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How Viewing a "Virtual You" Can Help You Save
Hugh Pickens writes "The WSJ reports that computer scientists, economists, neuroscientists and psychologists are teaming up to find innovative ways of turning impulsive spenders into patient savers. One way to shock Americans into saving more for their retirement is software that lets users stare into a camera in a virtual-reality laboratory and see an image staring back of how they will look in the year 2057. By enabling the young to see themselves as they will be when they are old, virtual-reality technology can transform their urge to spend for today into a willingness to save for tomorrow because to the extent that people can more vividly imagine how badly they will feel in the future with little to no retirement savings, they can be motivated to save more money now. In one test experimental subjects who saw a persuasive visual analog of a 70-year old version of themselves by morphing the shape and texture of his avatar to simulate the aging process reported they would save twice as much as those who didn't (PDF). 'An employee's ID photo could be age-morphed and placed on the benefits section of the company's website,' says Dan Goldstein of London Business School. 'From there, we're just a few clicks and a few minutes away from someone making a lasting decision that can be worth thousands [of dollars].'"
What about the people who die before retirement? When you're putting money to retirement savings you're gambling it. It's also money off from investments that could make you a lot more. And of course, it's money off right away.
Why not stop caring about future and live now like it would be your last day on earth? That's what I've done for the last 2-3 years and it's been great. I've also done so many things during that time. And I will continue doing so and let the future me take care of himself. If he is even half as awesome as I am, he will survive and he will survive even better than if I took care of him.
He's called "my dad"... and he worked hard his whole life, and I see that now at 64 has failing health, is tired all the time and doesn't do much apart from watching TV and surfing a bit. I know how my future looks, I can see him every day if I want.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
If the individual inputted as having an unhealthy lifestyle such as heavy smoker with lack of exercise did the study show them as dead or suffering at these older ages? I've seen many 50 year olds that looked worse than my 70 year old father-in-law due to how they took care of themselves.
Just other food for thought.
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The image samples in the article are pretty weak, they look like someone spent a few minutes in Photoshop changing the hair color to gray and altering the skin tones a bit and running the image through a brush filter, and the overall effect is as if they created a "Second Life" clone from a photograph. Not very good age-progression at all.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
http://youtu.be/A3oIiH7BLmg
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
Just had my 64th birthday. Wish that as a teenager I had been "scarred straight" about retirement savings. Michael http://plumbersstlouis.us/
> how they will look in the year 2057
I'm quite sure what I'll look like in 2057. It might be amusing to have a coffin-cam though with a URL that people could go to.
Although more likely I'll be cremated, and a pile of ashes isn't as interesting to look at.
Another way to help Americans save for retirement is to not crash the market...
Get $100 taken out of your paycheck every month for 40 or 50 years (480 months * 100 = $48,000) and then get a meager 600/month back for maybe 10 (120 months = however much $72,000 will be worth within 40 years) and if you're healthy enough 15 years.
My employer pays for my pension plan and they put in $100 and the $600 is what the fund says I will get even though my investments are very aggressive at this point (50% goes in the tech and asian markets with very good dividends that double the investment every quarter, 50% in the safe 'recommended' aggregated funds which doesn't ever seem to make a profit but is promised to be always there even if the markets crash). If I make another $250 contribution every month they say I should be able to have the same income as I do now but measured against the historic devaluation of money that is not what I want to be making within 40 years and I really could use the 250 right now.
The only way the pension funds work is if you're in the middle-to-upper class (>$250,000/year income) and can contribute easily a good $1000/month into your own managed investment funds. Then you should be able to cash in when you're 60 and live comfortably if off course you're investments paid off over time and you're not committing large funds in bubble's and crashes.
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Barring miraculous medical advancements I'll be long dead by 2057.
I do know that if 20 year old "me" could have seen the current, 45 year old "me", I would have taken much better care of my body, and spent more money and effort on upgrading and maintaining my appearance, rather than looking at the people who did do that as vain and shallow. Hindsight is always 20/20.
Just short of mind control, really. We're holding your future self for ransom and if you don't put your money in the the 401(k) he's gonna get it! It's also weirdly like the Wolfenstein HUD in that your character's face is used to communicate status.
Such a technology as this is really an abandonment of rationalism -- we concede we can't use empirical arguments and evidence about saving and retirement to convince people to save, so now we'll just scare them. Notice that people are only manipulated into saving, and not into thinking about what to put their money into, which is the actual decision people are making. How will your face look if you discover in 20 years the stocks you were buying were a house of cards, and that the only reason you were putting your money into them is because your corporate HR department was guilting you. You should decide how to save their money with a sound mind, free of the sort of manufactured anxieties bank and stock broker marketers use to induce new customers, which is all this is.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Saving? Are you insane?
