Key Facts
Procrastination does not meaningfully predict saving regret. Across 12 psychometric measures tested in both countries, the relationship is weak to nonexistent, and where statistically significant, it frequently runs in the opposite direction from what the behavioral economics literature predicts.
Economic shocks do. Exposure to negative financial shocks is the dominant predictor of wishing you’d saved more.
About half of Americans between 60 and 74 wish they had saved more. That’s a familiar finding, and it comes with a familiar explanation: people procrastinate. They know they should save, they intend to save, and then they don’t, because the present is vivid and retirement is abstract, because inertia is powerful, because human beings are not the rational optimizers of the textbook. A generation of behavioral economics has crystallized around this idea. We get nudges, automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans, default escalation schedules. The policy apparatus assumes, at bottom, that under-saving is a self-control problem.
A new working paper from Rohwedder, Hurd, and Börsch-Supan suggests we’ve been looking in the wrong place. The authors surveyed thousands of people aged 60–74 in the United States and Singapore, two countries that both emphasize individual responsibility for retirement but differ sharply in institutional design. They asked a simple question: if you could do it over, would you have saved more? Then they tested what actually predicts the answer. Is it procrastination? Or is it something else?
The something else turns out to be economic shocks. And the difference is not subtle. Which is (depends on you, darkly or not so) funny, considering what a lot of people are saying about LLMs/AI/etc and the job market.
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What do you mean by “tested.”
The authors didn’t just ask people whether they procrastinate and whether they regret their saving. They fielded 12 separate psychometric measures: questions about putting off tasks, giving up when things get difficult, settling for mediocre results, losing motivation, preferring immediate gratification. These are the kinds of instruments the behavioral literature treats as markers of present bias and poor self-control. The prediction, grounded in decades of work from Laibson, Thaler, O’Donoghue, Rabin, and others, is straightforward: people who score high on procrastination should be more likely to wish they’d saved more.
They aren’t. Across both countries, across 21 separate statistical comparisons per dataset, the relationship between procrastination and saving regret is, to a first approximation, nonexistent. Where significant associations do appear, they frequently run in the wrong direction. In Singapore, people who report never putting off difficult things are more likely to express saving regret than those who sometimes do. The authors later confirmed these null results using a different, widely validated procrastination scale. The finding held.
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