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Thanks to the Fed cutting interest rates this year, Americans are buying more homes. Housing starts, the figure economists use to track home building, has jumped 12.3% from last month and is at the highest level since July 2007. At least one economist is worried. Another figure they use

An opinion piece in The New York Times this week commented on the “brain gain” happening in rural America, where young, educated workers are moving in droves to quieter cities and rural landscapes. Many of them are returning home, but many immigrate for the first time. Last week, Money released

In the book of Proverbs, the wise teacher wrote, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.” Individually, we can all understand this. But what if a whole generation is slave to the lender? The last twenty years have seen extraordinary rises in prices

When you’re the leader of a business, financial knowledge is essential. You need to manage cash flow to pay your employees, balance a budget to keep the lights on, and drive profit to sustain the business for the future. If you’re the leader of a church or nonprofit,

On Sunday I received six emails in my work inbox.† I get emails at nights, weekends, holidays, you name it. Some tell me they take PTO just to get work done without being bothered. Simply put, people are working a lot. To get ahead in competitive environments, you have to

Scientists at UCLA might have discovered a way to reverse aging, which provoked an interesting discussion with a friend. Here’s a summary of the article. Volunteers who were given a cocktail of drugs for a year actually “aged backwards”, losing an average of 2.5 years from their biological

Yesterday I mentioned a lecture by Harvard economist Raj Chetty called “Causal Effects of Neighborhoods,” one part of a series called “Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems.” Chetty explains how he goes about understanding where, why, and how there are opportunities in economic mobility for American children.

In the second lecture of a Harvard economics course called “Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems,” there is a very interesting chart. But first, let me provide some context. A few weeks ago I mentioned Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist who—you might have guessed—uses big

In accounting, there are two types of transactions. Explicit transactions occur when cash exchanges for a good or service. You paid $20 for a haircut. You can explicitly record that transaction in your accounting book. The other type of transaction is a lot more interesting. Implicit transactions occur over time

I recently heard some marketers say, when conducting market research surveys, “Whatever numbers we need, we’ll reverse engineer the math to hit those numbers.” They said the same thing about headlines. It gave me pause, but it also made me think about larger issues in marketing and publishing. First,