Criticism
N.Y.U.’s Vacation Home Loans
Trachtenberg is commenting in the Times about N.Y.U. loaning out money to some faculty members and administrators to buy vacation homes.
Gotta Balance That Budget Kids
Philadelphia Public Schools have fired 3,783 employees in response to budget cuts. The Teacher Action Group would like to you see their faces.
No Discounts for Millennials
Priceonomics’s Alex Mayyasi takes a contentious stance in his post, “Why Does the Senior Citizen Discount Still Exist?” He says that the idea that senior citizens require financial help stems from high percentage of seniors who were living in poverty after the Great Depression. Federal programs like Social Security and Medicare dramatically decreased that percentage. Mayyasi now says that millennials are being screwed over by the recession and are in a vulnerable place, so maybe they should get a discount. If I made a list of things that probably would never come into existence, a discount for millennials would be on that list.
The Crazy Bag People Inside of Us
Quick, how many plastic bags do you have under your sink or stuffed in a drawer in your home? Probably a lot.
Google Island
This, by Mat Honan, is kind of incredible.
Open Thread
Who is the highest paid active public employee in your state? Answer: Probably an athletic coach of some kind.
Bad Incentives
Emily Oster is an economics professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and answers questions at The Wall Street Journal from the perspective of an economist. Her above answer is to a person who is trying to use a financial incentive ($10 a pound) to encourage his spouse to lose weight. I’m not surprised it didn’t work either.
Not All of Us Are Wasteful
Our financial lives vary, and we each have different ideas of how we want it to be. Personal finance is personal for a reason. Some of the problems we come across have to do with things we can control, namely living within our means, but a large part of it—pay discrimination, skyrocketing health care costs, the 401(k) problem—are simply out of our control and are things that typical middle class household are really dealing with. It’d be nice to recognize those problems while telling people to get out of their F-150s and get on a bike.
