George Epstein: Nearsighted

Sometimes you need to make decisions quickly, without considering the long-term consequences. If you’re crossing the street and a truck is bearing down on you, you don’t think about your ultimate destination — you get out of the way. If you don’t have any money and the rent is due tomorrow, this isn’t the time to do retirement planning. But most of the time, it pays to think about the future impact of a decision that looks good at the moment. 

We like our rewards quick and painless. Americans spend more on lottery tickets than all the money we spend on streaming services, concerts, books and movies combined.  The slots and table games at our little casinos have substantially better odds than the lottery, but we still spend over $100 billion on the little tickets. It only takes a bit of math to compute that the vast majority of lottery players will lose tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime of playing. Saving and investing those lottery bets over that period would leave the average player with six-figures toward retirement.  Playing the lottery equals short-term thinking.