Buying objects rather than experiences tends to disappoint. Over and over again, the idea that you can’t buy happiness has been exposed as a myth. Richer countries are happier than poor countries. Richer people within richer countries are happier, too. The evidence is unequivocal: Money makes you happy. You just have to know what to [...]

Can this couple live on Bitcoin alone for 90 days? There has been a lot of attention recently on bitcoin from tech early adopters and the mainstream media. The last six months has seen the value of the virtual currency grow more than tenfold and then fall half as much, as well as the government [...]

The rich got richer, and the poor kept on getting poorer. In 2010, Zero Hedge started an annual series looking at the (re)distribution in the wealth of nations and social classes. What they found then (and what the media keeps rediscovering year after year to its great surprise) is that as a result of global central bank [...]

We have recovered less than half of what we’ve lost in wealth. Households in the United States lost roughly $16 trillion in net worth since the recession started in 2007. According to the latest Fed data, we regained about $14.6 trillion, or roughly 91 percent, of it. But let’s not break out the champagne glasses [...]

The real gap isn’t between men and women doing the same job. It’s between the different jobs that men and women take. Women earn “only 72 percent, as much as their male counterparts” is probably the most famous statistic about female workers in the U.S.  But it is also famously false.  

At $1.1 trillion, student debt eclipses all other forms of household debt, except for home mortgages. The U.S. government is forecast to turn a record $51 billion profit this year from student loan borrowers, a sum greater than the earnings of the nation’s most profitable companies and roughly equal to the combined net income of [...]

Student debt is second largest source of U.S. household debt, after only mortgages. Some of the greatest colleges and universities in the world are in the U.S. But with the student debt load at more than $1 trillion and youth unemployment elevated, when assessing the value of a college education, that’s only one part of [...]

What is one of the first questions to ask yourself before starting a business? “Can I make money in this industry?”    

Student debt is a dangerous bubble that is piling unprecedented levels of debt on young people. Houses and cars power recoveries. And young people aren’t buying either. That’s a New York Fed study conclusion and that can be easily read as blaming student debt for holding back the recovery by squashing home and auto sales. [...]

Comparing salaries among colleagues has long been a taboo of workplace chatter, Brian Bader said at the orientation for a tech-support job with Apple Inc. that human-resources managers ran down the list of guidelines workers were expected to follow. Don’t use explicit language on calls with customers. Treat other employees with respect. And, he says, they told [...]