is his support of "unitary executive" theory - the idea that the Constitution requires nearly all executive power to be concentrated in the hands of the president. I used to support this view myself. But I now believe I was wrong to do so. Unitary executive theory was sound in a period where the scope of executive power was confined to its comparatively narrow original bounds. But, for reasons I summarized here, it is both dangerous and contrary to the original meaning to concentrate so much authority in one person's hands in an era when the executive wields vastly greater power than was granted to the federal government in the original Constitution.

Judge Kavanaugh's views on national security deference and the unitary executive are well within the mainstream of modern legal thought. He is no wild-eyed radical, or partisan apologist for Trump. His controversial opinions on national security issues actually came in cases challenging Obama administration policies.

But the fact that these ideas are mainstream is not as comforting as it may seem. Historically, most of the worst Supreme Court decisions came about precisely because mainstream legal thought went wrong on some important issue - not because the justices who voted for them were fools or extremists. A misguided "mainstream" is far more dangerous than the occasional fluky extremist ruling. When it comes to national security and the unitary executive, Kavanaugh is an especially thoughtful and articulate defender of positions on which mainstream conservative jurisprudence has gone wrong.

The fact that he may be wrong about these two questions doesn't necessarily mean he would be an undesirable Supreme Court justice,overall. Kavanaugh's flaws here should be weighed against his excellent record on many other issues, such as his strong support for freedom of speech. At this point in our history, neither Republicans nor Democrats are likely to give us an ideal Supreme Court justice who gets every important issue right. Very far from it, in fact. We could easily do far worse than Kavanaugh, who is a very solid choice in many ways. Still, Judge Kavanaugh's positions on executive power are an important aspect of his overall record, and they deserve serious scrutiny.

[sherristockman]

Trump Sets Off Media Firestorm With Creation of Vaccine Safety Review Panel Dr. Mercola By Dr. Mercola Only nine days away from his swearing-in as president, Donald Trump held his first press conference since the election and announced that the pharmaceutical industry was "getting away with murder" and that during his presidency he would do something about high drug prices with more competitive bidding for federal contracts. His remarks sent drug stocks into a sudden nosedive.1 As noted by Brad Loncar, manager of Loncar Cancer Immunotherapy ETF: "When somebody that high-profile says something that negative, people do not want to invest in it." According to Reuters:2 "Trump's campaign platform included allowing the Medicare healthcare program to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, which the law currently prohibits. He has also discussed making it easier to import drugs at cheaper prices. 'We are going to start bidding. We are going to save billions of dollars over time,' Trump said." Trump's comments came only one day after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told reporters that Trump had asked him to "chair a commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity." Although the Trump transition team quickly denied that any decision had been made on such a commission, shockwaves reverberated throughout the drug industry in speculation as to what impact this commission, if formed, might have on vaccine uptake and sales.3 Robert Kennedy and Media Coverage of a Possible New Vaccine Safety Commission Although Trump himself has not made a public statement, if you had any doubts whatsoever that conventional media is following an industry-created script, look no further than the incredibly biased coverage of Kennedy's reported appointment. A vast majority of the articles written are so blatantly slanted and unbalanced, it is hard to understand why self-respecting professional journalists would ever want their names associated with them. Repeatedly, such articles claim the science on vaccines is settled and vaccines are safe.4 Period. The New York Times — which recently promised to rededicate itself "to the fundamental mission of Times journalism … to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives"5 — wrote a remarkably biased article about Kennedy's appointment, saying:6 "Mr. Trump … asked a prominent anti-vaccine crusader to lead a new government commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity, ushering debunked conspiracy theories about the dangers of immunization into the White House … Among his many political pursuits, Mr. Trump picked up the anti-vaccine cause a few years back. In 2012, he tweeted … 'A study says @autism is out of control — a 78 percent increase in 10 years. Stop giving monstrous combined vaccinations.' These views, to say the least, are not the scientific consensus …" So, The New York Times, supposedly newly rededicated to impartial reflection on all sides of the issue, simply decides there's a consensus among all scientists and makes no attempt to address a single argument made by those who provide substantial evidence that there are big gaps in vaccine safety science. That's hardly upholding journalistic integrity. Yet, this is what we're seeing everywhere in news reporting by conventional media dominated by corporate interests these days. Is Vaccine Safety as Established a Fact as Gravity? There are no long-term