Real inflation is hitting what? 8% per year. Anything I save is made worthless very quickly. It is handed over to the bankers. On the other hand, if I take out as much debt as is possible and then I get to pay it back in devalued currency.
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On the one hand - it was good. All information can be obtained on the spot. On the other hand - less they know, better sleep.
...would be to find a way to drain those parasites at the top of more or less the entire finance system and many other sectors of the excessive riches they have misappropriated. The scum which acts as top suit of company A and sits in the board of directors of company B,C and D which colludes with the other scum which heads B and sits in A, C and D's board, approving each others thievery.
As long as those parasites hold sway over the banks it does not seem to make that much sense to go on a saving spree. Compare it to storing all your grain in a rat-infested silo in the hope to save it for when it is needed. By the time you need your grain the rats will have gone off with most, and spoiled the rest.
Just like the besuited-and-tied rats in those board rooms, really...
--frank[at]unternet.org
what if you die before you retire? I don't want to see visions of my death!
It's like the mind going AWOL, it's there somewhere
This can not possibly reverse decades of conditioning that watching advertising has wrought on a typical mind. Advertising is what makes you want things you do not need. Advertising is what gets you to spend on things that you would not have heard of otherwise. Advertising is what gets you to buy things impulsively without researching alternatives, checking prices in multiple places to get a better deal, or thinking about whether you can do just fine without the damn thing. If you could train people to have an attitude of default hostility toward advertising of any kind, then you will have a nation of savers. Otherwise people will keep spending and spending and spending, because that is what they have been trained to do.
I'm 62 now. This means a computer has predicted I'll be alive in 2057! Woo Hoo!!!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Deflation helps savers. Inflation helps borrowers.
You noticed all the "SALE 50%" signs go up in 2008/9? Deflation. Money increases in value.
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Not many in my family live to retirement age - I'm 37, have type 1 diabetes, smoke, work in the construction (oil, gas, chemical) industry ride a motorbike 300 miles a week, get very drunk every Saturday night, shoot guns most weekends and have an appalling sexual history... and I'm meant to save money for when I retire at 65?
Jog on.
I'm surprised that guillotines aren't being built in America yet. Maybe in a decade, when the top 400 own more than the bottom 290,000,000 and people start to wake up to the Ponzi scheme.
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Not all of us have that luxury, you insensitive clod.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I can't use anything that isn't even 64-bit...and that ain't a lot. Live fast and die young, while you can enjoy it! Everything else is a folly, that helps pay taxes for fat bureaucrats. Seriously, coke and booze it up hard. Only a few more years to go, for the whole lot of you! ~ It's a fact.
If nothing, this research confirms that there will be a lot of uglies walking around in 2057...
Isn't this how The Simpsons were encouraged to save?
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
I thought savings was really important before I watched my parents die. My Mom, slowly. My Dad next quickly; but taking care of her took a lot out of him.
My Dad, on more than one occasion sighed and said "ahhh the golden years" with obvious sarcasm. That was uncharacteristic of my Dad. Those "golden years" drove him to it.
Now I'm much more inclined to say, "fuck it". Take that road trip. Live in California and don't worry about earthquakes. You can watch yourself die in a SRO or and old folks home just as easily as you can in a castle. What's the point of being in some really nice place if you can't enjoy it.
In 2057 we had already reached the singularity, so everybody would be young. There would be no old people.
Right, because breaking out the guillotines and slicing the heads off of a bunch of rich jerks will is totally an effective strategy for improving the day to day lives of these people. Hope they enjoy themselves. Myself, though, I think I'll wander off somewhere else before anyone decides it's time to start purging the intellectuals, and would advise most of Slashdot to do the same.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
It's too expensive to build them ourselves. Much cheaper to have them built in China.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
A wage that hasn't been declining since 1970.
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Right, because breaking out the guillotines and slicing the heads off of a bunch of rich jerks will is totally an effective strategy for improving the day to day lives of these people.
It's called the trickle down theory. Except instead of tax cuts, it's head chops.
Hope they enjoy themselves. Myself, though, I think I'll wander off somewhere else before anyone decides it's time to start purging the intellectuals, and would advise most of Slashdot to do the same.
You know who is the most dangerous person in the world? Somebody who thinks they are smart when they're not.
