Yeah, and for a lot of earners in high tax states, the effective interest rate you pay is essentially almost half off thanks to the mortgage interest tax deduction. If your marginal tax rate across federal / state / local is high (mine's 46%), then you can get back almost half the interest. Which shortens the gap between a 3% vs 6% mortgage, the effective difference being more like 1.5% than 3%.
On one hand, I absolutely agree that you should try to focus on maximizing the positive aspects of your life rather than overly focus on beating down the negatives. For instance, I'm happiest when I'm taking a lot of recreational classes outside of work, and when I'm doing that - my phone usage is not a problem - it's a fine way to spend my limited free time because I'm already doing the things I love.
On the other hand, in the morning especially it feels like looking at my phone can kinda derail my day sometimes. So I download Opal and just set a hard block (impossible to skip) from 9:55pm - 9:35am, that way I'm able to use my phone during the day, but not the very first thing in the day. I find that works well for me.
Agree that people should not do active investing, although the solution would be passive investing (index funds), which allow you to focus on friends & family without missing out of the economy's long term gains.
Hot take but I'll bite, what's your rationale? We're only ~9% down from VTI's ATH and what happens now doesn't matter when your investing horizon is 15+ years.
This is terrible advice BTW. I got it in 2007, also HN and FT forums convinced me. So I put significant savings in a couple of index funds. I lost 40% within months. Left it there and recovered only after 8 years (and that's not even adjusting for inflation or MM rate). Please be a bit more self-aware. I spent many years in finance and the more I learned, the more I realized how much I don't know.
If you're investing a chunk of every paycheck, you'll keep plowing money into the index fund through every dip, which historically makes up for the money you add at peaks. You can spend a few years derisking as you approach retirement, which is similarly not that susceptible to recessions.
I meant to put money in index funds right now. Not ongoing investment over a long time.
And going back further to my original point, if I had money in funds now I'd move it to Money Market accounts because the risk of a stock market downturn is big (1987/2001/2008 style). You are not Soros/Buffett/Munger or a multi-billion dollar hedge fund.
- Recession now undeniably starting (several friends in Tech are losing their jobs in companies doing well)
- Ballooning deficits and debt at every level
- High rates making debt ballooning faster
- USD dominance decreasing
That's known and now not matter of opinion but hard facts. Now, where to invest? I have no idea (and I'm pretty sure traditional investment knowledge doesn't work anymore), so I do money markets and take the hit until I figure something out. Maybe there's a non-hype AI application opportunity somewhere, who knows. Worrying too much makes you do dumb life-altering things. In uncertain times, I chose to invest the time in enjoying life a bit. Wait and see.
Core inflation is going down, just not as fast as other sectors. People losing their jobs is not a hard fact of a recession, we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in history.
I'm just indexing and staying happy, worry free, it worked for the last 100 years and I'm sure it'll work for my lifetime.
I have a similar outlook. If the stock market starts losing against inflation over my time horizon (several decades) then we have bigger problems. There will be recessions in the future. I'll keep tossing money into index funds through the bottoms and enjoy coming out the other side. Every three months, I get a statement in the mail telling me how much money I've made or lost. That's all the attention I need to pay to my longterm finances.
Reading these comments make me feel sad about the state of Hacker News. As with any large public forum, it's turning into an anti intellectual space where takes like "economics is not a science, it's a social science!" are the best we have to offer. It's either engineer syndrome, or it's brigading from other niche political forums. I'm tired of reading knee jerk reactions to fields from commenters that have zero experience in but have all the conviction in the world.
To me as outsider economics often seems more like an ideology vs reproducible science. As far as Bernanke goes none of his work helped him to recognize a monstrous real estate bubble that was building. And when it popped all he could come up with was to shovel money to the banks and wealthy people. What was his work good for?
It has really gotten out of hand. I'm no fan of Ben Bernanke there's a way to have a constructive discussion about his work and waving a wand of preconceived notions is not one of them.
> turning into an anti intellectual space where takes like "economics is not a science, it's a social science!" are the best we have to offer
A bank taking an endowment awarding a prize and money to physicists, chemists and biologists, and ramming in to it a prize for economists saying nonsense the bankers like to hear, is the definition of anti-intellectual.
The physicists, chemists and biologists are the intellectuals and scientists, the economists are frauds telling the bankers what they want to hear.