studies comparing differences in health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. The pharmaceutical and medical trade industries claim a vaccine's benefits always outweigh the potential harms, but no solid scientific evidence is provided to back up such claims. It's really little more than opinion. The government and pharmaceutical industries say it would be unethical to study vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, as the unvaccinated children would be put at risk. Yet more and more parents are having first-hand experience with adverse reactions, and choosing to opt-out of the government vaccine schedule. Ask a parent of a child who died or suffered permanent brain damage after vaccination and I'm sure you'll get a very different response. Curiously, anyone who dares to question the quality and quantity of vaccine studies is immediately branded anti-science and a medical heretic. In response to Kennedy's announcement that Trump had asked him to head up a commission on vaccine safety, Dr. David Kimberlin, co-director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), said:7 "We don't have to keep asking if gravity is real. We don't have to keep asking if clean water is a good thing. Yes it is. Vaccines are good things. They save lives." According to Kimberlin, "The science proving the safety of vaccination is settled and does not need to be investigated again." But if it's settled, where are the studies? Where's the research showing that 50 doses of 14 vaccines administered to children in combination and repeatedly in the first six years of life equals long-term health and results in few, if any, problems? What are the multi-generational effects to the immune system with so many vaccine doses? The sad fact is the often repeated mantra that vaccines are absolutely safe and that there is nothing to worry about is a case of thinking that if a falsehood is repeated over and over again, and long enough, people will believe it's true. Why are vaccine proponents so terrified of an honest vaccine safety review? This in and of itself raises serious questions. Another fact that should give everyone pause is the witch hunt unleashed on anyone who dares to question the never-proven-hypothesis that vaccines are so unequivocally safe and beneficial for everyone that everyone should be forced, by law, to get vaccinated with every government-recommended vaccine. Cleveland Clinic Doctor Faces Disciplinary Action for Stating the Obvious One of the latest victims of such a witch hunt is Cleveland Clinic physician Daniel Neides, director of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute. Neides writes a monthly column for cleveland.com, a publication that is part of the Sun News organization, which also publishes the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In his January 6 column,8 Neides expressed his concerns about the ever-growing toxic burden humans face and his disappointing experience with the annual flu shot, which left him bedridden for two days. He also touched on the potential vaccine-autism link, saying: "Why do I mention autism now twice in this article. Because we have to wake up out of our trance and stop following bad advice. Does the vaccine burden — as has been debated for years — cause autism? I don't know and will not debate that here. What I will stand up and scream is that newborns without intact immune systems and detoxification systems are being over-burdened with PRESERVATIVES AND ADJUVANTS IN THE VACCINES. The adjuvants, like aluminum — used to stimulate the immune system to create antibodies — can be incredibly harmful to the developing nervous system. Some of the vaccines have helped reduce the incidence of childhood communicable diseases, like meningitis and pneumonia. That is great news. But not at the expense of neurologic diseases like autism and ADHD increasing at alarming rates." His comments ignited a media fire storm and prompted the Cleveland Clinic to issue a statement saying Neides would face disciplinary action for his comments.9 The column was briefly removed from the cleveland.com site, but mysteriously reappeared and became accessible again after Neides retracted his statements and apologized for what his physician colleagues and the media are characterizing as an anti-vaccine "rant." If a prominent, well-respected physician cannot state the obvious without facing potentially career-ending consequences, what hope do we have of ever getting at the truth? WHY is open dialogue about vaccination not permitted? It's simply not reasonable to shut every discussion down with the old "the science is settled" claim, while the scientific literature is still littered with outstanding questions. Coincidence Claims Falter as Vaccine Damage Becomes More Common On January 11, a group of concerned parents rallied at the State Capitol in Mississippi in the hopes of having their voices heard in the vaccine debate.10 One of those parents was Dr. Scott Guidry, whose son developed autism spectrum symptoms following some of his childhood vaccinations. Guidry told WJTV: "My son was vaccine-injured, and we reversed the vaccine injury, and now he's recovered from autism. I'm not against vaccines. I learned the same importance of vaccines like every other physician who went to med school did. I know. But it's never really been studied, the safety of vaccines. There's never been a long-term safety study on vaccines." According to this news report, Mississippi has one of the highest vaccination rates in the U.S. It also has one of the highest autism rates, as well as the highest infant mortality rate in the country.11 Coincidence? No one knows, but in the absence of firm proof either