Once you internalize a simple truth: that all behavior makes sense with sufficient information, the world looks a lot less crazy (although infinitely more complex). The problem is we rarely have access to the full set of variables driving someone’s decisions. Understanding this is not just an intellectual exercise. It’s a model for navigating the social, financial, and professional realms with insight to make sense of the world and get better outcomes from our teams and users, even have better relationships. In social contexts every interaction is imbued with subtext. Many assume others operate under the same rules they do, but each person carries a unique script shaped by their experiences and values. Instead of asking, ‘why are they acting like this’ we can try, ‘what might I not know about their world?

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Stocks don’t know that you own them. The market is never out to get you. When you personalize the market’s moves, you fall into the trap of trying to be right rather than trying to make money. Constantly worrying about outcomes that are completely out of your control, especially in the short term, is asking for trouble from Mr. Market. It’s bad enough that investors get dinged in their pocketbooks when they take losses. Don’t compound the issue by letting your ego make things far worse. You have to invest in the markets as they are, not as you wish them to be. 

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Poker has a cheating problem. Several recent schemes were uncovered involving poker players at casinos allegedly using miniature cameras, concealed in personal electronics, to spot cards. Should players everywhere be concerned?

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An interactive map that shows when the sun would rise and fall in your area if daylight savings was removed.

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Adrian Wojnarowski on retirement and what’s important in life:

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Daily or near-daily use of marijuana increased from less than 1 million Americans in 1992 to about 18 million in 2022—surpassing daily or near daily drinkers for the first time ever:

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The monthly inflows into U.S. stocks in November were the highest since the peak of the tech bubble in 2000.

12-month forward P/E ratios relative to the last 20 years. The U.S. is off the chart expensive, even when including Wall Street analysis aggressive “forward” (estimates) of earnings over the coming year.

No matter how you measure it, foreign stocks trade at half the valuation of US stocks:

It’s not just multiple expansion that created the outperformance. The U.S. also experienced much stronger earnings vs. the rest of the world over the last 15 years (the denominator in the P/E ratio):

The percentage of respondents that expect U.S. stocks to rise over the next 12 months. New record-shattering levels of bullish excitement:

The market cap (price investors are paying to own the U.S. stock market) is rising much faster than the profits relative to the rest of the world:

Jonathan Haidt wrote one of the most important books of the year, The Anxious Generation, about how toxic and destructive social media is on children’s lives. His other major focus of the book is how much it helps young kids to have the ability to play freely without adult supervision.

He wrote an article this week about how terrible social media is for all of society, not just children: Why The Past 10 Years Of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.

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Some interesting facts from 2024:

• Almost 20% of S&P 500 CEOs spent part of their careers at either GE or Procter & Gamble.
• The Shanghai Stock Exchange composite rose 105% in one day in 1992.
• In 2023, millionaires accounted for 1.5% of the adult population analyzed, and the U.S. had 38% of all millionaires.
• 1 million people now owe more than $200,000 in federal student loans.
• Roughly 50% college graduates have jobs that don’t use their degrees.
• Around 45% of America’s politicians are over the age of 60. That is a higher proportion than any other country in the OECD, where the average is 19%.
• While only 4% of the world’s population, the U.S. often accounts for half or more of worldwide revenue for a new pharmaceutical drug.
• If you shuffle a deck of cards, most likely that combination has never been shuffled by anyone, in history, ever.

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Cal Newport tried to summarize all the major ideas he focuses on in his books and newsletters in one location, with ideas like:

• Treat cognitive context shifts as “productivity poison.” The more you switch your attention from one target (say, a report you’re writing) to another (say, an inbox check), the more exhausted and dumber you become. Focus is like a superpower in most knowledge work jobs. Train this ability. Protect deep work on your calendar.
• Your phone should be used as a tool, not a constant companion. To accomplish this: (1) keep your phone plugged into the same spot when at home (instead of having it with you); and (2) remove all apps from your phone where someone makes more money the more you use it. Most people don’t need to use social media. If you really need to use it — e.g., for professional purposes — use it on a web browser on your laptop, and spend at most an hour a week logged in, as that’s enough for 99% of legitimate uses. There are better ways to be entertained, find news, and connect with people. Kids under the age of 16 shouldn’t have unrestricted access to the internet. Their brains aren’t ready for it.
• In building a meaningful and fulfilling life, it’s usually better to work backwards from a broad vision of your ideal lifestyle than it is to work forward toward a singular grand goal (e.g., a “dream job” or radical location change) that you hope will make everything better.
• Generative AI won’t really change our daily lives in a massive way until it leaves the chatbot format and becomes more integrated into specific tools. The biggest technology story everyone is ignoring is the end of screens. Within the next decade, AR glasses will replace essentially every screen currently in our lives — phones, laptops, tablets, computer monitors, and televisions. 

