#1yrago Nudging doesn’t give poor people retirement savings, it just makes them poorer
Nudging – the idea that a well-designed “choice architecture” can help people make free choices that are better than the ones they would make without the nudge – has a few well-publicized success stories: the cafeteria where frontloading veggies and other healthful options gets kids to choose carrots over pizza; and the employer-side deduction for retirement savings that gets employees to put aside a little more to retire on (this insight rates a Nobel-adjacent prize*!).
It’s true that people suck at saving for retirement, and there are lots of reasons for that, and some of them are undoubtedly psychological.
But we live in the age of wage stagnation, where all the economic gains have gone to a tiny minority of financial engineers and their pals, who have, not coincidentally, bought up all the necessities of lives (housing, health care, education) and turned them into money-sucking tornadoes that take an ever-larger share of the ever-small paychecks most of us get to take home.
So what happens when you “nudge” people to save more for retirement? Turns out that a lot of people aren’t saving enough for retirement because they’re not taking home enough pay to cover their car, student, and home loans (or rent), food, and other necessities. So when you take $3,237 out of someone’s paycheck per year toward their retirement, they amass $1,563 more in consumer and auto debt, and owe $4,131 more on their homes. And since investments generally return less than debts cost, you can see where this ends up. All this from The Effect of Providing Peer Information on Retirement Savings Decisions (Sci-Hub mirror), a 2015 paper in The Journal of Finance by a group of elite business-school professors).
The late stages of capitalism bear a striking and increasing resemblance to the standard stages of grief, with denial and bargaining featuring heavily, as in:
“People are going to end up either starving or being a burden on their working children or the state because they don’t earn enough to save for retirement: we’re going to need to bring back defined-benefits pensions, peg Social Security to inflation, and increase the minimum wage.”
“No! That way lies socialism. People should just stop being poor!” (Denial)
“We tried it. They’re still poor.”
“Agh! These poors have no self-control!” (Anger) “We’re nudge them into saving more.” (Bargaining)
“Still poor, dude. Poorer, actually.”
“Fuck, I guess we’re voting for Donald Fucking Trump then.” (Depression)
“Guys, they’re building guillotines on the Capital Mall!”
“Elizabeth Warren in 2020!” (Acceptance)
* Not an actual Nobel prize
https://boingboing.net/2018/01/09/keep-squeezin-that-toothpaste.html
Kids break into radio station, swear at listeners
A group of children broke into a radio station in Western Australia’s remote Kimberley region and put themselves live on air for an impromptu late-night show full of swearing.
The first police knew of it was a phone call from a listener, concerned at swear words being broadcast.
Station manager Angie Stahl says she had previously given the children lessons in community radio, and they worked out how to make the studio go live.
“But unfortunately their show mainly involved swearing, which was a bit punk, a bit avant-garde, but also breaches the broadcasting laws, and our codes of practice.
“So the cops got a call from an outlaying station ringing up to say, ‘I think you’ve got some kids on the radio, they’re busy swearing, you’d better go bust them’.”
Ms Stahl said the children appear to have entered through a window in her house, which adjoins the studios.
While in the house they ate some chicken nuggets and dyed their hair.
Not long after going on-air with their expletive-ridden jokes, police officers arrived to put a stop to the radio broadcast.
Ms Stahl said the children may have a future in broadcasting.
“They’d come in a couple of times before to do a couple of shows and programs, so I’d taught them the basics,” she said.
“So it’s good to see the knowledge was used correctly.”
“While in the house they ate some chicken nuggets and dyed their hair”
“A bit punk”
Amazing.
whoever snitched is a bitch
I love that Ms Stahl ain’t even mad
“The inspiration is an ossuary, the crypts of the cardinals, of the monks in the 15th century, and the precious decorations. This idea is that everything that is linked to the afterlife is accompanied by something of maximum beauty,” Alessandro Michele.
A collared gown featuring ornate decoration inspired by detail from an ossuary from the Gucci Cruise 2019 collection by Alessandro Michele at the Promenade Des Alyscamps in Arles.
Are you a gentle folk music Tolkien fan or a heavy metal Tolkien fan
