Moneybox: Weak-Willed? There?s an App for That.

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Moneybox Weak-Willed? There's an App for That.  Meet GymPact, a new company that wants to charge you for not exercising. By Matthew Yglesias Posted Tuesday, Jan 03, 2012, at 09:10 PM ET Welcome to January, the month of broken promises. Each December we take stock of our lives and decide where we'd like to see improvement, confirming our aspirations with New Year's resolutions. Sadly, resolutions are shattered as swiftly as they're made: You're probably already wavering on that one to skip dessert. Change, after all, is hard. If you really wanted to act differently you probably wouldn't need a resolution to persuade you to change. But perhaps there is a way to use a different set of incentives to persuade us to behave ourselves. The new startup GymPact is betting on the idea that Americans want to get better at resolving. To put it another way, they believe there's a market for a service that will do little more than charge you money for not going to the gym. The fundamental problem of weakness of the will has plagued mankind from time immemorial. The ancient Greeks had a special word for it, akrasia, which comes down to us in part because Plato found it so vexing that he decided it was impossible, writing that "no one goes willingly toward the bad, or what he believes to be bad" and that apparent instances must in fact represent some form of ignorance. Modern behavioral economists, less interested in the metaphysical issues, call it "time-inconsistent preferences" and have simply documented that it occurs systematically in ways that undermine the neoclassical modeling assumptions of humans as rational utility maximizers. We ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Weigel: How Ron Paul Diehards Plan To Keep His Campaign Alive After Iowa What the Iowa Caucuses Would Look Like if They Really Were a Horse Race Was Matt Flynn's Amazing Performance Sunday a Fluke?	Advertisement
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