Word: inertia
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...Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola; in theaters 6/11) Members of an Italian family fight and unite, but this ain't The Godfather. The glorious black-and-white imagery can't rescue Coppola's film from a fatal case of dramatic inertia...
...quietly done away with transfer admissions a year after announcing a two-year suspension of the program, I continue to hope that Harvard doesn’t permanently decide that transfer students are one of the things the school is better off without than with. I fear that institutional inertia will lead Harvard to continue along its current path rather than return to what was, but in this case, it’s worth it to overcome that inertia...
More along these lines is heading our way. The Administration hopes to harness our inertia with its automatic pension plan, a major step toward universal savings accounts, and by dramatically simplifying applications for federal tuition aid. Its push to computerize health-care records - another big-ticket stimulus item - could make generic drugs and cost-effective procedures our default treatments. And seniors who don't select health-care or drug plans could be automatically enrolled in low-cost options. "It would be nice if we all behaved like supercomputers, but that's not how we are," Orszag says...
...neoclassical economics wants government to let us alone to do what we want, behavioral economics leaves room for government action to help us do what we would really want if we were rational agents. Unfortunately, the qualities that have crippled Washington in recent years - inertia, denial, allergy to complexity, preference for short-term gratification over long-term planning - are our own flaws writ large. Members of Congress are people too; they're likely to embrace change only when it's easy, popular and rewarding. Do we really want them trying to change...
Behavioral literature can be a depressing window on human folly. But it offers us ways to transcend our folly, to restrain our ids, to harness our conformity and inertia and weakness in order to do less of the things that hurt us and our country. "In the physical world, we understand our limitations," Ariely says. "Nobody gets upset because we can't fly. We just design something to help us fly." If Obama can help us fly from our bad habits, he'll provide the change we need...