andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-8 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen reviews a recent book, “Lifecyle Investing,” by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff, two professors of management at Yale. The book recommends that young adults take out loans to buy stocks and then hold these stocks for many years to prepare for retirement. What I’m wondering is: What’s the goal of writing this sort of book? The main audience has got to be young adults (and their parents) who are already pretty well fixed, financially. Students at Yale, for example. And the book must be intended for people who are already beyond the standard recommendations of personal-investment books (pay off your credit card debt, don’t waste so much money on restaurant meals and fancy clothes, buy 1 used car instead of 2 new ones, etc). Basically it sounds like they’re talking to people who have a lot of money but want to make sure that they retire rich rather than merely middle-class. I can’t say that I’m morally opposed to helping the rich get richer. After all, I’m not out the
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 The book recommends that young adults take out loans to buy stocks and then hold these stocks for many years to prepare for retirement. [sent-2, score-1.479]
2 The main audience has got to be young adults (and their parents) who are already pretty well fixed, financially. [sent-4, score-0.334]
3 And the book must be intended for people who are already beyond the standard recommendations of personal-investment books (pay off your credit card debt, don’t waste so much money on restaurant meals and fancy clothes, buy 1 used car instead of 2 new ones, etc). [sent-6, score-1.123]
4 Basically it sounds like they’re talking to people who have a lot of money but want to make sure that they retire rich rather than merely middle-class. [sent-7, score-0.649]
5 I can’t say that I’m morally opposed to helping the rich get richer. [sent-8, score-0.617]
6 After all, I’m not out there lobbying to cut my own salary, and I teach at Columbia, where I have no problem encouraging students to go into well-paying jobs in applied statistics. [sent-9, score-0.254]
7 But I can’t really see what would motivate somebody to write a whole book on helping rich kids prepare for retirement. [sent-10, score-1.225]
8 I can see how people might want to buy such a book, and how it might make economic sense to publish it, and how it could get reviewed in the New York Times, but who’d care enough about the topic to write the book in the first place? [sent-11, score-0.808]
9 (The book might sell well but I can’t imagine it will make the authors rich, so I doubt it’s simply a financial motivation. [sent-13, score-0.421]
10 It’s also hard for me to believe they’re planning to use this book as a foundation for a lucrative consulting business, although maybe that’s what they’re thinking. [sent-14, score-0.563]
11 Perhaps as an economist he is thinking of this as a purely technical problem without questioning the larger goals. [sent-18, score-0.077]
12 Just to be clear on this: I’m not saying that it’s morally wrong to give financial advice to rich people (or even to “rich kids,” which somehow sounds even worse). [sent-22, score-0.684]
13 The question is why would two intellectually able economists, who can study anything they want, bother to write a book on the topic? [sent-23, score-0.526]
14 (And, yes, you could ask why I am bothering to write a blog entry on the question. [sent-24, score-0.327]
15 But I have a good answer to that, which is that it was bugging me, and a blog entry is the perfect vehicle for writing about something that bugs you. [sent-25, score-0.292]
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen reviews a recent book, “Lifecyle Investing,” by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff, two professors of management at Yale. The book recommends that young adults take out loans to buy stocks and then hold these stocks for many years to prepare for retirement. What I’m wondering is: What’s the goal of writing this sort of book? The main audience has got to be young adults (and their parents) who are already pretty well fixed, financially. Students at Yale, for example. And the book must be intended for people who are already beyond the standard recommendations of personal-investment books (pay off your credit card debt, don’t waste so much money on restaurant meals and fancy clothes, buy 1 used car instead of 2 new ones, etc). Basically it sounds like they’re talking to people who have a lot of money but want to make sure that they retire rich rather than merely middle-class. I can’t say that I’m morally opposed to helping the rich get richer. After all, I’m not out the
Introduction: Charles Murray wrote a much-discussed new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” David Frum quotes Murray as writing, in an echo of now-forgotten TV personality Tucker Carlson , that the top 5% of incomes “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.” [I’ve interjected a “perhaps” into the title of this blog post to indicate that I don’t have the exact Murray quote here so I’m relying on David Frum’s interpretation.] Frum does me the favor of citing Red State Blue State as evidence, and I’d like to back this up with some graphs. Frum writes: Say “top 5%” to Murray, and his imagination conjures up everything he dislikes: coastal liberals listening to NPR in their Lexus hybrid SUVs. He sees that image so intensely that no mere number can force him to remember that the top 5% also includes the evangelical Christian assistant coach of a state university football team. . . . To put it i
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Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would
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Introduction: From the exit polls: This is all pretty obvious but it seemed worth posting because some people still don’t seem to get it. For example, Jay Cost, writing in the Weekly Standard: The Democratic party now dominates the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as well as the wealthiest neighborhoods in the most powerful cities. And yet Republicans are still effectively castigated as the party of the rich. They are not — at least not any more than the Democratic party is. Arguably, both the Democrats and the Republicans are “the party of the rich.” But Republicans more so than Democrats (see above graph, also consider the debates over the estate tax and upper-income tax rates). Cost writes: Sure, the GOP favors tax rate reductions to generate economic growth, but the Democratic party has proven itself ready, willing, and able to dole out benefits to the well-heeled rent-seekers who swarm Washington, D.C. looking for favors from Uncle Sam. But he’s missing the point. The par
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen reviews a recent book, “Lifecyle Investing,” by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff, two professors of management at Yale. The book recommends that young adults take out loans to buy stocks and then hold these stocks for many years to prepare for retirement. What I’m wondering is: What’s the goal of writing this sort of book? The main audience has got to be young adults (and their parents) who are already pretty well fixed, financially. Students at Yale, for example. And the book must be intended for people who are already beyond the standard recommendations of personal-investment books (pay off your credit card debt, don’t waste so much money on restaurant meals and fancy clothes, buy 1 used car instead of 2 new ones, etc). Basically it sounds like they’re talking to people who have a lot of money but want to make sure that they retire rich rather than merely middle-class. I can’t say that I’m morally opposed to helping the rich get richer. After all, I’m not out the
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen reviews a recent book, “Lifecyle Investing,” by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff, two professors of management at Yale. The book recommends that young adults take out loans to buy stocks and then hold these stocks for many years to prepare for retirement. What I’m wondering is: What’s the goal of writing this sort of book? The main audience has got to be young adults (and their parents) who are already pretty well fixed, financially. Students at Yale, for example. And the book must be intended for people who are already beyond the standard recommendations of personal-investment books (pay off your credit card debt, don’t waste so much money on restaurant meals and fancy clothes, buy 1 used car instead of 2 new ones, etc). Basically it sounds like they’re talking to people who have a lot of money but want to make sure that they retire rich rather than merely middle-class. I can’t say that I’m morally opposed to helping the rich get richer. After all, I’m not out the
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