Willpower

have never known a man who was too idle to attend to his affairs & accounts, who did not get into difficulties; & he who habitually is in money difficulties, very rarely keeps scrupulously honourable, & God forbid that this should ever be your fate.
    —Charles Darwin, in a letter to his son accompanying a check to pay off the young man’s debts
    People just don’t want to have to be accountants.
    —Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com

    N ot long ago, a spendthrift sought help for his credit card debt from a team of researchers who called themselves neuroeconomists. They were monitoring the brains of people in the act of shopping—or at least as close to that as you can get inside a functional MRI machine in a lab at Stanford University. The researchers measured activity in the brain’s insula region as people contemplated spending money on gadgets, books, and assorted tchotchkes. This brain region ordinarily lights up when you see or hear something distasteful, and that’s just what happened when the tightwads in the study saw the prices of the items. But when a typical spendthrift went shopping for the same items, the insula didn’t register the same sort of disgust—not even when the brain considered spending a good chunk of hard-earned money on a color-changing “mood clock.”
    The one bit of hope for fiscal rectitude came in a separate experiment conducted at the request of this one particularly remorseful spendthrift. In the interest of full disclosure, we should note that this spendthrift was Tierney, before Baumeister began teaching him about self-control. Sure enough, the MRI test confirmed his spendthrift tendencies by revealing just how blasé his insula remained as he prepared to spend money for gizmos he didn’t need. But then the researchers tried an intervention. They flashed an image of Tierney’s most recent Visa bill—and got a reaction! At last, there was some sign of disgust: The researchers reported a “little spot of insula activation” when he contemplated the unpaid balance of $2,178.23. Apparently he wasn’t completely brain-dead when it came to money.
    That was reassuring, but how could this finding be put to use? How, short of having Stanford researchers follow him through a mall waving his Visa bill, could a spendthrift be forced to contemplate the effects of his spending? The obvious solution was for him to set a budget and monitor his own spending, just as Charles Darwin had advised his spendthrift son. But this was much easier said than done, until Aaron Patzer came along.
    Patzer was the kind of son Darwin would have liked—a fastidious bookkeeper who kept his checkbook balanced as a teenager and then went on to spend his Sundays dutifully categorizing all his purchases with Quicken software. But at one point, while working for a software start-up in Silicon Valley, he stopped tracking the spending, and when he sat down to catch up with his finances he faced the prospect of categorizing hundreds of transactions. It occurred to him that there must be a better way to spend his time. Why couldn’t a computer do this for him? Why couldn’t he outsource this job? Wasn’t this the kind of grunt work meant for silicon chips? The result of this was a company, Mint.com , so successful that within two years it was sold for $170 million to Intuit, the maker of Quicken software.
    Mint’s computers are now tracking the finances of nearly six million people, which makes it one of the largest exercises ever conducted into that second major step in self-control: monitoring behavior. It’s also one of the more encouraging developments in the history of artificial intelligence. Like other companies offering to electronically monitor other aspects of your life—how much you weigh, how well you sleep, how much exercise you get— Mint.com is using computers for a profoundly humanistic endeavor. Ever since Frankenstein, science fiction writers have fretted about artificial intelligences that become aware of their own powers and turn against their human creators. Political writers worried about the consequences of widespread computer surveillance—Big Brother is watching! But now that computers are getting smarter, now that more and more of them are watching us, they’re not becoming self-aware (at least not yet) and they’re not seizing power from us. Instead, they’re enhancing our powers by making us more self-aware.
    Self-awareness is a most peculiar trait among animals. Dogs