Nobody chose their pension fund. That is not quite true, but it is true enough: the great majority of people in the great majority of schemes hold whatever they were put in on their first day, and will hold it until the day they retire. The same is true of energy tariffs, browser settings, the order of the dishes on a menu and, if you are honest, most of the beliefs you would defend at a dinner party.
The default is powerful because it asks nothing. Every alternative asks something — a form, a phone call, a small confrontation with the possibility of being wrong — and the mind, being economical, declines. This is not laziness in any interesting sense. It is a sensible response to a world that presents far more choices than anyone could evaluate.
Who sets the default?
The uncomfortable corollary is that whoever writes the default writes a good part of your life. Sometimes that is a benevolent regulator enrolling you in a pension. Sometimes it is a company that has noticed how few people cancel. The behavioural revolution taught governments to use defaults for good; it also taught everyone else to use them, and the second lesson has been learned more thoroughly.
What follows is not a call to examine every setting; that way lies exhaustion. It is a call to notice which defaults are load-bearing — the handful that compound — and to spend your scarce attention there. The rest can stay as they were set. That, after all, is what defaults are for.
