Nevin's Data "Points"

This past week PBS’ Frontline ran a segment on retirement titled “The Retirement Gamble.” During that broadcast several individual cases were profiled—a single mother who lost her job (and a lot of money that she had apparently overinvested in company stock); a middle-aged couple whose husband had lost his job (and a big chunk of their 401(k) investment in the 2008 financial crisis); a couple of teachers who had seen their retirement plan investments do quite well (before the 2008 financial crisis); a 32-year-old teacher who had lost money in the markets and found herself in an annuity investment that she apparently didn’t understand, but was continuing to save; and a 67-year-old semi-retiree who had managed to set aside enough to sustain a middle-class lifestyle. The current income and/or working status of each was presented, along with their current retirement savings balance. Much of the promotional materials around the program focused on fees, and doctoral candidate Robert H...

I was a late convert to the convenience of NetFlix, and while I appreciated the convenience of delivery, when they expanded the offering to include online movie viewing “at no additional charge,” I didn’t really “get” it. Aside from the fact that, at that time, my DVD player wasn’t wireless compatible, the selection (certainly in those early days) was unremarkable at best. In fact, I remember telling a friend once that the online movies were free, and worth every penny. The quality and breadth of selection improved over time, until of course, there came that fateful decision to charge a fee for that online movie access separate and apart from the home DVD delivery. All of a sudden, a service that had been a nice-to-have “at no additional charge” had to be viewed through a whole new prism―it was now a benefit with a cost. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), group health plans that offer dependent coverage are required to extend coverage to workers’ children...

One of my favorite short stories is Ray Bradbury’s “ A Sound of Thunder .” The story takes place in the future when, having figured out time travel, mankind has found a way to commercialize it by selling safaris back in time to hunt dinosaurs. Not just random dinosaurs, mind you—cognizant of the potential implications that a change in the past can ripple through and affect future events, the safari organizers take care to target only those that are destined to die in short order of natural causes. Further, participants are cautioned to stay on a special artificial path designed to preclude interaction with the local flora and fauna. Until, of course, one of the hunters panics and stumbles off the path—and the group finds that, upon returning to their own time, subtle (and not so subtle) changes have occurred. Apparently because in leaving the path, the hunter stepped on a butterfly—whose untimely demise, magnified by the passage of time produced changes much larger than one might have ...

Generalizations are often misleading, but I think it’s fair to say that some people (specifically those of the male gender) are notoriously reluctant to ask for directions—even when it’s painfully clear to everyone else traveling in their company that they are “lost.” If you’re not one of those people, I’ll bet you know someone (and probably more than one someone) who is.¹ The rationalizations offered by those refusing to seek help are as varied and variable as the individual circumstances that bring those hesitations to light: a shortage of time; certainty that, however lost they seem, they actually know where they are (or will be shortly); a lack of trust in the reliability of the instructions they might receive; the inconvenience of stopping…this despite the knowledge (frequently even among those reluctant to ask directions) that the modest investment of time to seek assistance will likely be far less than the time (and aggravation) that they will expend trying to find their own w...