way, many parents are renewing their call for the legal right to make voluntary decisions about which vaccines their child should receive and if or when they should be given. The same scenario is playing out in other states across the nation. The numbers of children suffering with chronic illness and disability, including autism spectrum disorders, are increasing. The numbers of children and adults who have experienced serious vaccine reactions are also increasing. It has become so common that a majority of people now have a family member or know someone who has been adversely affected by one or more vaccines. Eventually, this first-hand experience with vaccine reactions will come to include most physicians and politicians, as well. At a certain point, the coincidence-theory simply cannot hold water any longer, and that's what we're starting to see now. Very often, people don't care enough to get involved in the discussion until it's personal and, in recent years, we've seen a growing number of influential people speaking up and describing their personal experiences with vaccine reactions in the public forum. Robert De Niro is the latest example of a well-known celebrity parent, who has gone on the public record questioning vaccine safety and the reported link between vaccines and autism. Not surprisingly, like everyone who raises questions about vaccine safety, he has been attacked by the media as being uninformed and promoting dangerous ideas. Rick Rollens, former secretary of the California State Senate, and retired Representative Dan Burton (R-Ind.) are two examples of individuals who worked for government and publicly shared their personal experiences with vaccination and autism. They were strongly criticized for speaking out as they attempted to open up discussions about vaccine safety. Absolutely no one is above ridicule should they dare question the safety of vaccines. Paul 'For Profit' Offit's at It Again Wherever discussion about vaccine safety is covered by the media, Dr. Paul Offit is there in the middle of it. A vaccine developer for Merck and author of several books attempting to marginalize vaccine safety critics, Offit has become the "go-to" doctor whenever corporatized conventional media wants a spokesperson to deny vaccine risks and defend "vaccine safety." Rarely, if ever, does media note his deep ties to the vaccine industry, and the fact that he stands to profit personally from maintaining the illusion that vaccines are absolutely safe for everyone all the time, which also protects the status quo for industry profitmaking. The Daily Beast recently ran an article12 penned by Offit, in which he says "Trump needs vaccine experts, not conspiracy theorists." How do you know a propagandist when you see one? For starters, they're extremely fond of throwing around derogatory and humiliating terms like "conspiracy theorists," "hacks" and "quacks," in lieu of making a solid argument. Offit has earned tens of millions of dollars in royalties from the Rotateq vaccine, and has notoriously stated that infants can tolerate 10,000 vaccine doses at once without ill effect. He's also been caught making unsubstantiated and false statements about former CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, and lying to the OC Register about providing CBS News with the details of his financial relationship with the vaccine maker Merck.13 Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the non-profit charity, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), sued Offit for defamation in 2009, along with reporter Amy Wallace and publisher Conde Nast. "She lies," Offit was quoted as stating "flatly" about Fisher in Wired magazine. However, no evidence supporting his accusation was provided and Fisher was never asked by the reporter for a comment on Offit's baseless allegation. Fisher sued in the Fourth Circuit federal court in Virginia for a jury trial and $1 million in damages, but Judge Claude Hilton dismissed the defamation lawsuit. Hilton's primary argument for dismissal was that both Fisher and Offit are public figures and that, in his opinion, Offit's allegation that "she lies" was made in a moment of emotional exasperation and the heat of spirited public debate, which is the hallmark of free speech protected by the First Amendment. It is interesting how the free speech argument was used to dismiss a clear-cut case of defamation. The big question today is: Will the First Amendment protect Neides or anyone else in the U.S. who dares to publicly criticize the safety or effectiveness of vaccines? In Absence of Reliable Injury Reporting, How Can Safety Be Ascertained? In 2015, media reports noted that a "study" by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had confirmed that vaccines rarely ever cause serious reactions. The study in question used CDC Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) data, concluding there were only 33 "confirmed vaccine-triggered anaphylaxis cases" among the 25,173,965 vaccine doses administered between January 2009 and December 2011.14 However, there's a significant problem with using this study to "prove" safety, as there are dozens of serious reactions besides anaphylaxis. To say that vaccines rarely cause serious reactions based on the occurrence of anaphylaxis alone is misleading at best. Moreover, it's reasonable to suspect that the findings rely on incomplete data. The assumption is that the VSD — which collects health data from nine health care partners — actually receives thorough and accurate information about what happens to a patient following vaccination. But the chances of that are actually slim, since studies have shown vaccine reactions are rarely if