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Market efficiency helps protect naïve investors from themselves—but it won’t protect them from brokers hell-bent on collecting a commission.
Adam M. Grossman is the founder of Mayport, a fixed-fee wealth management firm. Sign up for Adam's Daily Ideas email, follow him on X @AdamMGrossman and check out his earlier articles.NO. 17: OUR MOST valuable asset is often our human capital—our income-earning ability. A regular paycheck can be like collecting interest from a bond, which then frees us up to invest in stocks.
NO. 103: YOU CAN estimate stock market returns by adding the starting dividend yield to the expected percentage increase in earnings per share. But such estimates could prove badly wrong—depending on investor sentiment. When investors grow bullish, they put a higher value on corporate earnings, driving up the market’s price-earnings ratio.
HAPPINESS RESEARCH. Using experiments and survey data, academics have brought greater rigor to our understanding of what drives happiness. For instance, researchers have found that commuting and the birth of a child hurt happiness, a robust network of friends is a big plus, and that money buys happiness but the amount wanes as our income rises.
NO. 3: WE LACK self-control. Prudent money management is simple enough: We should spend less than we earn, build a globally diversified portfolio, hold down investment costs, minimize taxes, buy the right insurance and take on debt judiciously. Yet folks struggle with such basic steps—because they can’t bring themselves to do what they know is right.
NO. 17: OUR MOST valuable asset is often our human capital—our income-earning ability. A regular paycheck can be like collecting interest from a bond, which then frees us up to invest in stocks.
MY TWINS ARE SENIORS in high school. That means, pandemic or no pandemic, we spent the fall applying to colleges.
Here in California, the pandemic closed public schools in March and most did not reopen for in-person teaching with the start of the current academic year. That forced parents to stand in for college counselors. The preparations high school juniors usually engage in, such as visiting colleges and taking standardized tests, didn’t occur this past spring or summer.
MY DAUGHTER IS MORE than halfway through her junior year of high school. College and career choices are hot topics in our household. My wife and I have a dilemma: Should we encourage our daughter to pursue a college degree that matches her passions—or nudge her toward one that has a better chance of paying the bills?
My daughter is no slouch in math and science, but her true love turns in another direction.
AS SOMEONE WHO’S been employed in academia for more than two decades, I often wonder about the future of higher education. One trend seems clear: At a time when more companies are doing away with degree requirements for new hires, more colleges are doing away with studying. The so-called college experience appears to be more important than academics. Indeed, grade inflation has been running rampant since the 1960s.
Meanwhile, student debt loads are the highest they’ve ever been.
THE NATIONAL STUDENT Clearinghouse Research Center recently published a report on postsecondary enrollment for fall 2021, including enrollment at community colleges, undergraduate institutions and graduate schools.
If you’re a believer in postsecondary education, the headline numbers weren’t encouraging. Enrollment fell by 2.7%, or 476,100 students. Over the two years since the start of the pandemic, it’s declined by 5.1%, or 937,500 students.
While the report offers no reasons for these declines, my view is that colleges are struggling to justify their value proposition to students and their families,
A FEW WEEKS BACK, Jonathan Clements wrote an article reminding readers that they, too, likely made financial missteps in their younger days. His article was in response to comments by HumbleDollar readers about the perceived lack of financial discipline shown by those currently in their late teens and early 20s.
Before my recent career change, I would’ve had the same opinion as many readers. With my new job teaching accounting to undergraduates,
INVESTING FOR education costs has never been more popular, as evidenced by recent Morningstar data. The research company found that 2021 was a record-breaking year for assets in 529 college savings plans. At almost $500 billion, total investments are up nearly fourfold over the past decade.
A big reason is the tax advantages—investments grow tax-free if they’re used for qualifying education expenses—plus 529 accounts are treated relatively leniently under the college financial-aid formulas. You can learn more about the accounts from other authors who have real life experience saving through 529 plans.
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Doubt the Forecast
ArticleAdam M. Grossman | Mar 28, 2026
- No one can see around corners, and we shouldn’t believe anyone who can claim to be able to. Presumably, there was some scientific basis for Ehrlich’s predictions. The problem, though, was that all of his predictions were based on extrapolation, and he could only extrapolate from the facts available at the time. For example, he had no idea how advances in agriculture would outpace population growth, made possible by technologies like LED bulbs for indoor farming, something that hadn’t yet been invented at the time.
- We should be inherently skeptical of extreme predictions. Extreme views aren’t necessarily wrong. After all, extreme things can and have happened. The reason we should be skeptical is because the world is complex. As I noted a few weeks back, it’s possible for an observation to be correct but incomplete. And that was a key flaw in Ehrlich’s thinking.
The formula at the center of his research considered just three variables (population, affluence and technology). But when it comes to most things in the world, the ultimate outcome is dependent on many more variables than that. So someone like Ehrlich might have been accurate with one, or even more than one, of his observations. But at the same time, he was ignoring innumerable other factors, such as public policy decisions.- In a similar vein, we should be wary of stories that sound convincing only because of the way they’re presented. I’ve discussed before the phenomenon of the “single story”—when an overly simplified, one-dimensional version of the facts takes on a life of its own. Later in life, Ehrlich acknowledged that he had benefited from this sort of thing: “The publisher’s choice of The Population Bomb was perfect from a marketing perspective…,” he wrote.
- We shouldn’t be too easily impressed by credentials. Despite being almost entirely wrong with his “population bomb” arguments, Ehrlich was a tenured professor at Stanford and received numerous awards. This carries an important lesson: Smart people can veer off course just as much as anyone else. As I’ve noted before, the scientist who invented the lobotomy received the Nobel Prize for his work. We should never blindly accept an argument based solely on its source.
- We should be careful of confirmation bias. That’s the emotional tendency to look for evidence that confirms pre-existing beliefs. In Ehrlich’s case, despite all the disconfirming evidence, he never backed down from his views.
In 1980, economist Julian Simon challenged Ehrlich to a bet. Simon let Ehrlich pick a basket of commodities and wagered that each of them would be less expensive by 1990. For his part, Ehrlich was sure they’d all increase in price due to population pressure. Ten years later, every one of the commodities in the basket turned out to be cheaper, despite the population having grown by 800 million people over the course of the bet. Ehrlich held up his end of the bet, sending Simon a check for $567 in 1990, but he had his wife sign it, and he never acknowledged that he might have been wrong. Indeed, he doubled down. In 2009, Ehrlich commented that, “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future.” The bottom line: Prognosticators can be convincing and are often entertaining. As investors, our job is to listen with a critical ear.Is The Australian Superannuation Program the Answer to US Retirement Problem?
David Lancaster | Mar 30, 2026
- To say that the Australian superannuation system is 3 decades old is a little off the mark. The system is only now reaching the 12% contribution level for all employees, after starting at 3%. So it will actually be another 3-4 decades before we see the full affect of the Australian superannuation system on aged pensions etc.
- Tax incentives are an integral part of the super system, to encourage retirement saving. However this also incentivises wealthier Australian to use super as a tax minimisation scheme, which was not it's intent.
- Our super system seems to be most closely compared to the 401K system in the US. The simplest way forward, in my very humble opinion, would be steps to broaden the 401K system to a greater proportion of the population, with a final target of 100% coverage.
"Debriefing
Dan Smith | Mar 27, 2026
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Wrapping It Up
Ken Cutler | Mar 26, 2026
Keeping up with the Jonses— at least it looks that way.
R Quinn | Mar 29, 2026