While the best practices of personal finance remain constant, the mechanics of banking, investing, borrowing, and decision making have made a massive leap forward. Technology enables these improvements. Brokerage fees have gone to zero. Mutual fund fees have declined sharply. Online tools facilitate all aspects of personal financial management, from banking to retirement planning. What's … Continue reading The transformation of personal finance
Ethics of forgiving college debt
Now that Joe Biden is the president elect, a number of politicians are demanding large-scale forgiveness of college debt as one of Biden's first initiatives. Also see here and here. There are massive ethical problems with a one-time debt forgiveness and I am stunned that senators and members of congress are so fervently pushing this. … Continue reading Ethics of forgiving college debt
The road ahead for value investing
Many academic studies find that value stocks, those which have low prices relative to their earnings or book value, tend to out-perform growth stocks (those with high prices relative to earnings or book value). This concept also makes intuitive sense. Investors who are prepared to buy stocks that are cheap, because these companies have hit … Continue reading The road ahead for value investing
The ‘Fading American Dream’?
A commonly-cited metric of economic progress is how many children are better off than their parents. In 2017, Raj Chetty and coauthors published a paper titled The Fading American Dream in which they argue that working Americans are far less likely to earn more than their parents than in previous generations. I recently saw the … Continue reading The ‘Fading American Dream’?
An optimist’s view of the future of work, part 2
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post titled An optimist's view of the future of work. A great deal is written about how workers are increasingly at risk, whether from automation, offshoring, or the apparently inexorable increase in the returns to capital vs. labor. My thesis, in that article, is that there are … Continue reading An optimist’s view of the future of work, part 2
Financial inclusion
Amidst a growing societal discussion on racism, inequality, and social conflict, we need to focus on practical ways that we can address these issues. One of the challenges for disadvantaged people is that they lack access to the key tools for managing money and building wealth. Efforts aimed at increasing access to low-cost financial services … Continue reading Financial inclusion
Real world data analysis
I have worked on data analytics for my entire career, spanning seven years of employment with NASA and more than twenty years in the private sector. While computing power has increased dramatically over these years, the central challenge remains the same: identifying and quantifying meaningful relationships in data. Especially with massive computing power, it is … Continue reading Real world data analysis
Free guide to personal finance
For years, I wanted to write a book on personal finance and financial literacy. I finally found the time and wrote my take on what people need to understand in order to be effective with money. I have gone back and forth about whether to publish the manuscript through traditional means, self publish, etc. I … Continue reading Free guide to personal finance
Radical uncertainty and COVID-19
I have been reading a very interesting book called Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers. The authors' thesis is that people, companies, and governments place far too much faith in quantitative predictions and measures. The failure of predictions and planning lies in the inherent limitations in our understanding and data. This relates to Nassim Taleb's … Continue reading Radical uncertainty and COVID-19
How we measure value and why this matters
Economics and finance largely come down to how people measure the value of things. Value is always a difficult concept to pin down because it is really about what people can agree upon at a given moment in time. Money is the epitome of agreed-upon value. Dollar bills have no inherent or use value. The … Continue reading How we measure value and why this matters
Geoff Considine on Finance and Economics 