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Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist and associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has studied the most efficient way to board a plane. That method involves boarding passengers in alternating rows. In one version, you begin with the traveler sitting in the window seat of the last row of the plane. The next person boards two rows away, and so on, switching between each side of the plane, and working from the window to the aisle seat.

The fastest way to deplane, Steffen says, is to employ this boarding method in reverse. Under the current row-by-row method, an entire plane full of people might end up waiting for one person who struggles to take down or manage luggage. The alternating row method would allow more travelers to step into the aisle and take their bags.

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Have we reached peak PreCheck? With more than 40 million people enrolled in the government’s Trusted Traveler program, passengers are wondering whether the expedited security program has become too popular – and too slow.

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For most drugs, expiration dates are about three years after the day they’re produced, however, many drugs retain much of their potency for a lot longer than three years. There’s an obvious disincentive for manufacturers. Proving that certain products have much longer shelf lives than we assume would mean less frequent re-upping, which would decrease sales.

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Confirmation bias is a deeply human tendency to favor evidence that supports what we already believe while ignoring or downplaying evidence that contradicts it, even when the consequences are expected to be terrible. In simple words, it’s like wearing special glasses that only let us see what we want to see. When we believe something, our brain naturally looks for information that proves we’re right and ignores anything that suggests we might be wrong. There are numerous ways this negatively impacts us with investing.

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Since their introduction as an asset class in 1988, emerging market equities have outperformed developed markets:

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The anti-foreign-stock drumbeat has grown louder with each additional year that international markets underperform U.S. shares. Indeed, even though foreign stocks beat U.S. shares in the 1970s, 1980s and 2000s, there are folks today who argue there’s no reason to own foreign shares. Before you throw in the towel, ask yourself six questions:

• 1. If U.S. stocks had lousy returns for 15 years, would you abandon them?
• 2. If U.S. multinationals are a good substitute for investing abroad, why don’t they perform like large-cap foreign stocks? 
• 3. Yes, foreign companies offer fewer legal protections and greater business risk. But isn’t this already reflected in share prices? 
• 4. If foreign stocks are riskier, shouldn’t they offer higher returns?
• 5. If you’re an indexer happy to hold U.S. stocks according to their market value, shouldn’t you also be willing to allocate among countries on the same basis?
• 6. What if you’re wrong?

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U.S. stocks (the S&P 500) have taken out the 2021 bubble high in the CAPE price to earnings ratio. U.S. stocks are now more expensive than any moment in history, outside a brief period around the 2000 tech bubble peak:

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The S&P 500 has now crossed above the 2021 AND 2000 tech bubble peak for the price to book ratio:

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The price to earnings ratio for companies outside the U.S. relative to the S&P 500 (U.S. companies) continues to diverge dramatically (chart on the left below showing how undervalued foreign stocks are relative to U.S. stocks). In addition, the income you receive (dividends) for holding foreign stocks continues to increase relative to U.S. companies (the chart on the right):

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The market cap of U.S. stocks is now over 200% of GDP, making U.S. stocks the most expensive in history relative to the size of the economy:

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Through a friend, he heard about a firm called Yield Wealth and the “guaranteed” 15.25% return it was offering to investors on some products. In March, Whitacre withdrew his entire 401(k) from Fidelity—$763,094.21—and rolled it over into an individual retirement account with Yield, which was affiliated with a firm called Next Level Holdings. Now Whitacre, like hundreds of other investors who altogether put at least $50 million into these products, wonders if he’ll ever see his money again. Many of these people may be in desperate tax trouble.

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The share of U.S. 12–17-year-olds having experienced depression in the past year has risen from 7.9 percent in 2006 to 18.1 percent in 2023. The share of teens who had reported a major depressive episode was particularly high among Multiracial (24.4 percent) respondents in 2023, followed by white adolescents (19.6), Asian (13.7 percent) and Black teens (13.3 percent).

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37% of people ages 18 to 29 (and 21% of all adults) get their news from influencers.

• Americans aged 18 to 34 watch less than five hours of live and timeshifted TV per week.
• 50 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds in the U.S. say that they don’t watch any traditional TV!
• At the other end of the scale, those aged 65 and older watch more than 40 hours on average.

