Nevin's Data "Points"

As spring follows winter, so apparently do dire predictions about the nation’s retirement prospects. For example, the Center for Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College now claims we are looking at a $7.7 trillion dollar “retirement gap” for American workers, up from $6.6 trillion five years ago. Meanwhile, a new report by the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS) on what it called the “Continuing Retirement Savings Crisis” didn’t cite a specific aggregate gap, but a year ago NIRS employed a similar approach to suggest that that gap was likely somewhere between $6.8 trillion and $14 trillion. While these outcomes are cited widely (the CRR’s as recently as last week in a U.S. Senate hearing ), the underlying methodologies and assumptions are worth understanding. Both rely heavily on self-reported numbers from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), and while both track the progress of American retirement readiness by examining how individuals in the...

I’ve had both cats and dogs in my family over the years, and while each of our individual pets has had a unique personality, there are some attributes that seem to apply to each species, regardless of the individual animal. One of the most obvious is their approach to food.  For example, you can leave your cat alone in an apartment for a weekend with a supply of food and water sufficient to last for a few days, and odds are when you return home, there will still be some left.  But leave your dog alone in the same apartment with the same additional allotment of food and water, chances are it won’t last 30 minutes.  And in those circumstances, if you have both a cat and a dog in that apartment, odds are the latter will eat the former’s food as well. Animal psychologists have a variety of explanations for why dogs and cats approach food the way they do, generally citing either a confidence of its future availability, or a concern that if it’s not consumed now, it will disa...