> turning into an anti intellectual space where takes like "economics is not a science, it's a social science!" are the best we have to offer
Evidence: VictorPath's reply
> A bank taking an endowment awarding a prize and money to physicists, chemists and biologists, and ramming in to it a prize for economists saying nonsense the bankers like to hear, is the definition of anti-intellectual.
The physicists, chemists and biologists are the intellectuals and scientists, the economists are frauds telling the bankers what they want to hear.
I would recommend against Human Action. It's "Austrian" school economics, which is considered heterodox, and it's something that's understandable by a layman but generally not be considered good economics. I fell into the trap when I was in high school of reading Mises and Rothbard et al, I wish I had not.
Fair - I did not give any arguments, just my personal experience as someone that was really deep into that subculture. I'm also not an economist, so I would defer to the professional consensus, which I think we'd both agree is that modern Austrian economics is not considered a serious thing. I think we should be wary of debating a highly technical topic as a layman - it's very easy to be wrong, and it's hard to get feedback from people more versed in these topics. For context - I wanted to be an Austrian economist when I started college, I was majoring in math (real analysis, etc) and econ with the intention of starting an econ phd. I fell in love with computer science instead. I look back on my libertarian / austrian phase as just me having too much time on my hands as a high schooler, being a pretty smart student, and there being a wealth of info online about it. It feels even better as a smart person to think that you know something others don't, including professional economists. I just want people online to be aware of the Austrian rabbit hole, because the von Mises institute is just a think tank in Alabama that's very good at creating an online presence that feels legitimate and scholarly, but it's not really. That's not to say there's not interesting arguments, I'll always be attracted to some libertarian ideas, e.g. some of Walter Block's Defending the Undefendable. But I think most people can relate to having strong convictions about something, growing older, losing the conviction, and then being wary of taking extreme positions in topics that they know little about.
Interesting, can you please share anything, besides that "professional consensus" is different, on what is the problem with the Austrian view of central banks? You realize that by saying "Professional consensus" in a field of study, not practice, is worthless by definition?
Not really, no. You're both correct that I offer no substantive arguments against austrian economics, ABC theory, or their critique of central banks.
I'm not a professional economist. I honestly know very little about the subject (apart from taking intermediate micro / macro and having had an interest in the subject since childhood). I don't think I could argue against the view that "climate change is a hoax" either, because I don't really understand the science. There are many things in my life that I believe despite not being a PhD in the field - and yes, a lot of it relies on appeals to authority and my impression of the world, which we could disagree on. I'm just advocating that we all share a bit of humility when it comes to highly technical topics, and in doing so we should probably defer more to academic consensus. Otherwise, it's essentially like debating religions - fun perhaps, but no one really knows what they're talking about.
I think we can both agree with the statement that academic economists by and large dismiss Austrian economics. If not, let me know, and I'd be happy to debate that point. Of course, "Austrian" economists have made many meaningful contributions to the field, e.g. Menger's marginal revolution, Bohm-Bawerk's work, Schumpeter's creative destruction, etc. Hayek was a well regarded political and economic thinker.
However, modern day austrian economics is essentially a think tank that espouses a very hardcore version of libertarianism - claiming that modern economics is a farce, empirical methods are useless, and that inflation is the devil and we need to return to the gold standard. I remember reading Rothbard's The Case Against the Fed and parroting many of the points, having been impassioned by Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign. I remember railing against the Fed and its loose monetary policy, absolutely sure that inflation was coming post 2008 (it did not).
I can't really provide a detailed takedown of Austrian economics, again, because I'm not an economist. All I have is my life experiences of having believed in it ardently, and then not, and then asking myself why I was ever convinced in the first place. Bryan Kaplan, another extremely libertarian / ancap economist, has a critique here that some might find influential: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm. But most serious economists don't even address it, presumably because it's not a part of academic discourse at all. More pop economists from across the spectrum, like Krugman and Friedman, both disparaged it of course.
The thing to be wary about is that Austrian economics is essentially ignored by mainstream economists, but Austrian believers are extremely passionate and have built up a huge online presence - led by a handful of non-economist political bloggers. So if you google austrian economics, you'll find pages and pages of Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, etc. It's very easy to fall down the rabbit hole. Meanwhile, academic economists are doing research, not creating pages and pages of "austrian economics is pseudoscience" articles. Listen, if you want to be a libertarian, that's fine by me - but upholding austrian economics to help justify your political beliefs seems a bit unnecessary to me.
