The remedy is rarely exhortation. It is a change to the situation so that the easier choice is also the better one. None of this is new. Adam Smith noticed most of it, and then the profession spent two centuries forgetting. Ask most people why they did what they did and they will give you a reason; ask them again a week later and the reason will have quietly changed. Notice how rarely anyone is argued out of the weather forecast, and how often they are simply moved past it by a change in circumstance.
What follows
The measure that matters is not what people say about restraint but what they do when nobody is scoring. Institutions know all this, of course, which is why the weather forecast is so rarely left to chance. The point is not that people are foolish. The point is that restraint is expensive, and we economise on it like everything else. We describe the departure from the model as an error. We might equally describe the model as a hopeful guess about us.
