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Hello, everyone.

It's Larry Kotlikoff with Economics Matters, the podcast.

I'm really delighted to have Justin Wolfers with me.

Uh, Wolfers is, uh, Justin is a... [chuckles] Wolfers.

Justin is a star in economics, a, a budding star, um, I think partly because of his personality, uh, mostly because of his economics and the fact that he has a ton to say, uh, about lots of different things.

Uh, and he's got a terrific platform, uh, it's called Platypus.

Right

I'm cutting Social Security benefits.

yeah on the other hand uh something has to be done which is going to affect all of us in some way or other and the something that has to be done is likely to be too little That's the way we've been dealing with Social Security.

We keep operating on half the tumor.

So we had a quote fixed to Social Security back in 1983, led by Alan Greenspan.

He was the head of the Federal Reserve.

The president appointed a group of, I guess it was President Reagan, a group of politicians to meet in this committee with Greenspan or maybe one or two economists.

I was not one of them.

Should they not count on Social Security being there when they retire at all? I mean, should they just like plan around it and say it's not going to be there? I don't happen to think that's true, but what do you think?

So thank you very much, Larry, for joining us today.

It's my great pleasure, Wade.

So economics-based financial planning is based on the work of the giants of finance, going back to Irving Fisher in the 1920s at Yale, working on The issue of consumption smoothing, that's something that squirrel knows very well because squirrels consumption smooth between the winter when they don't easily have acorns and they save up in the spring, summer and fall.

And the idea is to try and have the same number of acorns.

It tends to average 12 a day that they try and sock away in the ground and then be able to go out and grab those.

during the winter know where they are.

So that's consumption smoothing as a key principle of economics-based financial planning.

Could you talk about if there's any kind of loss of fidelity or loss of computing power by having fewer simulations?