Financial education quiz answers
1. How much is spent per-person in the U.S. on consumer financial education?
Answer: Two dollars.
2. In terms of selling financial products and services, banks out-spend consumer education groups by …
Answer: $16.3 billion annually.
3. The leading advocates of consumer education, in terms of annual spending are …
Answer: Nonprofit groups, which spend $472 million a year on consumer financial education. This is almost four times the amount spent by the federal government.
A Vindication of Bobby Fischer in the Age of Computer Chess
In 1992, a 49-year-old Bobby Fischer emerged from a 20-year seclusion to play for a $5 million prize against Borris Spassky in Sveti Stefan, Yugoslavia. One of the spectators that showed up to watch the match was an 81-year-old Russian grandmaster whom Fischer had never met named Andrei Lilienthal, who was living across the border in Budapest. Fischer’s words of greeting:
“Hastings, 1934/35: the queen sacrifice against Capablanca. Brilliant!”
Meg in Debt
This is not Meg. This is a model.
Meet Meg. She’s a fan of Ben Folds Five and The Handmaid’s Tale. She has a master’s degree in lit . She posted this information on a public blog a couple of years ago. The blog has a total of two posts and no followers. It was last updated in October 2011, and its creation is apparently one in a series of plans that didn’t work out for Meg. In it, she gripes about her “$100,000 McChickens”-worth of student loan debt and her part-time job that pays $7.14 an hour. (She tells Typewriter People that she has since gotten a job as a teaching assistant, but this is temporary, and she anticipates going “back to the drawing board” soon.)
The Professor and the Lawyers: Outing 401(k) Fee Mysticism
Yale economist and law professor Ian Ayers grabbed national attention this summer when he sent letters to 6,000 401(k) sponsors, telling them they could be paying too much in fees. Continue reading
How (Some) Airlines Profit from Tragedy
On March 1, 2010, I received a phone call that changed my life forever. My dad, on government contract in South Carolina, was in the hospital. It was not clear what the issue was, but it was urgent. The evening of March 1 was spent online, trying to find an affordable airline ticket for the next day. Simply put, they were not available. I ended up spending seven hundred dollars on a two connection flight from Milwaukee to Columbia, South Carolina. One connection flights and even direct flights from Milwaukee to Columbia are available, but they were at least a hundred dollars more expensive. Continue reading Seneca’s Advice to Millenials
Lucius Annaeus Seneca 4 BC – 65 AD
There have always been badasses around, and the Stoic philosophers have a reputation as being some of the original ones (think Russell Crowe in Gladiator). As part of the research for my next book project, I have been reading Seneca’s Letters From a Stoic for the first time. Seneca was a Roman philosopher and statesman, roughly a contemporary of Christ, and a tutor and advisor to the emperor Nero, at whose hands Seneca was ultimately killed.
In Letter XV, Seneca quotes Epicurus:
The life of folly is empty of gratitude, full of anxiety: it is focused wholly on the future.
The Prison Economy: Not Just Cigarettes for …
You really can go home again if you want, but be prepared for weirdness. A typewriter fetishist blog reviewed the still-being-produced Royal Scrittore II portable manual typewriter earlier this year, with author “Richard P” noting that he ordered the machine because he wanted a typewriter fresh off one of the few remaining assembly lines before they shut down for good. The review is not flattering, nor are the images of sample type impressive. Continue reading
Advice from and Old White Dude, a Review of Arnold Bennett
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day is, in many ways, as quaint and dated as it sounds, but Arnold Bennett’s 1910 booklet is also gloriously short, less than 30 pages. In its brevity, tone, and candor it can be called a creepily prescient forerunner to today’s how-to ebooks. The slim volume is meant to enrich readers’ lives by encouraging them to cultivate a life of the mind through a regimen of study and thought implemented during evening hours they otherwise spend socializing, pipe smoking and various white pursuits of early 20th century Britain. This is a solid suggestion, no doubt, but Bennett offers it with a compelling, often overlooked argument based on the democratic nature of time. He writes: Continue reading
Is Shop Class Soulcraft? A Critical Review of Matthew Crawford
In “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” Matthew Crawford offers a interesting throwback solution to the lack of opportunity that confronts so many Americans–young and old–in this post recession era. The solution, according to Crawford, is to be found in the skilled trades. Here, I offer a deliberately critical review of Crawford’s book, but before I do so, I point out some of the insights that Crawford gives in this thoughtful, worthwhile read.