ever recorded or reported. Providers of vaccines are by law required to report vaccine reactions to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), jointly operated by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Despite that, most vaccine providers are unaware of this requirement, are unfamiliar with the reporting process, are confused about who should be doing the reporting, and/or are unwilling to file a report. As noted by The Vaccine Reaction, an online journal newspaper published by NVIC:15 "Although the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act [NCVIA] of 1986 requires doctors and other health care providers who administer vaccines to make a report to VAERS for 'hospitalizations, injuries, deaths and serious health problems' following vaccination, it is estimated that this happens in only between 1 to 10 percent of the cases. VAERS receives about 30,000 reports annually. Given the extreme under-reporting to the system, it is likely that the true number of vaccine adverse reactions in the United States is closer to at least 300,000 per year, and perhaps as high as 3 million. One can only guess how many of those would be serious reactions. Suddenly, the argument that vaccines are safe because adverse reactions are 'rare' becomes a bogus one." If underreporting to VAERS is that common, chances are, the VSD is no better. Adding to the problem, the VSD data is not openly available to independent researchers, and without replication, the accuracy of the findings must forever remain suspect. The Vaccine Reaction Cover-Up Most pediatricians will tell you they've never seen a vaccine reaction, or that reactions are really rare. However, when a child suffers a vaccine reaction, they typically end up in the emergency room (ER), not the pediatrician's office. In a 2015 article, an ER nurse and former police officer shares his experiences with vaccine reactions, noting he's "seen the cover-up" first hand. He writes, in part:16,17 "I cannot even begin to guess how many times over the years I have seen vaccine reactions come through my E.R. Without any exaggeration, it has to be counted in hundreds … The cases almost always presented similarly, and often no one else connected it. The child comes in with either a fever approaching 105, or seizures, or lethargy/can't wake up, or sudden overwhelming sickness, screaming that won't stop, spasms [or] GI inclusion … And one of the first questions I would ask as triage nurse, was, are they current on their vaccinations? … Parents (and co-workers) usually just think I'm trying to rule out the vaccine preventable diseases, when in fact, I am looking to see how recently they were vaccinated to determine if this is a vaccine reaction. Too often I heard a parent say something akin to 'Yes they are current, the pediatrician caught up their vaccines this morning during their check up, and the pediatrician said they were in perfect health!' … But here's the more disturbing part. [Of] all the cases I've seen, I have never seen any medical provider report them to VAERS. I have filed VAERS reports. But I am the only nurse I have EVER met that files VAERS reports. I have also never met a doctor that filed a VAERS report. Mind you, I have served in multiple hospitals across multiple states, alongside probably well over a hundred doctors and probably 300 [to] 400+ nurses … What does that say about reported numbers? … And the final part of that, is that I have, first hand, seen blatant cover ups from doctors. I have seen falsification of medical records and documentation via intentional omission … I remind them that VAERS is a reporting body for ANY symptoms that are contemporaneous to vaccination, whether causation is believed to be associated or not, and I get the dismissal that they are not filing it because it [the vaccine] has nothing to do with it [the symptom] … This is a systemic suppression of information and statistics." How Vaccine Mandates Are Imposed on Health Care Workers in Absence of Legal Requirements In related news, GoErie.com recently reported18 that six health care workers fired from a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, for refusing the annual flu vaccine have been reinstated with back pay. In related commentary, according to Dr. Meryl Nass, a vaccine blogger with special interests in vaccine-induced illnesses, it appears American hospitals do not actually have a legal leg to stand on when firing health care workers over vaccine refusals, because the federal government claims it does not impose vaccine mandates for adults. So why are hospitals firing workers for refusing influenza vaccinations? In large part, it appears to be a strategy designed to receive higher Medicare reimbursements. Organizations co-created by the federal government have created guidelines for improving "quality of care" in hospitals, and Medicare reimbursements are used to forcibly impose certain quality measures over others, such as vaccination. In a nutshell, hospitals that have higher vaccination rates for patients and health care workers get higher Medicare reimbursement rates. But this has little to do with actual federal mandates. In fact, according to the CDC, "there are no legally mandated vaccinations for adults, except for persons entering military service. CDC does recommend certain immunizations for adults, depending on age, occupation and other circumstances, but these immunizations are not required by law." Flu Vaccine Mandate for Hospital Workers Is Financially Driven Employee coverage rates of flu vaccination is a quality measure that is reported to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). As noted by Nass: "The bottom line is that the