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The last time emerging markets were doing this badly the term “emerging markets” hadn’t been coined yet. That spells opportunity, and the greatest spoils might go to those investors who are the boldest and also willing to look past that poorly defined category. Emerging markets outperformed developed market stocks in the century’s first decade as commodity prices boomed and the tech and housing bubbles dented the U.S. market. Today, though, they are much cheaper as a multiple of earnings.

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International stocks have performed so poorly that Bank of America analysts think the time is right to buy Chinese and European stocks. They reason that bad sentiment is bound to reverse after getting so extreme. The price performance of U.S. stocks relative to international stocks hit a 75-year high, the bank found. So far there hasn’t been much of a reversal. 

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US stocks have been outperforming international stocks for 16 years running, and by a huge margin. The result: we’re now more than 3 standard deviations above the mean in terms of historical US outperformance.

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What has performed better than U.S. stocks and bonds this century? Surprisingly, gold has.

A study found that A.I. chatbots defeated doctors at diagnosing illnesses, even the test group of doctors that were using a chatbot for assistance. ChatGPT-4, from the company OpenAI, scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent. The study showed more than just the chatbot’s superior performance. It unveiled doctors’ sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they made, even when a chatbot potentially suggests a better one.

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The only thing worse than not making life-changing money is losing the life-changing money that you just made. Why is it so hard to hold on to the money we made? Because hitting a home run on an investment is euphoric. And beyond the dopamine rush, it strokes your ego, making you feel smart. Those good feelings cloud your judgement. Financial returns are a seductive feedback mechanism. When something you invest in goes up by a lot, you feel like a genius, and you want to experience that rush again. And because your last bet was correct, you grow more confident, so you decide to double down on another trade.

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AI-generated influencers based on stolen images of real-life adult content creators are flooding social media. It is now trivially easy to make these accounts and monetize them using an assortment of off-the-shelf AI tools and apps. What was once a niche problem on the platform has industrialized in scale, and it shows what social media may become in the near future: a space where AI-generated content eclipses that of humans.

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$500,000 Pay, Predictable Hours: How Dermatology Became the ‘It’ Job in Medicine. Americans’ newfound obsession with skin care has medical students flocking to this specialty. Medical residency applications for dermatology slots are up 50% over the past five years, with women flooding the zone. Dermatologists earn a median $541,000 a year. Pediatricians, by contrast, earn a median $258,000 annually. Given the infrequency of skin emergencies, far fewer dermatologists are on call at night and on weekends.

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The new administration is talking about cutting the number of federal government employees. Federal employment was around 4.3% of total employment in 1960 and is now down to only 1.9%.

Most government employees are local (police officers, fire department, etc), followed by state employees. Approximately half of the state and local employees work in education (teachers!)

Just some numbers and graphs to keep in mind during the discussion of federal employment cuts.

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Should investors just give up on stocks outside America? Suppose you had invested in an index of American shares at a trough in 2009 and held on to it until today. Your portfolio would now be getting on for triple the size it would have been if you had instead picked a basket of stocks listed on the old continent (see chart below). Just about whenever American share prices crashed, European ones fell about as far or further; when American prices rocketed, European ones trailed them.

Investors greeted Donald Trump’s re-election by sending American share prices to record highs. European stocks have dropped by 4% since the morning of the result, and by 5% since a peak in September. They are not alone—stocks in much of Asia fell alongside them. 

Firms listed in America now constitute nearly two-thirds of the value of MSCI’s broadest index of global stocks. American companies are valued eye-poppingly higher, relative to earnings, than non-American ones. The difference is often justified by their fatter profit margins, better management and stronger growth. Fair enough. However, another way of looking at the valuation gap is that, in order to get from earnings to share prices, the market scales them up by radically different multiples based on whether they are made inside or outside America. This is peculiar, and much harder to justify, suggesting that valuations may have fallen out of whack and may eventually be subject to a correction. With American shares more expensive than at almost any other time in history, that would hardly stretch belief.

• The Stoxx Europe 600 index has underperformed the S&P 500 by 21% this year, the most on record.
• This comes as European stocks have returned only 3% year-to-date much below the 24% gain of US stocks.
• The Stoxx Europe 600 index is now on track for its 8th year of underperformance out of the last 10.
• Over the last decade, European equities have increased by just 50% much less than the S&P 500 return of 187%. As a consequence, the US stock market is now 4 TIMES larger than Europe.

