The Difference Between Food and Money

From some spam I got yesterday:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has shown interest in books and magazines on cooking, you might like to know that you can get a $5.00 instant discount on SmartMoney this month.

I’m not entirely sure what is going on here. It’s possible that it’s just a mail-merge typo, that the text "cooking" was accidentally put in where Amazon meant to write "finance and investing." I like eating as much as the next guy, but describing me as somebody "who has shown interest in books and magazines on cooking" is quite a reach. On the other hand, I do keep buying books about finance, so flogging SmartMoney to me makes some sense.

But there is another, less likely, explanation that I would rather was true. I would rather that the algorithms at Amazon that tell them that people who bought A might like to buy B have found that personal finance and cooking/nutrition/dieting are similar topics with similar audiences.

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Pound Wise and Penny Foolish

A few days ago there was an encouraging little post on The Wallet about how we’re spending more on life’s smaller luxuries in the face of the Great Recession. I call it encouraging because I think it is the direction most people should go in their spending, more on the small stuff, less on the big things, and I like reading positive articles about how consumers are doing this. Not that I really think this is going on.

My theory, admittedly not based on much science, is that we’re happier if we spend more on the smaller things we like than on the big things. A great big house may indeed add joy to our lives, but not as much as the equivalent in nights out on the town. (Or rounds of golf, or manicures or whatever floats your boat.)

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Curmudgeon’s Law of Numerical Fiction

Regular readers of Bad Money Advice will not be surprised to hear that I prefer numbers to words. (Allegations that I prefer computers to people, however, are greatly exaggerated.) I think this is a natural inclination. Any halfway thoughtful person favors evidence over feeling, and numbers have the appearance of being hard facts.

But not all published numbers are factual, even when widely repeated in respectable places. Which presents a difficulty for us lovers of digits. How can we separate the real from the realish? Not to worry, because today I am revealing for the first time my Law of Numerical Fiction which will help identify the imposters.

To be successful, that is, repeated widely as if it were true, a fake number must satisfy three criteria.

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Time for College Reform?

Our elected leaders are currently working up a head of steam to reform healthcare. Good luck with that. The mere fact that they vaguely call the effort "reform" tells you it’s going to be a very steep hill to climb. What nobody wants to say out loud is that the big problem with healthcare is that we spend so much on it, and we can’t spend meaningfully less on it without getting less of it. Like I said, good luck.

In the US, we spend about 12.5% of GDP on healthcare, a higher percentage than any other developed country. However, I think we can all agree we get rather a lot for our money. In contrast, we spend 2.6% of GDP on higher education, also the highest developed world percentage. And of course, we get something for our money here too. I for one am glad our doctors went to medical school. But dollar for dollar I think we’re getting a lot more value from healthcare.

Why do we spend so much on higher education? And why isn’t it considered a crisis worthy of reform? Part of the problem is a cultural attitude that higher education is a kind of higher calling. Attending college is a good thing in an abstract and noble way that doesn’t lend itself to cost benefit analysis. Asking if it is a wise investment in dollar terms just seems tawdry.

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On Money and Psychology

One of several recurring sub-themes here at Bad Money Advice is that some givers of personal finance advice, particularly the mass market gurus, say things that can only be justified assuming an irrational audience incapable of acting in their own best interest.

So, for example, when Suze Orman tells her readers that they should absolutely never borrow from their 401k account to pay off a credit card balance, I give her a hard time for giving terrible advice based on the assumption that her audience has no willpower and will merely run up the credit card balance again.

But when I criticize the gurus for giving bad money advice that is, in fact, bad psychotherapy, I do not mean that everybody ought to be able to behave in a perfectly rational manner around money. Quite the opposite. We are all merely human, not uber-logical Vulcans. We act sub-optimally around money (and everything else) for a variety of emotional and behavioral reasons.

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