2 Quotes by George Ainslie

The awkwardness of getting reward in a well-off society is that the creation of appetite often requires undoing the work of satisfying appetite.

Are ordinary people really populations of interests rather than something more solid? It’s disturbing to think of yourself as so fluid, so potentially unstable, held together only by the shifting influence of available rewards. It’s like being told that atoms are mostly empty and wondering how they can bear weight. Yet the bargaining of interests in a society can produce highly stable institutions; perhaps that’s also true of the internal interests created by a person’s rewards.