i.e., Who’s profiting from your news feed addiction?
Facebook isn’t publicly-traded, which means you can’t buy stock in the company on any stock market. But it seems to have found plenty of well-heeled investors without reaching out to the great unwashed masses (i.e., us).
A lot of different things can influence how you spend your money – your account balance, your blood sugar level, the weather. But one of the most important and overlooked factors is your personal set of values. That’s right. Values.
Take this quick quiz and see how you stack up against others (who may have similar values to yours) when it comes to how you spend your money.
Now look at your last bank or credit card statement. What portion of your money goes to experiences? How about material objects? What kind of experiences and objects do you tend to spend the most money on?
(btw, YourMorals.org isn’t a religious website – it’s a collection of surveys put together by seven social psychologists to explore how morality and political values interact. Once you register, you can take and save your results for any number of surveys.)
When they say the U.S. unemployment rate is 9%, does that mean that only 9% of all possible American workers are out of a job?
Nope. The official unemployment rate doesn’t count people who have given up looking for a job. It also doesn’t include people considered “not in the labor force,” like students. And it definitely doesn’t tell you much about the millions of people who are working part-time but can’t find full-time work. (They’re called the “underemployed.”)
Contrary to popular belief, the unemployment rate has nothing to do with how many people are applying for or receiving unemployment benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics collects data by actually going out and asking people about their employment status.
Click the chart for Matt Berger’s explanation.
How do you fit into this chart?
Ever wonder how people end up homeless or hungry? It’s easier than you may think.
Think it could never happen to you? Play SPENT to get a sense of what life is like for the 55% of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Today at TILE we talked about how financial terms can unexpectedly make their way into our everyday lives. Have you seen LIFO in the newspaper lately? FIFO? What does it all mean?
Accounting is the language of numbers and financial terms. While the official language in the U.S. is English, the official language of a company’s finances is accounting. But sometimes these two languages get mixed together, kind of like “spanglish.” If you know where to look, you can often find accounting terms sneaking into your everyday speech… and impacting your life in ways you wouldn’t expect. Recently there has been a lot of discussion about LIFO, which stands for “last in, first out.” Have you heard of it? It is an accounting concept used to manage expenses – but recently it’s been applied to public school teachers as well.
The folks at GE put together this neat-o interactive feature that shows you how much carbon is created by your every daily move.
It will either depress you, or make you more of a conscientious carbon consumer. Probably both.
Germy currencies from around the world…
“Fun” Fact: Australia had the cleanest currency in the study, and the U.S. dollar had the highest concentration of E. coli – the bacteria that causes food poisoning.
(Don’t be offended by the giant “FOR KIDS” headline at the top of the article. Money is gross no matter how old you are.)
Ouch. According to a new study, college students are spending four (or more) years and thousands of dollars on higher education, but they’re not actually learning anything.
(photo credit: peanutian)
Here’s the short story:
Students are slacking off, colleges are more focused on enrolling and keeping new students than they are on making sure each student gets a quality education, and professors are having trouble keeping up with their increasingly large class sizes as more and more people attend college.
Here are the fun facts:
Read the whole story here.
Even if the graphs are, oh, maybe just a little misleading. Take this one, for example. It appears to say that the reason certain European countries are in worse financial shape than others is because more of their men want to stay at home playing videogames.
See? Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal are over there on the right, with more of their menfolk living with the parents. And, conveniently, those same countries rank high on the riskiness (a.k.a. sovereign risk) of their government bonds (a.k.a. sovereign debt).
If he lives with his parents, you might want to think twice. About buying his government’s debt. (via The Economist)
But in case your statistics teacher hasn’t drilled this into your heads yet, correlation is not causation. This is a real-world example of that. Just because you can make a chart with a nice line on it doesn’t necessarily mean that one factor causes the other. Think about this:
In conclusion:
You may have an opinion about the compensation practices of Wall Street firms, but what would Aristotle do?
We had to look across the pond to get an answer, but the BBC has done a pretty bang-up job of using classic philosophy to talk about modern issues. And the comments below the story are just fantastic.
Aristotle aside, what do you think about the big bonuses? Does your opinion change after reading the article?