Nobody who thinks themselves a fool has ever caused a tenth the harm of somebody who thinks they are wise.
"Shock therapy" is available for only 5 easy payments of $99.99 on your credit card... Frankly I will wait until I see the numbers. Writing N=50, saying there was a "significant savings" and including a bad graph does not a scientific study make. Although it makes for what the marketing people see as a hell of a presentation. There's proof! See the graph?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
What people say and what they do are like white knight to black bishop.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The Fed took food and fuel out of their inflation measures on the pretext that they are too volatile.
To be fair, they should measure the volatility of all goods, and take them out on the basis of volatility alone.
If they did that, I think they'd find that food and fuel have, on average been high for quite some time, and are thus not as volatile as they think. Also, the iPads and other gizmos that they are currently including in the index are even more volatile than food and fuel. When Apple decides to cut a price 50% all at once, how volatile is that?
In short, the Fed's inflation measures are widely known to be b0rked. While the paranoid bloggers may indeed be paranoid, they have a point.
Another problem with the Fed's inflation measures is that they are generally known. Speculators who depend on cheap money will "run from measurement". What do I mean? I mean that if you're a hedge fund and you have any idea how the Fed measures inflation and uses it to determine rates, then you'll make sure to invest your cheap dollars in things that the Fed doesn't measure. Hence, you go to commodities, farmland in Iowa, etc. Anything that the Fed can't measure is good for you. If you buy too many things that the Fed can measure, they'll take the punchbowl away which is exactly what you don't want.
Get it? Speculation runs from measurement. It's obvious to me. It should be obvious to those in charge yet apparently it itsn't.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I would imagine that most here can "wander off somewhere" because mommy and/or daddy was born elsewhere. This makes it a lot easier to obtain citizenship in the land of their origins. American liberty has had its day, especially for those who have alcohol metabolism issues.
If you are in your late 40s and your father had it, DO NOT WAIT ON THE PSA. Get it tomorrow!
In all seriousness, do it. It could save your life if caught early enough.
Spoken from early 40s with an elevated PSA and recent Da Vinci prostatectomy.
Blasphemy! Off with his head!!!
You may want to check out how the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates CPI. www.bls.gov/cpi/
It does count oil. It does count food.
Yes, it does count the cut in Apple, but the weight given to such items is low. Look at housing instead. That has been keeping overall inflation low for the past few years.
I think you are talking about "headline" inflation, which is something different. That excludes oil and food. The fed can cut / raise short term interest rates. That can affect manufacturing and housing. It will not affect food [wait until next year when we can plant some more] or oil [since we import a lot.]
I stopped reading when they stated that a sloppy investor might be eating ramen noodles later in life, while a good investor could be eating sushi. That is such a moronic, consumption-based bullshit example that works so well on mindless US tweens, who are bombarded with the idea that wealth = happiness. Fuck that shit, man, I like ramen noodles!
If you're worried about being broke in your late years, lifestyle decisions will have a much more profound impact than any typical investment strategy some banker will shove down your throat. Want to live like a king ? Don't have kids, and don't spend money you don't have. Better yet: choose a career where you'll still be valuable in your old age and retirement becomes a non-issue. A skilled consultant with 45 years experience will beat your retirement fund, since he won't be competing with inflation, he rolls it into his hourly rate.
Ultimately, we are very adaptive creatures. I'm not saving up for retirement, though once the wife is settled in her career, and her student debt is paid off, we'll be earning more than we can reasonably spend, since we already live quite indulgently on our sub-average income. If we set a goal to retire by a certain age, we'll make the lifestyle adjustments to attain that goal. Right now, we're living for today and life is grand.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
trying to scare people into digging in their feet and becoming schizophrenic ?
...
in a world where top 1% gets 52% of all wealth generated, top 5% including that 1% gets a whopping 72%, and bottom 85% - practically everyone - gets only 15%, there is a lot you need to do before you ever need to get to the point of trying to scare people into savings.
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
and no - the top 5% had not come to grabbing that much of everything by 'saving'. you cant get 72% of everything, by saving. it can quite easily be said that, this crowd has no concept of 'saving' at all, while skiing behind their 7th yacht
Read radical news here
Doesn't matter if its smart or not. Once people reach a breaking point heads start rolling whether justified or not. History has proven this time and again.
First off though you might want to do a bit more learnin' before you take a figure like 8% to be the "real" inflation because you read it on some random site (here's a hint: it's not).
