Median life expectancy is affected by a much larger number of variables, and is also susceptible to just as much (if not more) number fudging and statisitical nudging. Maybe the country also has a large subset of obese alcoholics for example. If someone lives to be over 100, that in and of itself is a pretty valuable data point
I'm also surprised it's so low, because I feel that doesn't align with my anecdotal experience. Perhaps part of the problem is they only did the analysis on "...for freshman admission between 1994 and 2011 for whom complete data were available on all covariates". Perhaps wealthy families are less likely to submit family income data, or the income data is somehow related to FAFSA, in which case wealthy families will be under represented. Also note, they used family income as a proxy for SES, which is understandable but also not completely correct. Many wealthy people have no-to-low income for tax purposes.
Indeed, the ultra-wealthy pay far less than 40% effective estate tax. Seems closer to 15% due to creative accounting, which is further reduced to 6.8% by charitable contributions:
> Specifically, for single decedents, estate taxes paid equal 6.8% of the value of Forbes wealth at death. The value of their gross estate is 39% of the Forbes estimate of their wealth. This large gap, already noted in earlier work (Raub et al., 2010), is likely to reflect the various techniques available to high-net-worth individuals to undervalue assets in the context of the estate tax. Taxable estate is then 45% of gross estate (due to deductions primarily gifts to charities) and on that base the tax rate is 39% (Balkir et al., 2025, Table 4 Panel B).
No, which is why there are very few vacant units in NYC: 1.4%-ish percent of total supply, whereas the rule of thumb I've heard is that around 5% is the sign of a reasonable equilibrium.
(In a well-functioning real estate market there are some units offline due to vacancy, turnover, and renovation, so we don't expect 0%. High vacancies of e.g. 10% suggest insufficient demand for the supply.)
No, it's about as "controversial" as claiming lead exposure is bad for children's brains.
Do we have RCTs for that? Or might we reasonably shape our priors from the hundreds of studies using a dozen different causal methodologies, which all find the same result?
The evidence for lead exposure harming children's brains is extremely solid, I believe. The evidence for spanking is not in the same league. It is not just about a lack of RCTs.
If you have good zoom binoculars or a zoom monocular, and a bit of practice, you can zoom in if you can hold it very steady, such at a window sill or against the window itself.
Thanks the second chart is more concerning than the first. The first has a variety of potential distortions at play first of all portion of industrial activity that's done by public vs private companies shifts over time and second of all a lot of these companies do 40 to 50% of their business overseas.
Whereas a historically low ratio of earnings to index value is a deeper concern to me
I’ve never looked at the numbers to see exactly how large of a pool it is but millions of Americans are effectively forced to buy into the market to fund our 401ks and future retirements. That’s billions of dollars of inflow every month that has to go somewhere, usually index funds.
it is exactly this. I am self-employed and have been managing my solo 401k for 15+ years now. while I am fully aware of market being overvalued I will still max out my 401k this year ($80k, I am over 50 :) ) and that money needs to go somewhere. I could theoretically sell and sit on the cash and wait on "crash" but I could have technically done that a year ago (this were similarly not very rosy) or even earlier and that obviously would have been a terrible financial decision. no one can time the market and therein lies the core issue, money will always be flowing in...
reply