It is time to make another visit to the bounty of information that our nations’ intrepid polling companies gather for our enjoyment. I usually start these visits with a short proviso about how survey data about what people say to strangers who call them on the phone can’t hold 
a candle to data about what people actually do. Often I point out that survey respondents tend to be neither candid nor thoughtful in their responses.
Today I am going to skip all that. I will just give examples.
The Rich are Optimistic?
On July 12 Gallup found that Upper-Income Americans See Living Standards Improving. Depending on your outlook, that might have given you a sense of second order optimism, after all, those rich folks must know more than the rest of us, or perhaps bitterness of the-rich-just-get-richer sort.
In either case the feeling was likely short-lived because four days later The New York Times carried the front page headline Wealthy Reduce Buying in a Blow to the Recovery. The Times story was largely a compilation of anecdotes and quotes from assorted “analysts” who like to see their names in print. But the gist was that rich folks are pessimistic enough about the future to cut back on spending.
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Today is the first anniversary of the posting of one of my few evergreen items, When to Start Collecting Social Security. Coincidentally, just yesterday I
came across an item in Smart Money that made me realize I needed to update my analysis to include an interesting wrinkle in the Social Security rules.
To recap, a person is allowed to decide when to start drawing Social Security payments from the government. You can get them at 62, at 70, or anyplace in between. There is an obvious attraction to getting it sooner rather than later, and about 45% of those eligible choose to start getting the checks on their 62nd birthday.
The reason that the other 55% hold off is that the older you are when you start, the bigger the checks become. The payments for a person starting at 70 are about 70% higher than for a person starting at 62. (But relatively few hold out all the way until 70. The median age is 63.)
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Yesterday was quite a news day. BP capped the well. Congress passed what AP headline writers termed a “stiff financial reform bill.” And the SEC announced a $550 million settlement with Goldman Sachs. The coincidence of those second and third items is quite remarkable, don’t you think?
The SEC made its announcement within hours of the bill passing, while the stock market was still open. Generally, 
news like that is kept under a tight lid while the stocks concerned trade, ideally until early the next morning. But then the bill and the settlement would have been in different news cycles.
I must say, as an aside, that I am saddened by the settlement. The SEC’s case was largely imaginary and I am particularly irked by the $250 million going to a pair of European banks, apparently to compensate them for being idiots. I am sure that had Goldman gone to court it would have, eventually, won. But truth and justice are sometimes subordinate to good business. $550M is about two weeks of profit for Goldman, and if the deal comes with a gentleman’s agreement to be left alone for a few years then it was money well spent. Goldman’s market cap is up more than $5 billion on the news.
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I am always amused by things that started as a mocking joke but then, through repetition, slowly became 
unfunny enough that they were taken seriously. The word “software,” once used derisively by engineers who built actual electronics to refer to the work of their programmer counterparts, is a good example. Daylight savings time, first proposed in a satirical essay by Ben Franklin in 1784 is another.
To this list of the absurd becoming ordinary we can now add the idea that richer Americans should arrange to die in 2010 to save on estate taxes.
In May 2008 the Wall Street Journal ran an article with the eye-catching title of Death by Taxes: Seniors May Plan Their Demises to Maximize Their Bequests. But the author made clear his humorous intent in the opening paragraph.
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Regular readers of BMA, and I know there are dozens of you out there, know that there is nothing I like more than science. Particularly science extrapolated from a single experimental result and recounted in blogs.
For example, just last week the NYT’s Economix blog asked Do Hungry People Take Bigger Financial Risks? According to some scientists in the UK, hungry people, or at least 19 guys in their mid-20’s who hadn’t eaten lately, tend to take more risks. What’s more, the blog post describes an experiment different than the one in the paper that it links to, which tells me that there must be two scientific studies out there supporting this exciting new finding.
It is exciting because it confirms a previously held belief of mine, that the problem we have in this country is too much food and not enough risk taking.
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a candle to data about what people actually do. Often I point out that survey respondents tend to be neither candid nor thoughtful in their responses. 
College, Government, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
July 30, 2010 11:59 am | 
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