Then you might want to consider that your debt has interest factored in, unless you've convinced a bunch of friends to loan to you. You'll almost certainly find that interest is above 8% meaning that you can crow on about currency being "devalued" all you like, in real dollars you'll pay more to pay it off. Goes double since when you make payments on debt your payment goes to interest first, then principle, so if you are paying it down as slow as possible so that you can use "devalued currency" you end up paying much more in interest.
Finally you might just want to look at how things actually work out for people. I've known people like you, not with the completely faulty logic, but people that borrow and spend as much as they can. Me, I'm one of the ones who saves and spends only when I've got the money. In university and even right out of it, they had more and/or better stuff than me. Nice cars, more gadgets, all that kind of stuff. Now, 12ish years after? I get people amazed at how I can have such a nice house with nice toys on a modest salary. The answer is I don't pay interest on any of it except the mortgage. I buy what I can afford.
I find the older people get, the wider the gap becomes. I see people who borrow, borrow, borrow who live paycheck to paycheck and scrape to make ends meet, and people who save who have a far nicer quality of life and a safety net, even though they make about the same.
At any rate you do what you like but I'd suggest you might want to put your learnin' hat on and find some more about this. Your plan isn't necessarily a recipe for disaster, but it is one for giving far more of your money "over to the bankers," than someone who doesn't. If you want to do that, ok fine but then no whining about your "rich" or "lucky" neighbour who chose not to do that and is able to afford things you can't.
Sounds like his whining is coming down to the fact that his company has a small pension. Ok well that's fine, the idea may well be "We are going to force you to save a little, but we'll give you the flexibility to decide what you want to do with the rest." Fine, but it is then on you to save more.
At my job we have a pension and they take a variable amount (how much depends on how well the fund does, when it does bad you put in more when it does well you put in less) currently 9%, and the employer matches that dollar for dollar. THAT is what you need for a pension that is going to be your only real source of income but yes, it means less take home pay.
The number often suggested as a good minimum is 10% of your income. You should take 10% and save for retirement. So if your employer is only making you save 2.5%, well then you have 7.5% more you need to save.
Unfortunately, we do not live among Vulcans. People have feelings, and sometimes the best way to motivate someone is by manipulating those feelings. Sure, I'm an idealist in the sense that I think it would be ideal if people used their brains and saved more money. But I'm also a pragmatist, and my experience tells me that in 30 years when I retire because I've been saving, *someone* is going to have to pay for those that didn't save. No, letting them starve is not an option, at least not in a civilized country, especially one that you want to keep that way (starving people generally have nothing left to lose . . . ). Tax the rich? Yeah, good fucking luck with that. No, I'm afraid that if we have to manipulate people into saving, then that's what we should do. If nothing else, maybe it will keep the retards from spending money on awful pop cultural shit, and we might see a return to art in our society.
Nathan's blog
Does it work on the wife?
work harder, for less. Jesus, when did that become OK? Anyway, no amount of 'unconventional lifestyles' is going to help when I'm 50 and can't get health care (but am required by law to have bogus health 'insurance' with copays higher than I can afford). No amount of stretching is going to get around $5/gallon gas and a transportation system built around $0.89 cent/gallon gas. Food prices are shooting way, way up. We're seeing REAL inflation now. You can't squeeze blood from a stone, and btw, you can't fix modern devices. They're either too complicated or built to fall apart and be replaced.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, the 1 line comment I posted with implied a lot more screwed up stuff. The world if falling apart around us, you can't just make a few tweaks in your lifestyle and pretend it's A-OK.
Good luck man, since that all that counts these days!
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People that save for their retirement see the money being stolen by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase through a raft of fraudulent and corrupt methods. Better ask scientist to develop a type of money that is a good store of wealth and retains its value without having to be managed...oh, shoot! that's GOLD
If I saw myself at seventy, I would probably decide to save less and enjoy myself more now while I can.
http://www.shadowstats.com/
You may find it beneficial to your financial health.
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I'll keep spending it for you.
You really need to find out what money is before you get totally robbed.
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Saving up money doesn't stop you from growing old or dying.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No worries then, since those are "intellectuals" then they will surelly remember that when enough people go hungry, heads start to fall and act accordingly.
The problem is.
Over those 40 years, you saved $1 million worth of value, but only get lets say $200,000 worth of benefit from it. You have been robbed[1] of $800,000 worth of value. This is the nature of saving in an inflationary environment. It is stupid to do so.
[1] By the state and by the bankers.
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Your "retirement money" will be worthless by the time you retire, but I'm sure the investment bankers will enjoy the use of it in the meantime...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Definately by 2050. No fear or regrets.