When I come into the office, I begin by sitting down with a white pad of narrow-ruled paper (narrow-ruled, which is smaller than even college-ruled because that is how I like it), and set out everything I want to achieve that day. If I knock off the top 5 things, I consider it a success.
Mental Model: Veblen Goods In today’s installment of our mental models catalog, we are going to discuss Veblen goods, which are a special type of item that would appear, at first glance, to violate the law of supply and demand relationships to prices. Veblen goods are a type of commodity, product or service for which…
Once you begin to have success, shopping for clothes is a very different experience.
This essay on solving the trade deficit resulted from a letter I received from a reader. From August 31, 2010 through August 10, 2016, it consisted of six independent posts on the site. As part of the transformation of the site to the new, streamlined template, those six posts were combined into a single post.
Where Do Millionaires Invest Their Cash to Keep It Safe? I’ve been having a conversion about investing and money with the reader “Frat Man” in the comments section of another post. He asked: I also had one other question I have always wondered. Where do millionaires keep their money? In the sense that FDIC insurance…
Mental Model: Social Loafing If you were starting a project or business, common sense would tell you that you could produce 5x as much output if there were five people working on your goals than if there were just one person. If you are running a counseling program, ten counselors should be able to do…
On April 11th, 1823, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to John Adams. In the private correspondence, the man generally regarded to be one of the three most brilliant founding fathers confided to his fellow founder and former President, “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter”.
Countless Americans mistakenly believe that the constitution says we are a nation, “of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Though it’s a nice sentiment, many don’t realize that the line came halfway through the nation’s history in the Gettysburg Address by President Lincoln and isn’t part of our constitutional framework at all.
I happened to re-read some of Justice Scalia’s opinions tonight and in his Evans dissent, Scalia stated, “Since the Constitution of the United States says nothing about this subject, it is left to be resolved by normal democratic means”. This sentiment embodies a fear that founding father Madison believed was inevitable – that someday, someone would come along and convince people that only those rights listed in the constitution were constitutional rights.
In 1953, a great movie starring Lauren Bacall, Bette Grable and Marilyn Monroe was released called How to Marry a Millionaire. I got curious as to how much money it would take to equal the same net worth today so I did an inflation adjustment because I wanted to know how big their motivation was in the film.