Thomas C. Schelling (1980), The Public Interest, Summer 1980, pp. 94–118. Read from the publisher’s free archive (National Affairs). No DOI.
Key takeaways
- Two selves, alternating in command. “People behave sometimes as if they had two selves”, and “The two are in continual contest for control.” The example is the boy who chose to sleep with one blanket too few: the warm boy at bedtime always made the decision, and the cold boy at night always cursed it. Who is in charge depends on timing, on whether the decision is “synchronized with the command cycle”.
- Self-management is managing another. “Treating your sometime self as though it were somebody else is a ubiquitous and familiar technique of self-management.” Mittens on one’s own hands at night, wax in one’s own ears, a string on one’s own finger and a friend who polices one’s calories are all the techniques used on children, patients and recruits, turned inward. The proposed discipline is “egonomics”, and its strategic part deals with conscious behaviour.
- Time preference alone fits poorly. Explaining a lapse as a high discount rate would need one of “100 percent per hour or per minute”. The essay suggests the lapser is “not thinking of the future” and “shuts his eyes to avoid it”, rather than valuing it lower.
- Which self is authentic has no general answer. In the case of a person who asks in advance to be allowed to die and may later beg to live: “which is the authentic ‘I’?” Some pairs are easy to judge (the vicious drunk), and some are not (the dieter starving to be “movie thin” who now and then has a good meal).
- The tactics. Removing the option, avoiding cues, precautionary rules against precursors, bright lines (“zero is a more enforceable limit”), public commitment, monitoring like parole, mandatory delays, small deadlines for large tasks, and self-administered rewards and penalties. Deceit, the most common interpersonal tactic, is “peculiarly unavailable” against oneself.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the reading that stands in for Schelling’s 1984 Ely Lecture (LIT-573). That lecture is on JSTOR only. This essay is shorter, earlier and freely published, and it is Schelling’s own statement of the same programme.
It sits beside Ainslie’s précis (LIT-586). The two describe the same divided chooser. Ainslie gives a mechanism, hyperbolic discounting and bargaining among interests. Schelling gives the tactics and a taxonomy of habits, and expressly declines a theory of the self. Schelling’s “zero is a more enforceable limit” is Ainslie’s “bright line”, and his New Year’s resolution, which “raises the stakes” so that “one’s personal constitution is violated” by failure, is Ainslie’s personal rule staked on a precedent. Neither text cites the other.
Its authenticity question is the one THEORY-029 asks in the language of higher-order attitudes. Schelling asks it of time-slices: which self’s instruction should a friend obey? He gives cases on both sides and no criterion. Its self-administered reward and penalty scheme is, in self-determination theory’s terms, controlled regulation that one imposes on oneself (LIT-558). Schelling reports of it: “I tried it and found that it could” work. See NOTE-452.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.