Of course I believe in luck. How otherwise to explain the success of those you dislike? – Jean Cocteau, French writer and artist The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability. – Pierre-Simon Maquis de Laplace, French mathematician & pioneer in the field of statistics Meeting Phil…
My youngest child, Savannah, graduated from high school last week, and I found out recently that my oldest daughter, Kelsey, is expecting our first grandchild. One chapter of my life is ending and another just beginning. These events have prompted me to reminisce about when my children were small. As they were growing up one…
Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, American author, poet, and philosopher Last year I lost my cell phone on an out of state trip. I prepare taxes out of my home as a side job and we were just entering the tax season. I knew my customers would be…
Drive-in banks were established so most of the cars today could see their real owners. – E. Joseph Crossman I have long thought that cars were a great destroyer of middle-class wealth. Recently I stumbled across some evidence confirming this. The evidence came in the form of a graph created by the Wall Street Journal…
The $50,000 Dollar Tennis Game Larry Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University, expert on Social Security, and weekend-warrior tennis player. Several years ago he was playing tennis with Paul Solman, the business and economics correspondent for the PBS News Hour. I don’t know who won the tennis game but it was definitely…
“Periodic outbreaks of those two super-contagious diseases, fear and greed, will forever occur in the investment community. The timing of these epidemics will be unpredictable. And the market aberrations produced by them will be equally unpredictable, both as to duration and degree. Therefore, we never try to anticipate the arrival or departure of either disease. …