For what it's worth, CBT was hugely helpful for me. I read The Feeling Good Handbook (kind of the CBT bible, a new edition of Feeling Good). CBT is definitely a tool that you want on your tool belt if you're struggling with anxiety/depression. It may not be the be all end all, but I like that it puts control and responsibility into the person's hands, namely the thesis that thoughts precede emotion. It's helped me reframe my mind to give me more control over what I think and feel, to separate the true reality of life ("that person and I didn't talk for long", "I haven't heard from a friend in 24 hours", "I'm not currently doing anything on this saturday night") from the normative, subjective spins your mind can put on reality ("that person didn't like me", "I have no friends", "I'm a loser with nothing to do").
There's definitely a discussion about whether CBT should always be the therapy of choice. Personally, I think you need to be at the right spot for CBT to be effective. For me, I was a functional person who could somewhat identify what I didn't like about my mental state and was very open to trying to improve. I'm guessing CBT is probably not as effective if you're experiencing severe mental health problems or breaks in reality, or if you have milder symptoms but don't want help/change. Sometimes when I'm really down, CBT essentially feels like "you're sad because you're too stupid to be happy!" At the same time, I imagine every therapy works better if a person is at an okay spot and open to change. And CBT can probably help people all over the spectrum to various degrees.
If you're experiencing mental health problems, give The Feeling Good Handbook a try! It's a large workbook where you read and work through written exercises. Very helpful to me so I try to evangelize it when I can (and give out copies to people I know who struggle). I never tried in person therapy but that'd also be immensely helpful too. The great thing about CBT is how simple it is though, so reading a book (aka bibliotherapy) for a self-motivated patient can do the trick. Indeed, he spends the first chapter reviewing studies that claim bibliotherapy is just as successful as in person therapy. (Not sure what I think of that... I imagine book readers are more self-motivated than the average in-person patient but they were experimental studies so I'm sure that's already controlled for... nevertheless, bibliotherapy was good for me.
About me: I lost my dad in high school, my mom in college, and my sister to suicide after graduating. Pair that with an interesting childhood (alcoholic mom, bipolar sister) albeit a financially comfortable childhood. It was (and still can be) an incredibly hard stretch of time. At the same time, I was exceptionally gifted at school and really looked up to my teachers so I was and am very lucky and traditionally successful. If you're struggling, get help! Take responsibility! Your mind CAN change in small but subtle ways in how you frame your life and the daily happenings of it.
> I'm guessing CBT is probably not as effective if you're experiencing severe mental health problems
I'm bipolar. CBT is ineffective for problems that aren't resulting from bad thoughts. But it just as important as medication for my treatment plan.
CBT is absolutely critical to maintaining stability when I am rational. Stopping bad thoughts before they get time to spiral out of control significantly reduces the severity of my symptoms.
While CBT can't fight irrational thoughts resulting from my mood swings, it's taught me what I can and can't change. As a result, I know when to switch to a different coping skill to get through a bad day.
As far as in-person therapy goes, a therapist is a guide. They can point you in the right direction and provide a different perspective.
Sometimes people point to the English IAPT scheme (which offers mainly CBT) as evidence of lack of effectiveness of CBT for depression. They say that it only works for about 60% of the people who try it.
IAPT has 4 tiers. The higher tiers are delivered face to face, one to one, with an experienced therapist, and you get up to 16 weeks of therapy. The lower tiers might be group work, or telephone based, or maybe even delivered over computer. If you have a therapist they may be less experienced. And you get 5 weeks of therapy. But the results of all these tiers are mashed together.
Guitar playing (justinguitar.com)! Swing dancing (or other types, look up classes in your area)! Writing (journal, or essays, look up writing nights on meetup)! Weightlifting (r/fitness FAQ beginner routine).
Designing Data Intensive Applications is not exactly what you're looking for, but it touches on some API topics and is a genuinely great technical read for application programmers.
From the ones I've read: The Head First series of books are really really nice... other such books... D Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts; B Eckel's Thinking in Java; Skiena's The Algorithm Design Manual; M Nielsen's Neural Networks and Deep Learning; J Kurose's Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach; R Lafore's Data Structures and Algorithms; J Bloch's Effective Java.
