I recently watched all six hours of Commanding Heights; a great documentary that attempts to trace the rise of free markets during the last century, as well as the process of globalization. It acts almost like a primer on 20th century economics.
I have just re-discovered the PBS supplementary website for Commanding Heights and am suitably impressed with this information rich resource. It’s not without accolades:
- BAFTA for Best Achievement in Online Education
- One of Time Magazine’s Top 50 Websites of 2003
- Two nominations for the 2003 Webby Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (Best Practices and Best Broadband Site)
- I.D. Magazine’s 2003 Interactive Media Design Review; Bronze Winner
- 2002 Emmy Nomination (the only Web site nominated; interactive television)
Originally an idea for “professional philanthropic development”, Michael—a multi-millionaire who’s giving away $78m over a 10 year period—lived with a homeless Chicago man for one weekend. Freakonomics covers the story in Michael, Meet Curtis: Philanthropy Gets Personal.
Curtis cooked another plate of chicken and beans. He was about to eat it, but once again he offered it to Michael. This time Michael accepted. Michael looked overwhelmed; his face was perspiring. Curtis refilled his coffee and gave Michael one of his cigarettes to calm him down.
“Not everyone lives like this,” I said. “And don’t feel bad for Curtis.”
“No!” Curtis exclaimed. “Don’t pity me,” he said, pouring some whiskey in Michael’s coffee. “This will help you sleep tonight…” Curtis lit a cigarette and leaned back on his busted plastic chair. “Just understand that you got to be creative. Even if you got a home, you still got to pay rent — so you take in somebody now and then. Maybe you let your friend stay in the house and they watch your kid, or clean up, or pay you…” Curtis kept on talking. Michael kept on eating.
When 40 finance greats are asked for the best financial lessons they ever learned, you’re sure to learn something. But who wants to trawl through 40 separate pages to get to all that advice (apart from me)?
- Stocks build wealth - with no work
- Don’t follow the herd
- Do what you love
- Know where your money goes
- Shift from thinking about a paycheck to thinking about building equity and long-term wealth
- Study Warren Buffett
- Leave your money alone
- Be frugal but not stingy
- Use small bills
- Swear off debt
- To excel at something, immerse yourself
- Create your own opportunities
- Ignore the noise
- Don’t buy anything you don’t want or sell anything you ain’t got
- Money doesn’t make you happy
- Asset allocation is the most important decision investors must make
- Stay the course through thick and thin
- Don’t get too good at the wrong stuff
- Live within your means
- You can’t reliably beat the market
- Take risks when you can
- Tap the power of compounding
- You can’t fight the market, so join it
- Don’t save too much
- Buy low, sell high
- It’s hard to exploit a trend
- Know what risk you are taking
- Performance is random
- Stick with what you know
- You don’t know more than the market knows
- The less you pay, the more you keep
- The future is uncertain. Because the future is uncertain, there’s a need for caution. Try to figure out the intrinsic value of a business
- Always get it in writing
- Be humble about what you don’t know
- Develop a healthy scepticism
- Ignore short-term market swings
- Sell for the right reason
- Careful of people you trust
- It is character, not assets, that counts most
- No one has ever invented a way to get something for nothing
- Investing isn’t only about stocks and bonds but rather is a mind-set for making sense of all of the transactions a consumer engages in
The BBC has compiled a number of graphs vividly showing the key factors affecting the current economic ‘crisis’ – the results are quite enlightening.
Some aspects aren’t deviating far from the general long-term trend (petrol prices); some are not as dramatic (with a long-term comparison) as some fear (house prices); while others genuinely are anomalies worthy of worry (inflation).
Penelope Trunk—The Brazen Careerist—on why salaries should be transparent (and how to find out how much you should be paid).
Who is being protected by secret salaries? Certainly not the employee—the more transparent salaries are, the more accurately an employee can assess his or her value to a company.
You’d think that companies benefit from secret salaries and that’s why they keep them secret, but really, if salaries were 100% accurate—perfectly pegged at the employee’s worth to the company—then the company would have no problem revealing all salaries.