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In my psychotherapy practice, I have seen more and more people whom I call “Unhappy Achievers”—people who regularly achieve what they strive for, but still feel anxious, depressed, and empty. Those around them may believe they have it all together—and on the surface they do. But inexplicably, deep down, they often feel miserable. Here’s why:

Unhappy Achievers frequently have great jobs, attractive partners, and lifestyles that are the envy of their friends. They may notch win after win, believing the next achievement will finally allow them to relax. But any satisfaction they feel vanishes quickly, and they feel more compelled than ever to start on the next attempt to impress. Many Unhappy Achievers are socially successful and appear outgoing. They may even be seen as the “life of the party.” But they secretly feel exhausted when they’re surrounded by people and can only truly relax when they’re alone.

On top of this, Unhappy Achievers are often embarrassed to admit that they are struggling. Who could blame them? With so many people striving for material and professional success, who wants to admit that they feel unhappy, even anguished? And because it’s so counterintuitive, I’ve found that almost none of these Unhappy Achievers can make sense of why they feel the way they do. Too often, they feel that there’s simply something shameful and broken about them. And that makes them feel lonelier.

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There is ample evidence that memories are not saved in our brains but reconstructed whenever we need them. This is a very dynamic and highly flawed process and prone to a lot of errors. People can implant false memories in other people with relative ease, particularly if they are trusted members of their social circle. Indeed, our memories are so flawed that the value of eyewitness testimony in court trials is by now much diminished because we know how unreliable such testimonies are. One can influence memories even with perceived friends that one has never met.

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The FTC says spam calls are down 50% since 2021, even though it doesn’t feel like it.

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Piper Sandler’s 2024 Teen Survey:

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Americans spent $186 billion on their pets last year, more than they spent on childcare.

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NBA ratings are down, and some think it has to do with the rising number of threes teams are taking per game.

China’s economy is bigger than the entire rest of Asia’s 30 countries combined:

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As a hospice nurse, Julie McFadden spends her days caring for people near the ends of their lives. The job gives her a window into the regrets people most commonly express on their deathbeds, which she says offers insight into how people can live better, more fulfilling lives. McFadden says she hears these regrets most often from her hospice patients:

• They wish they’d appreciated their health when they had it. “They didn’t understand how lucky they were to have a healthy body,” McFadden says. “That’s the No. 1 thing I hear.”
• They wish they hadn’t worked their life away. Some people worked intensively throughout the years leading up to their retirement, leaving them with limited time to appreciate life.
• They regret how they navigated their relationships. Her patients frequently expressed misgivings over not saying sorry when they should have, not reconnecting sooner to their estranged family member or friends.
• They regret caring too much about what people thought. Not living the life they wanted, but living the life people around them wanted.

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The Reality of Growth in Life and Business:

Life and business growth are often misunderstood. Many people envision progress as a straight, upward trajectory—steady, predictable, and consistent. But in reality, growth is non-linear. It is defined by long periods of minimal change or slow progress, where it may feel like little is happening. These are the periods of preparation, learning, and process—the times when the foundation for future success is quietly being built.

Then come the spikes: the moments of significant wins that redefine everything. In business, it might be a major sale, a breakthrough partnership, or an idea that suddenly scales. In life, it could be the birth of a child, meeting a lifelong partner, or a moment of clarity that changes your path. These “big wins” seem to happen all at once, but they are the result of the groundwork laid during those slower periods.

Understanding this rhythm is key to staying motivated. The quiet times are not wasted; they are essential. And the spikes, while transformative, only come to those who commit to the process. Growth is not linear—it’s a journey of patience, persistence, and faith in the moments that will ultimately reshape your life.

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Data is mounting about the impact our attitudes and beliefs have on our health and longevity.  Examining data from the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement, a survey conducted from 1975 to 1995 that included views on aging; comparing early attitudes with death records, there is a striking correlation: People who reported positive age beliefs early on lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those who had more negative beliefs. The advantage held even after controlling for age, gender, socioeconomic status, loneliness and health.

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The average P/E ratio of the top 10 largest companies in the S&P 500 is now almost 50. The historical average trailing P/E ratio for stocks is 17.5 (the higher the number, the more expensive stocks are relative to their earnings).

New research shows that it is specific and salient memories that influence our investment decisions rather than the collective memories (aka ‘experience’) we have. It matters for our investment decisions (in the stock market for example) if we have a memory of a good or bad experience investing in stocks. But it also matters if this memory is of a personal experience or a more distant, impersonal memory. If we have personal experiences, it makes us ‘immune’ or rather less receptive to expert advice. We think we know best because we have first-hand experience with the situation.

