Lore abounds not only about how people mistrust their own future preferences, but how they sometimes engage in strategic planning to outsmart the future selves that will have these preferences. Here is Ulysses facing the Sirens or Coleridge moving in with his doctor to be protected from his opium habit. We know that the stakes in this intertemporal game sometimes reach tragic proportions. Yet we can't reconcile this game with utility theory's basic meat-and-potatoes notion that people try to maximize their prospects. The irony of smart people doing stupid things – or having to outsmart themselves in order not to – appears in literature again and again, but without an explanation.

This quandary may have been one reason for the popularity of cognitive explanations, which at least stay close to intuition. The problem hasn't undermined utility theorists, but it has cramped their style. They go from success to success in areas like finance and sociobiology, where tough competition selects strongly for individuals who function like calculating machines. However, their attempts to explain self-defeating choice on a rational basis have been unconvincing; the most notable has been the effort by economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy to show how a person who sharply devalues the future might maximize her prospective pleasure by addictive behavior. Their proposal is basically that devaluation of the future leads to addictive behaviors, which further increase this devaluation.