federal government squeezed hospitals by requiring hospitals to report the rates of yearly influenza vaccinations of both hospital staff and hospital patients, including these two measures in a global calculation of hospital 'quality.' A hospital's 'quality' number determines approximately 3.75 percent of its overall Medicare reimbursements rate in 2017 … In the health care industry, 3.75 percent is enough to make a hospital sink or swim. The hospitals, predictably, acquiesced by demanding their employees be vaccinated or fired. But the federal government insists it imposes no mandates. Yet its actions created a de facto mandate. Where are the lawyers who will litigate this in federal court? I don't understand why cases are going through EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission], where employees may win, when their wins do not impact the de facto health care worker flu shot mandates that continue to be imposed in most U.S. health care institutions today." Vaccinating Hospital Workers Has No Impact on Patient Safety Interestingly, hospitals began mandating annual flu shots for their workers AFTER meta-analyses by Cochrane (considered the gold standard of meta reviews), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the CDC concluded that health care worker vaccinations do not protect patients from influenza — a finding that raises questions about its validity as a "quality of care" measure in the first place. The first one, published in July 2013, by the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, found "laboratory-proven influenza or its complications (lower respiratory tract infection, or hospitalization or death due to lower respiratory tract illness) did not identify a benefit of health care worker vaccination on these key outcomes … This review does not provide reasonable evidence to support the vaccination of health care workers to prevent influenza in those aged 60 years or older resident in long-term care institutions." The Cochrane Database Systematic Review published an update to this analysis in June, 2016, noting that 5 percent of health care workers who had received the influenza vaccine and 8 percent of workers who were unvaccinated had laboratory-proven influenza each season, and that health care workers may transmit influenza to patients. Still, the conclusions remained the same. "Offering influenza vaccination to health care workers based in long-term care homes may have little or no effect on the number of residents who develop laboratory-proven influenza compared with those living in care homes where no vaccination is offered," the authors write. They did note one study of moderate quality evidence suggests health care vaccinations may reduce lower respiratory tract infections in residents by 2 percent, from 6 to 4 percent. Another 2013 meta-analysis — this one by the CDC — found, "The evidence quality that health care personnel vaccination reduces patient mortality and influenza cases is moderate and low, respectively."19 A third analysis of 20 different studies,20 also published in 2013, found that while influenza vaccination of health care workers is likely to offer some indirect protection to vulnerable patients, the evidence is limited. Science Be Damned As noted by Nass:21 "Each of these three groups examined the world literature on the effects of health care worker vaccinations in 2012 [to 20]13, and each determined that there was no statistically significant evidence that health care worker influenza vaccinations prevented either influenza cases or influenza deaths in their patients. You cannot get better evidence than this. Health care worker flu vaccinations, despite what the public has been told, do not improve patient care. Furthermore, there is no good evidence that flu shots benefit the over-65 Medicare patients who are also being vaccinated to comply with a second 'quality' measure. To my knowledge, no one has looked to see if hospital inpatients have poorer outcomes because of these shots, but they certainly might. The shots cause a generalized inflammatory reaction that might adversely affect patients with, for example, autoimmune diseases, pneumonia or heart attacks." If you ask me, I think it's about time we get a vaccine safety review commission started, and if Kennedy is the one who heads it, I wish him the best in this endeavor and hope he seeks advice from Barbara Loe Fischer, co-founder of NVIC. We must bring back some objective sanity to the discussion about vaccine safety and scientific integrity. It's going to be an uphill battle all the way, but it is encouraging to see the topic being discussed by the new administration and, hopefully, it will result in better science and holding drug companies more accountable for the safety of their products.

[themoneybuff-blog]

The psychology of passive barriers

A surprising thing happens to people in their forties. After working hard, buying a house, and starting a family, they suddenly realize that they'd better start being responsible with their money. They begin reading financial books and trying to learn how to set up a nest egg for themselves and their families. It's a natural part of growing older. If you ask these people in their forties what their biggest life worry, the answer often is, quite simply, money. They want to learn to manage their money better, and they'll tell you how important financial stability is to them. Yet the evidence shows something very different. In the table below, researchers followed employees at companies that offered financial-education seminars. Despite the obvious need to learn about their finances, only 17% of company employees attended. This is a common phenomenon.

