Gilbert: Fighting Fallacies With Fallacies?

I'm a big fan of Daniel Gilbert. His work on affective forecasting is top-notch. The book Stumbling on Happiness is insightful and compulsively readable. Why is he selling retirement planning services?

 

 

 

I acknowledge that we often underestimate how much money we are going to need for retirement and how long we are going to live. I also recognize that we care about tomorrow a bit less than we care about today. That said, the premise of this advertisement, designed to persuade us to invest with Prudential, is another infamous fallacy: the availability heuristic!

What is Daniel Gilbert thinking?  

Let's assume that being poor in your golden years is a bad thing. Now, consider the fact that it is more likely that we will participate in retirement plans if we are automatically enrolled because of the status quo bias (there are problems with this strategy, but they can be easily remedied with some careful decision making on the part of conscientious policy makers).

So, what is Daniel Gilbert thinking?

I'm not a psychic, but something along these lines, perhaps: If you can get us to avoid doing bad things by manipulating our cognitive biases, such as the status quo bias, you should. Geriatric poverty is worse than misleading the public, all things considered. Prudential indeed...