What’s an acceptable level of income inequality in America? Is the current situation far too unfair, as many who lean to the political left maintain? Would ending tax breaks for people earning more than $250,000 a year …
We’ve written before about the upside of down economies: people grow closer. Now comes word of yet another silver lining in the barrage of depressing economic news in recent years: it might be good for marriages. That’s one of …
Most people are taught early to believe in what we might call “momentum morality”: the idea that good (or bad) actions lead to further good (or bad) habits. Economists and other philosophical types call these feedback loops …
In an earlier post we described research showing that people get more long-lasting satisfaction from money spent on experiences than money spent on material goods. If you read that post and took it to heart — humor us — an …
In some Big Apple circles there’s a concept referred to as “The New York City Street Tax.” This isn’t anything official. Rather, the idea is that the simple act of walking through the city—walking through any bustling city, …
A new year, a new batch of resolutions! Alas, these promises to ourselves rarely produce long-lasting results. (Depending on the source, nearly nine in 10 resolutions don’t take.) Worse, failed resolutions could be harmful if …
We were intrigued but not surprised by a recent article in the New York Times detailing troubles at Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry. Among several problems facing the Canadian tech company is an overabundance of …
Nearly all accounts about why people have the tastes and preferences that they do center around the idea that the human brain has been “wired” to have those tastes and preferences because of advantages they provided to our …
‘Tis the season … to accumulate debt, and in that spirit we thought we’d write about a pair of related and timely subjects. The first is a new study, containing findings that could help you pay off loans faster. The second is a …
The seeming economic success of this year’s Black Friday-But-Really-Thursday, judged by many as an economic win-win for business and consumers, got us wondering what we as a country have gained in terms of what psychologists …
The always-insightful Jason Zweig of The Wall Street Journal once said that great personal finance journalism is really the art of communicating the same handful of important lessons over and over again without boring people. …
There’s no question that for many (if not most) Americans, today’s economy is challenging for numerous reasons we need not list. For a lot of people, though, their sense of economic vulnerability is greater than their actual …