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The internet commoditized information, and the widespread availability of information has devalued it because you can now find some data point, anecdote, or statistic to support any possible viewpoint, creating an environment ripe for echo chambers and false signals, which we saw this election cycle. To cut through those false signals, you have to be careful in deciding which information to look for. You have to ask good questions. 

The (Presidential election) polls made the mistake of asking the folks they were surveying who they were voting for, not accounting for inaccurate responses. As a result, they got faulty information. Théo’s method, asking who “your neighbors” are voting for, proved to be more accurate, as it reduced the risk that someone would change their answer to save face (they didn’t want to say they were voting for Trump, even though they were).

If you’re trying to decide if you’re bullish or bearish on a stock, you’ll find a million arguments supporting both stances. If you have a headache, you are only three WebMD searches away from convincing yourself that you’re having an aneurysm. The antidote to this abundance of information is distillation: figuring out which information is important and discarding the rest. But distillation is downstream of interrogation: if you ask the right questions, the information filters itself.

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The average American spends 16 minutes per day reading. Only 46% of Americans read a book in the past year, and only 18% have read ten or more. Meanwhile, we spend nearly three hours watching TV and two hours and fourteen minutes on social media (often while watching TV). The way serious people learn is by reading. The way they share important information is by writing it down. Read, read, read. Rich people read a lot — Forbes asked a while ago, and the modal answer was two hours per day. The science backs this up: reading improves your ability to focus, slows memory deterioration and enhances memory, boosts verbal skills, and improves your ability to connect different pieces of information and ideas. 

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The cost of college is quietly going down. In-state tuition for a public university is down to $11,610 a year, compared to $12,140 a decade ago. After grant aid is applied, the average student would pay $2,480, a decrease from the 2014-2015 school year, when that amount totaled $4,140. For private schools, the net price is $16,510 a year, down from $19,330 back in 2006. Even sticker prices, the cost that is displayed by schools before any aid if applied, have mostly gone down in the last decade. The report said sticker prices in the last decade rose only 4 percent at private, nonprofit schools, decreased 4 percent at public four-year colleges and went down 9 percent at public two-year ones.  The report also showed that student debt overall is down. Those graduating in debt with bachelor’s degrees are down 10 percent, or $5,600, from a decade ago, with the average debt among borrowers now at $27,100.

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The terrifying average cost of weddings, by state, for any of the fathers of daughters out there:

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What does a once-in-a-generation investment opportunity look like? It’s when the dominant investment them of the last 10 to 15 years peaks and new leadership begins to emerge from a new asset class.

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How risky stocks are to a given investor depends upon which part of the life cycle he or she is in. For a younger investor, stocks aren’t as risky as they seem. For the middle-aged, they’re pretty risky. And for a retired person, they can be nuclear-level toxic. The reason why stocks aren’t very risky for a young person is that you have a lot of “human capital” (the ability to make money working) left. On the eve of retirement, you don’t have any of that. Stop playing when you’ve won the game.

Great article from Louis-Vincent Gave discussing why most investors don’t realize how far ahead China has moved ahead of the rest of the world in many industries.

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Young people are not watching sports (live). The average age for broadcast prime-time NFL viewers is 62.5. Younger people have shorter attention spans. And we know for a fact they have infinite choices in terms of how to spend their time. So there’s tons of things vying for their time. And there are ways they can engage with a sport without spending three hours watching a live event. They can follow it on social platforms. They can get highlights as they happen. They can play fantasy. They can engage with individual athletes and immerse themselves in their fashion taste or musician tastes. They can read trade rumors or draft rumors

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Marijuana use among teens is dropping. Biennial data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey from 2011 to 2021 included 88,183 adolescents in grades 9th through 12th showed that the percentage of adolescents who reported current marijuana use dropped significantly from 23.1% in 2011 to 15.8% in 2021. Although current marijuana use declined significantly for both girls and boys over time, in 2021 girls were more likely (17.8%) to currently use marijuana than boys (13.6%). In 2011, the opposite was true, with boys (25.9%) being more likely to use marijuana than girls (20.1%).

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If you want people to respond to your emails, be brief, direct, and vulnerable.

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Do we need to throw out our black plastic spatulas? Cooking with any plastic is a dubious enterprise, because heat encourages potentially harmful plastic compounds to migrate out of the polymers and potentially into the food, black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid.

