ALLOCATING WILLPOWER. Economists see the world in terms of limitations. They are trained to resist Utopian thinking. For me, I think my view of the importance of limits came before I took any economics courses. I remember being struck by Meyer Burstein’s statement in my first economics class that we would be studying the allocation of scarce resources among competing wants. Usually we think of economists as studying how income is allocated. I have seen some economists who suggest that for many people the operative constraint is not income, but time. And now psychologists are applying the same thinking to willpower.
[...] Traditionally, they deal with the problem of efficiently allocating a limited income. I posted here about how economists are now thinking about allocating time and that some psychologists are [...]