A New Hampshire man who thought he had a decent ball toss says he lost his life savings—or about $2,600—playing a carnival game he claims was rigged.
Really? Was there any doubt about the chance and how these game operators make their money? Unfortunately, this is not uncommon and is an example of sunk costs and why they should be ignored. There are only two other games that have lower odds of winning and are therefore more corrupt.
| | |
|
Sometimes it lasts in love,
And sometimes it hurts instead.
What Adele is referring to in this refrain from her song, Someone Like You, is that she failed to diversify her relationship portfolio. She went "all in" in her romance and rather than her investment paying off (i.e., it lasted in love), it turned out to be a bad investment and it hurt instead.
Much like a stock portfolio where you hold a large number of stocks of companies in different sectors, you should also diversify your relationship portfolio and maintain solid friendships with other people. If one of them leaves, or you find that a relationship with one of the friends is not working out, there are plenty of other friends with whom to associate. Once you are fairly certain that that special one is really "that special one," then maybe it's time to take a big risk and go all in on that person, committing yourself only to him or her. (Hey, you wouldn't argue that going all in on Wal-Mart and buying only Wal-Mart stock is a good investment, would you?)
Now, Adele was in her twenties when she was engaged and maybe to her she felt that he was "that special one." Maybe she felt that it's time to get married and that the marginal cost of searching for someone better exceeded the marginal benefit to her were she to find someone better. Consequently, she took the risk and went all in.
This is not the case with adolescents, and a recent study demonstrates why teens should diversify their relationship portfolio and not go all in and date.
Adolescence is when children first begin to push boundaries on the way to adulthood. While they may think they know what’s best for them, they sometimes lack the foresight to see the consequences of their actions.
Study participants who didn’t date had better overall academic performance, while those who dated earlier in middle school were twice as likely to begin using alcohol and drugs in high school, the researchers said.
All right, so maybe that's a lot of correlation rather than causation. Children who tend to date in middle school exhibit impulsive behavior in all areas of their lives, including drinking, drugging, dating and school.
“A likely explanation for the worse educational performance of early daters is that these adolescents start dating early as part of an overall pattern of high-risk behaviors,” Orpinas said in a press release.
Other amplifying factors include the emotional difficulties teens often face in middle and high school: bullying, depression, and anxiety. All of these have been linked to higher rates of smoking, drinking, and drug use.
In other words, if you've hired an advisor to manage your portfolio, ask him or her when she first began dating. If they say middle school, take your money and run before they lose it all in risky investments.
So the dating isn't the cause of the social problems, but is likely a response to other troubling factors in the adolescent's life. If you see your middle or high school-aged child dating, maybe they're looking for something currently lacking at home. Family is the best relationship asset to hold while growing up, but if kids find family an unsafe investment that's not paying off, they'll go looking for other, more lucrative ways of realizing an emotional return.
I think it's all this investment jargon that sustains the romance in my relationship.
| | |
|
Men and women who rise to managerial positions face many similar challenges, but there are unique complexities in the female-to-female workplace dynamic. Studies dating back nearly 20 years examine both the differing communications styles and skills of female and male managers, and how this impacts their employees' job satisfaction. Data suggest that female employees reject women bosses who behave in a "masculine" or traditionally managerial way. Women employees, when surveyed about qualities they desire in their female bosses, react positively to empathy, support, sensitivity, and self-disclosure, which could well be characterized as historic female stereotypes. The attributes generally associated with male leaders — being persuasive, analytical, and action-oriented — are not influential in how women perceive their female superiors.
We might anticipate these stereotypes to change as more women enter organizations at a professional level, but biases change very slowly. More recent studies have made similar observations that "some skills and behaviors, may be considered essential for female managers but not for male managers." Women both expect more qualities, typically labeled "feminine," from their female superiors and give them lower ratings if found lacking. Women do not hold their male bosses to these same standards when evaluating them.
The catch-22 is that to advance in male-dominant organizations, women often must develop the more traditionally male traits. They generally attain their position through a heavy dose of the traditional male qualities we associate with success — determination, decisiveness, tireless work ethic, and effective use of authority. They repress their feminine qualities, only to find that the women whom they lead demand those more compassionate skills.
