Month: November 2018

This article went viral, getting tons of up-votes: Improving Ourselves to Death: What the self-help gurus and their critics reveal about our times. These passages stood out: In our current era of non-stop technological innovation, fuzzy wishful thinking has yielded to the hard doctrine of personal optimization. Self-help gurus need not be charlatans peddling snake… Continue reading Improving Ourselves to Death

Just two years ago possibly the most divisive and polarizing President in recent history was elected. It was pandemonium. The left-wing media was apoplectic. Anything related to Trump got thousands of retweets, comments, and likes. There was genuine fear by the left and some on the right, of America descending into full-blown fascism (even though… Continue reading What happened to the alt-right

Barry Ritholtz rebukes minimum wage critics: What Minimum-Wage Foes Got Wrong About Seattle Much of the hand-wringing was based upon a deeply flawed University of Washington study. As we noted in 2017, the study’s fatal flaw was that its analysis excluded large multistate businesses with more than one location. When thinking about the impact of… Continue reading Minimum wage

This article from cityobservatory.org is going viral: Housing can’t both be a good investment and be affordable Well, in order for your home to offer you a real profit, its price would need to increase faster than the rate of inflation. Let’s pick something decent, but not too crazy—say, annual increases of 2.5 percent, taking… Continue reading Housing can’t both be a good investment and be affordable?

In theory, Congress can override the 14th Amendment, but the odds are slim: In simple odds, the chance of any constitutional amendment being repealed would be roughly the same as a person living to 80 years old being struck by lightning during their lifetime, according to National Weather Service data. And for the Second Amendment,… Continue reading Trump and the 14th Amendment

A question that comes up on personal finance subs is, how is it possible for people in their late 20’s or early 30’s to have a lot of money, and especially given the media narrative that millennials are broke and struggling under the weight of student loans? Studies that purport negative net-worth for millennials are… Continue reading Misconceptions about Student Loans and Student Loan Debt, and How Young People Make Money