As Laura Levine of the Jump$tart Coalition told me and I paraphrase Bob doesn't want to attend his 401(k) seminar because he's afraid he'll see his neighbor thereand that would be equivalent to admitting he didn't know about money for all those years. They also don't like to attend personal-finance events because they don't like to feel bad about themselves. But of those who did attend the employer event, something even more surprising happens. Of the people who did not have a 401(k), 100% planned to enroll in their company's 401(k) offering after the seminar. Yet only 14% actually did. Of those who already had a 401(k), 28% planned to increase their participation rate. 47% planned to change their fund selection (most likely because they learned they had picked the default money-market plan, which was earning them virtually nothing). But less than half of people actually made the change. This is the kind of data that drives economists and engineers crazy, because it clearly shows that people are not rational. Yes, we should max out our 401(k) employer match, but billions of dollars are left on the table each year because we don't. Yes, we should start eating healthy and exercising more, but we don't. Why not? Why wouldn't we do something that's objectively good for us? Barriers are one of the implicit reasons you can't achieve your goals. These barriers can be psychological or profoundly physical, like something as simple as not having a pen when you need to fill out a form. But the underlying factor is that they are breathtakingly simple and if I pointed them out to you about someone else, you would be sickened by how seemingly obvious they are to overcome. It's easy to dismiss these barriers are trivial, and say, Oh, that's so dumb! when you realize that not having an envelope nearby could cost someone over $3,000. But it's true. And by the end of this article, you'll be able to identify at least three barriers in your own life whether you want to or not.

Why People Don't Participate in Their 401(k)s If you're like me, whenever you hear that one of your co-workers doesn't participate in their 401(k) especially if there's an employer match you scratch your head in confusion. Even though this is free money, many people still don't participate. Journalists will cite intangibles like laziness and personal responsibility, suggesting that people are getting less responsible with their money over time. Hardly. It turns out that getting people to enroll in their 401(k) is just plain hard. Using simple psychological techniques, however, we can dramatically increase the number of people who participate in their company's retirement plan. One technique, automatic enrollment, automatically establishes a retirement plan and contribution. You can opt out at any time, but you're enrolled by default. Here's how it affects 401(k) enrollment. (AE = automatic enrollment.)

From 40% participation to nearly 100% in one example. Astonishing. Today, J.D. has given me the opportunity to talk about one of the ways to drive behavioral change when it comes to your money. I call them barriers. While I do this, I'm going to ask you for a favor. You'll see examples of people who lost thousands of dollars because they wouldn't spend one hour reading a form. It's easy to call these people lazy and there's certainly an element of that but disdainfully calling someone lazy doesn't explain the whole story. Getting people to change their behavior is extraordinarily hard even if it will save them thousands of dollars or save their lives. If it were easy, you would have a perfect financial situation: You'd have no debt, your asset allocation would be ideal and rebalanced annually, and you'd have a long-term outlook without worrying about the current economic crisis. You'd be at your college weight, with washboard abs and tight legs. You'd have a clean garage. But you don't. None of us are perfect. That's why understanding barriers is so important to changing your own behavior. Just Spend Less Than You Earn! There's something especially annoying about comments on personal-finance blogs. On nearly every major blog post I ever made, someone left a comment that goes like this: Ugh, not another money tip. All you need to know is: spend less than you earn. Actually, it's not that simple. If that were the case, as I pointed out above, nobody would be in debt, overweight, or have relationship problems of any kind. Simply knowing a high-level fact doesn't make it useful. I studied persuasion and social influence in college and grad school, for example, but I still get persuaded all of the time. These commenters make the common mistake of assuming that people are rational actors, meaning they behave as a computer model would predict. We know this is simply untrue: Books like Freakonomics and Judgment in Managerial Decision Making are great places to get an overview of our cognitive biases and psychological motivations. For example, we say we want to be in shape, but we don't really want to go to the gym. (J.D. is a prime example of this, and he'll be the first to admit it.) We believe we're not affected by advertising, but we're driving a Mercedes or using Tupperware or wearing Calvin Klein jeans. There are dramatic differences in what we say versus what we do. Often, the reason is so simple that we can't believe it would affect us. I call these barriers, and I've written about them before: Last weekend, I went home to visit my family. While I was there, I asked my mom if she would make me some food, so like any Indian mom would, she cooked me two weeks' worth. I came back home skipping like a little girl. Now here's where it gets interesting. When I got back to my place, I took the food out of the brown grocery bag and put the clear plastic bags on the counter. I was about to put the bags in the fridge but I realized something astonishing:

