Helaine and I continue our conversation on personal finance. Our topics include what your financial advisor has in common with Dionne Warwick.
Helaine then expresses skepticism about “nudges,” and more interestingly, about the inherent limits of behavioral economics. We discuss the pitfalls of a professional consensus in which retirement experts come to regard misguided individual behavior and impatience as the fundamental challenge in retirement saving policy. I myself am ambivalent about this issue. Our culture of consumption and pervasive innumeracy are genuinely serious problems. Yet one can narrowly focus on these issues and thus neglect the importance of stagnant wages and other macroeconomic problems.
In part 5, we ponder Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party as reactions to financial dislocation. Helaine is much more impressed by Occupy than I am. We finally close things out with a schmooze about what it’s actually like to sell a book in the internet era.
The conclusion video gives a message that “this video is private” when I attempt to watch it.
fixed.
I wanted to make readers aware of a lively and very helpful forum for advice about low cost indexing funds (but also general advice about personal finance and retirement planning). Vanguard Diehards
http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php
non commercial- -does not accept advertising. John Bogle has posted there, and has attended Diehard organized functions. William Bernstein is also a poster there.
Yet one can narrowly focus on these issues and thus neglect the importance of stagnant wages and other macroeconomic problems.
Indeed.