Story here. As I've argued before, unlike their male peers, from a very young age females are gender typed into behaviors that are not typically valued in labor markets. What this article is saying is that if they deviate from these roles and act more like males when they take on supervisory roles, they are scorned by the female employees under them.
| | |
|
Dr. John Gottman, director of Seattle University’s “Love Lab” and founder of the Gottman Institute, has studied thousands of couples for decades. By dissecting every nuance of their rapport from eye rolls to shrugs, he can predict with 94 percent accuracy whether a relationship will eventually dissolve. Four traits turned out to be the most reliable predictors of a breakup (especially when they’re combined in some fashion).
And just what are those traits?
[C]riticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Criticism involves attacking your partner’s personality or character by saying something like, “you never help with the dishes” or “why are you always so late?” Contempt involves putting your partner down (i.e., “you’re stupid for believing that”). Defensiveness often involves rebuffing your partner’s complaint with one of your own (“I may be late, but you’re way too uptight about it.”) Stonewalling involves clamming up and refusing to hash things out with your partner at all.
I concur with all of these. And I also agree with Terri Orbuch's recommendation for creating a happy marriage. I'm a lucky man!
In her research, she found that 67 percent of happy couples say their spouse “often” made them feel good about themselves, whereas only 27 percent of unhappy couples could claim the same thing.
| | |
|
The best strategy for negotiating, either as a buyer or as a seller, is being willing to walk away from a deal. But being willing to walk away from a deal also means being able to walk away from a deal.
For example, if you are negotiating the purchase of a new car and are indifferent between the one about which you are negotiating and another or others, you have bargaining leverage since you can walk. If you're dead set on that car, be willing to pay a premium.
The same applies to the seller. If the seller of the car has more than one prospective buyer, she has leverage since she can walk away. If there are no other potential buyers, she better begin accepting lower offers.
In yesterday's New York Times, Jessica Bennet explains a primary reason for why women earn less than men.
For years, legislators and women’s advocates have been seeking solutions. In many ways, the wage gap is a complicated problem tied to culture, tradition and politics. But one part of it can be traced to a simple fact: many women just don’t negotiate, or are penalized if they do. In fact, they are one-quarter as likely as men to do so, according to statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. So rather than wax academic about the issue, couldn’t we simply teach women some negotiation skills?
So one remedy for the wage gap is simply to teach women how to be better negotiators.
At Mount St. Vincent, the Smart Start workshop is broken into sections: understanding the wage gap, learning one’s worth on the market, and practical negotiation, in which students use role-playing in job-offer situations.
Women learn never to name a salary figure first, and to provide a range, not a number, if they’re pressed about it. They are coached not to offer up a figure from their last job, unless explicitly asked. The use of terms like “initial offer” — it’s not final! — is pounded into them. And, perhaps most important, they learn never, ever, to say yes to an offer immediately.
“I can’t tell you how many times I hear stories of women who go into a negotiation saying, ‘Oh my gosh, thank you so much, I’ll take it!’” says Ms. Houle, noting that one student she coached even hugged her boss. “Here these women are, more educated than ever, incurring incredible debt to get that education, and they’re going to take whatever they’re offered. It’s like, ‘No, no, no!’ “
This, along with other reasons, explains much of the gender wage inequality we observe in this country. But there are still other reasons that lead to women earning less than men, none of them having anything to do with discrimination against females.
First, for women who do work—and this has increased considerably since the 1950s—they have typically been the secondary income earners for their families. This means that a wife has a more inelastic supply curve for her labor services relative to her working husband. This exacerbates the problem of women being poor negotiators. For example, a married man may seek a new job and, since moving anywhere is usually an option for him while searching, he has many companies from around the U.S., and even the world, bidding for his services. Once he chooses a job and moves his family to that location, the wife is now limited in her job search to that geographical location. She has fewer companies competing for her services relative to her husband.