if I got hungry, I'd probably go to the fridge, see the plastic bags, and realize that I'd have to (1) open them up and then I'd have to (2) open the Tupperware to (3) finally get to the food. And the truth was, I just wouldn't do it. The clear plastic bags were enough of a barrier to ignore the fresh-cooked Indian food for some crackers!! Obviously, once I realized this, I tore the bags apart like a voracious wolf and have provided myself delicious sustenance for the past week. I think the source of 95%+ of barriers to success isourselves. It's not our lack of resources (money, education, etc). It's not our competition. It's usually just what's in our own heads. Barriers are more than just excuses they're the things that make us not get anything done. And not only do we allow them to exist around us, we encourage them. There are active barriers and passive barriers, but the result is still the same: We don't achieve what we want to. I believe there are two kinds of barriers. Active barriers are physical things like the plastic wrap on my food, or someone telling me that it'll never work, etc. These are hard to identify, but easy to fix. I usually just make them go away.Passive barriers are things that don't exist, so they make your job harder. A trivial example is not having a stapler at your desk; imagine how many times a day that gets frustrating. For me, these are harder to identify and also harder to fix. I might rearrange my room to be more productive, or get myself a better pen to write with. Today, I want to focus on passive barriers: what they are and how to overcome them. How to Destroy Passive Barriers Psychologists have been studying college students for decades to understand how to reduce unprotected sex. Among the most interesting findings, they pointed out that it would be rational for women to carry condoms with them, since often the sexual experiences they had were unplanned and these women can control the use of contraceptives. Except for one thing. When they asked college women why they didn't carry condoms with them, one young woman typified the responses: I couldn't do thatI'd seem slutty. As a result, she and others often ended up having unprotected sex because of the lack of a condom. Yes, technically they should carry condoms, just as both partners should stop, calmly go to the corner liquor store, and get protection. But often they don't. In this case, the condom was the passive barrier: Because they didn't have it nearby and conveniently available, they violated their own rule to have safe sex. Passive barriers exist everywhere. Let's look at some examples. Passive Barriers in E-mail I get emails like this all the time: Hey Ramit, what do you think of that article I sent last week? Any suggested changes? My reaction? Ugh, what is he talking about? Oh yeah, that article on savings accountsI have to dig that up and reply to him. Where is that? I'll search for it later. Marks email as unread Note: You can yell at me for not just taking the 30 seconds to find his email right then, but that's exactly the point: By not including the article in this followup email, he triggered a passive barrier of me needing to think about what he was talking about, search for it, and then decide what to reply to. The lack of the attached article is the passive barrier, and our most common response to barriers is to do nothing. Passive Barriers on Your Desk A friend of mine lost over $3000 because he didn't cash a check from his workplace, which went bankrupt a few months later. When I asked him why he didn't cash the check immediately, he looked at me and said, I didn't have an envelope handy. What other things do you delay because it's not convenient? Passive Barriers to Exercise I think back to when I've failed to hit my workout goals, and it's often the simplest of reasons. One of the most obvious barriers was my workout clothes. I had one pair of running pants, and after each workout, I would throw it in my laundry basket. When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I would think is: Oh god, I have to get up, claw through my dirty clothes, and wear those sweaty pants again. Once I identified this, I bought a second pair of workout clothes and left them by my door each day. When I woke up, I knew I could walk out of my room, find the fully prepared workout bag and clothes, and get going. Passive Barriers to Healthy Eating Too many people create passive barriers to healthy eating. You're sitting at your desk at work and you get hungry. Rather than reach for a healthy snack (because you don't have one with you a passive barrier), you go to the vending machine for a bag of Cheetos. Here's a real-life example of passive barriers preventing J.D. from eating healthy. We were in Denver together in 2013 for a conference. During a long day with no breaks, he didn't have a healthy snack with him. But he did have Hostess Sno-Balls. Bad J.D. That's not even food.