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The crypto industry accounted for almost half the money contributed by corporations to political action committees in the first half of 2024.

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American politicians are the oldest in the world. The percentage over age 60 looks very different than most other countries:

Six years ago, Kevin Kelly celebrated his 68th birthday by gifting his children 68 bits of advice he wished he had gotten when he was their age. Every birthday after that he added more bits of advice for them until he had a whole book of bits. In a few days he’ll will turn 73, so again on his birthday, he offers an additional set of 101 bits of advice he wished he had known earlier:

• Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years.
• Interview your parents while they are still alive. Keep asking questions while you record. You’ll learn amazing things. Or hire someone to make their story into an oral history, or documentary, or book. This will be a tremendous gift to them and to your family. 
• Asking “what-if?” about your past is a waste of time; asking “what-if?” about your future is tremendously productive.
• When you are stuck or overwhelmed, focus on the smallest possible thing that moves your project forward.
• Discover people whom you love doing “nothing” with, and do nothing with them on a regular basis. The longer you can maintain those relationships, the longer you will live.
• Write your own obituary, the one you’d like to have, and then everyday work towards making it true.
• The highest form of wealth is deciding you have enough.
• Very small things accumulate until they define your larger life. Carefully choose your everyday things.
• Humility is mostly about being very honest about how much you owe to luck.

Spotify is paying hundreds of millions on an annualized basis to audiobook publishers, according to internal figures obtained by Axios. The company has also doubled the number of titles available to premium members in the past few months from 150,000 to 300,000. The figures, confirmed by a Spotify spokesperson, suggest Spotify’s entry into the audiobook market is helping to significantly grow the pie for audiobook publishers at large. Without Spotify, the audiobook industry in the U.S. grew 14% in unit sales between Q4 2022 and Q4 2023, according to Bookstat. With Spotify, it grew 28%.

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Research suggests that unearned income is at best inferior as a happiness multiplier and at worst a Faustian bargain. People constantly ask me what they should help their adult kids pay for, if they themselves have been lucky enough to do well in life. The dilemma they have is that they’re proud of having earned their way and feel that their self-reliance, not a handout, is the gift they want to pass on; yet they also feel that it’s stingy to hold out on their nearest and dearest, rather than share their good fortune. Here’s a rule of thumb to help resolve that dilemma: If you can afford to help your adult kids, pay for investment, not consumption. In practice, that means: Education? Absolutely. Vacation? No way. Staking a business? Yes, if it seems a viable proposition (as opposed to mere whim or lifestyle choice). Wine cellar? Don’t be ridiculous. A down payment on a house? Judgment call. In this way, you are giving generously—to help them earn their own success.

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If it feels like the S&P 500 has always outperformed everything else in the world (and always will), you only need to go back to the 2000 – 2009 decade to see that cycles always change:

How expensive stocks are when you buy them (price to earnings ratio) has a direct correlation to the future returns.

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It’s so common for people’s memories about a time to become disconnected from how they actually felt at the time. When thinking about our own lives, we don’t remember how we actually felt in the past; We remember how we think we should have felt, given what we know today. “You should have been happy and calm, given where things ended up,” you say to your past self. But your past self had no idea where things would end up. Uncertainty dictates nearly everything in the current moment, but looking back we pretend it never existed. Understanding why economic nostalgia is so powerful – why it’s almost impossible to remember how uncertain things were in the past when you know how the story ends – helps explain what I think is the most important lesson in economic history, that’s true for most people most of the time: “The past wasn’t as good as you remember. The present isn’t as bad as you think. The future will be better than you anticipate.”

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Success has become overplaybooked. math competitions take naturally very smart kids and focus them entirely on training for specific math tests. The game selects for people who are smart enough and can train the most and learn the best. In the process, it kills polymaths. The problem isn’t that kids are competing or studying hard, but that they’re narrowing. One of the reasons kids can’t (or won’t) read full books any more might be that books contain a lot of superfluous information that won’t be on the test. There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?, so teachers don’t make kids sit down and read Tolstoy. Or anything long and challenging. The problem isn’t that they don’t know Tolstoy, specifically, but that they might be missing out on the one book that ignites something in them that makes them want to learn.

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College students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. Teachers have noticed this problem everywhere. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. Students tell their college professors that, at their public high school, they have never been required to read an entire book. They have been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover. The anecdote helped explain the change teachers were seeing in their students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how.

The percentage of Americans with obesity fell for the first time in 45 years. The Ozempic effect is here:

Overdoses have hopefully peaked as well: