Jennifer Baez
@jenniferbaez
Jennifer Baez
@jenniferbaez
Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing:
... See moreI love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.” It applies so well to how we behave with money.
If you grew up when inflation was high, you invested less of your money in bonds later in life compared to those who grew up when inflation was low. If you happened to grow up when the stock market was strong, you
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When we bemoan the lack of originality in the world, we blame it on the absence of creativity. If only people could generate more novel ideas, we'd all be better off. But in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation-it's idea selection. In one analysis, when over two hundred people dreamed up more than a thousand ideas for
... See moreThe term “psychological safety” has been around since at least 1999, when Dr. Amy Edmondson of Harvard University published this influential paper on the subject . In her study, Dr. Edmondson proposed that regardless of its makeup, a team’s success will largely boil down to its members “tacit beliefs about interpersonal interaction,” and whether
... See moreThe lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 a year on lotto tickets, four times the amount of those in the highest income groups. Forty percent of Americans cannot come up with $400 in an emergency. Which is to say: Those buying $400 in lottery tickets are by and large the same people who say they couldn’t come up with $400 in an
... See moreSocial scientists have long known that we tend to be overconfident when we evaluate ourselves. Here are some highlights of their findings: High school seniors: 70 percent report that they have "above average” leadership skills, compared with 2 percent "below average"; in the ability to get along with others, 25 percent rate themselves in the top 1
... See moreIn the era of the institutional marriage, from the nation’s founding until around 1850, the prevalence of individual farming households meant that the main requirements Americans had for their marriage revolved around things like food production, shelter and protection from violence.
In the era of the companionate marriage, from roughly 1850 until
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