Second, and very important, women are gender-typed from a young age into adopting roles and skills that are not necessarily desired in labor markets. I explain this here. It is also demonstrated in a different way by these commercials. What this does is encourage women into self-selecting careers that typically pay less than careers where risk-taking and discovery and innovation are desired.
The solution is not to impose more legislation, which simply makes it less attractive for firms to hire women, especially the least skilled women. Instead, we must do a better job of socializing females, from a very young age, into adopting roles that have high labor market potential.
| | |
|
Bolstering my earlier argument, Brian Palmer provides some relavent evidence.
According to data compiled by Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, guns killed an average of 4.92 victims per mass murder in the United States during the 20th century, just edging out knives, blunt objects, and bare hands, which killed 4.52 people per incident. Fire killed 6.82 people per mass murder, while explosives far outpaced the other options at 20.82. Of the 25 deadliest mass murders in the 20th century, only 52 percent involved guns.
The U.S. mass murder rate does not seem to rise or fall with the availability of automatic weapons. It reached its highest level in 1929, when fully automatic firearms were expensive and mostly limited to soldiers and organized criminals. The rate dipped in the mid-1930s, staying relatively low before surging again in the 1970s through 1990s. Some criminologists attribute the late-century spike to the potential for instant notoriety: Beginning with Charles Whitman’s1966 shooting spree from atop a University of Texas tower, mass murderers became household names.
Emphasis mine.
Again, eliminating one means of satisfying their actual end will not put an end to, or reduce the incidences of, mass murders. If the end is notoriety, then only after the media stops satisfying it are we likely to see a reduction.
| | |
|
My statement in this post that rather than banning guns we should instead ban the media was hyperbole. Please don't take it seriously.
The point I was trying to make is one that Ronald Coase made almost forty years ago. When I hear media pundits argue that the most recent attack by some personality defect with a gun is renewed fodder for banning guns, there's a better case to be made for banning the media. The media's sensation with these stories - constantly plastering the perpetrator's picture on the front pages of newspapers or on television screens, or showing repeatedly pictures of the tormented faces of the family of a victim, or constantly running banners like "Tragedy In Colorado," etc. - perpetuates this type of behavior by fulfilling the perpetrator's objective(s). This makes it far more attractive for the next personality defect looking to make a statement to follow suit. Therefore, the media deserves more blame for perpetuating violent events like this than even the most negligent gun seller. If it's cause to ban guns because someone with a personality defect shoots people, then it also must be cause to ban the media.
Neither, of course, are desired, with both amendments to the Bill of Rights essential to a free society. But that's just the point: the Second Amendment is just as essential to protecting freedoms as is the First.
| | |
|
Lower the cost of something and people consume more of it. Tax the things you want less of and subsidize the things you want more of. Do these basic premises of economics apply to welfare? Apparently so.
The graph below shows the percentage of two-parent families within each income quartile. Although it has declined for all income groups since 1970, the decline has been most precipitous for the bottom quartile.
Income inequality has been increasing over the past 40 to 50 years. Children raised in single-family homes suffer a host of social problems and are far more likely to live their adult lives in the bottom quintile. Citing research, Jason DeParle notes,
Changes in family structure may explain anywhere from 15 to 40 percent of the increased inequality in recent decades.
Let's stop this insanity by not subsidizing socially and personally destructive behavior.
Here is DeParle's article in the New York Times.
| | |
|
Researchers had participants sit in chairs at tables. Some sat in chairs that wobbled and tables that also wobbled, while some sat in sturdy chairs at sturdy tables.
Once in their chairs, participants were asked to judge the stability of the relationships of four celebrity couples: Barack and Michelle Obama, David and Victoria Beckham, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis. They did this by rating how likely they thought it was, on a scale of one to seven, that a couple would break up in the next five years. A score of one meant “extremely unlikely to dissolve”. A score of seven meant “extremely likely to dissolve”.
- - - -
The results reveal that just as cold drinks lead to perceptions of social conditions being cold, tinkering with feelings of physical stability leads to perceptions of social instability. Participants who sat in wobbly chairs at wobbly tables gave the celebrity couples an average stability score of 3.2 while those whose furniture did not wobble gave them 2.5.
Story here.
| | |
|