J.D. needs to remove passive barriers to healthy eating If you find yourself snacking on Cheetos (or Sno-Balls) all day at work, try this: Dont take any spare change in your pockets for the vending machine. Even if you leave quarters in your car, that walk to the parking lot is barrier enough not to do it. Give yourself an alternative. Carry a healthy snack with you, like apple slices. Remove the passive barrier to eating healthy. Applying Passive Barrier Theory to Your Own Life As we've seen, the lack of having something nearby can have profound influences on your behavior. Imagine seeing a complicated mortgage form with interest rates and calculations on over 100 pages. Sure, you should calculate all of it, but if you don't have a calculator handy, the chances of your actually doing it go down dramatically. Now, we're going to dig into areas where passive barriers are preventing you from making behavioral change sometimes without you even knowing it. Fundamentally, there are two ways to address a passive barrier. You're missing something, so you add it to achieve your goals. For example, cutting up your fruit as soon as you bring it home from the grocery store, packing your lunches all at once, or re-adding the attachment to a followup email so the recipient doesn't have to look for it again.Causing an intentional passive barrier by deliberately removing something. You put your credit card in a block of ice in the freezer to prevent overspending. (That's not addressing the cause, but it's immediately stopping the symptom.) Or you put your unhealthiest food on the other side of the house, so you have to walk to them. Or you install software like Freedom to force yourself not to browse Reddit three hours a day. Personally, here are a few passive barriers I've identified (and removed) for myself: I keep my checkbook by my desk, because for the few bills I receive in the mail, I tend to never mail them in. I keep a gym bag of clothes ready to work out. And I cut up my fruit when I bring it home from the store, because I know I'll get lazy later. Now let's see how this can work for you. Here's an exercise I'd like you to do: Get a piece of paper and a pen or open the note-taking app on your phone.Identify ten things you would do if you were perfect. Don't censor. Just write what comes to mind. And focus on actions, not outcomes. Examples: I'd work out four times per week, clean my garage by this Sunday, play with my daughter for 30 minutes each day, and check my spending once per week.Now, play the Five Whys game: Why aren't you doing each of these things? Let's play out the last step with the example of exercising regularly. Let's assume I say that I want to exercise three times per week, but I only go twice per month. Let's do the Five Whys: Why do I excercise only twice per month? Because I'm tired when I get home from work.Why? Because I get home from work at 6 p.m.Why? Because I leave late for work, so I have to put in eight hours.Why? Because I don't wake up in time for my alarm clock.Why? HmmBecause when I get in bed, I watch Netflix for a couple of hours. Here's a possible solution: Put the computer in the kitchen before you go to sleep sleep earlier come home from work at an earlier time feel more rested work out regularly. That's a gross oversimplification, but you see what I mean. Homework: Pick ten areas of your life that you want to improve. Force yourself to understand why you haven't done so already. Don't let yourself cop out: I just don't want to isn't the real reason. And once you find out the real reasons you haven't been able to check your spending, or cook dinner, or call your mom, you might be embarrassed at how simple it really was. Don't let that stop you. Passive barriers are valued in their usefulness, not in how difficult they are to identify. The Bottom Line Passive barriers are subtle factors that prevent you from changing your behavior. Unlike active barriers, passive barriers describe the lack of something, making them more challenging to identify. But once you do, you can immediately take action to change your behavior. You can apply barriers to prevent yourself from spending money, cook and eat healthier, exercise more, stay in touch with your friends and family, and virtually any other behavior. You can do this with small changes or big ones. The important factor is to take action today. A caveat: Sometimes people take this advice to mean, The reason I haven't been sticking to my workout regimen is that I don't have the best running shoes. I should really go buy those $150 shoes I've been eyeingthat will help me change my behavior. Resolving passive barriers is not a silver bullet: Although they help, you'll be ultimately responsible for changing your own behavior. Instead of buying better shoes immediately, I'd recommend setting a concrete goal Once I run consistently for 20 days in a row, I'll buy those shoes for myself before spending on barriers. Most changes can be done with a minimum of expense. J.D.'s note: This is one of my favorite guest articles in the history of Get Rich Slowly. It had a profound effect on me, my life, and my work. This piece was originally published on 17 March 2009. I'm reprinting it today to celebrate the newly-published second edition of Ramit's book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich [my review]. https://www.getrichslowly.org/passive-barriers/