Good morning, sunshine, and welcome to another day of Apex Money, your home for hand-selected articles about personal finance and self improvement. Every weekday, Jim and I collect a few of our recent faves to share with a couple thousand faithful readers.
Here’s what I have for you today…
Why hard work alone isn’t enough to get ahead. [BBC Worklife] — “Hard work is still very important, says Carol Frohlinger, president of US-based consulting firm Negotiating Women, Inc. But simply waiting for someone to pick up on it is detrimental…This flies in the face of societal training that begins as early as primary school, when students are taught that the quiet, hard workers are those most likely to prosper.”
Do you have a shopping addiction? (And how to recover.) [Women Who Money] — “Shopping is very much a part of everyday life, especially in today’s world of one-click purchases and Apple Pay. But when shopping becomes a compulsion, you buy things you don’t need, or you’re deeply in debt because of your purchases, there may be a bigger problem at hand.”
Nobody knows how the economy actually works, and a Fed paper is the latest sign. [The New York Times, so possible paywall] — “Macroeconomics, despite the thousands of highly intelligent people over centuries who have tried to figure it out, remains, to an uncomfortable degree, a black box. The ways that millions of people bounce off one another — buying and selling, lending and borrowing, intersecting with governments and central banks and businesses and everything else around us — amount to a system so complex that no human fully comprehends it.”
Lastly today, here’s a lucid explanation of a logic problem that has puzzled me for decades. It’s the first walk-through of the Monty Hall problem that has made sense to me.
Why you should always switch: The Monty Hall problem explained. [Behavioral Scientist] — “One of the most famous television game shows from the heyday of the genre from the 1950s to the 1980s was Let’s Make a Deal. Its host, Monty Hall, achieved a second kind of fame when a dilemma in probability theory, loosely based on the show, was named after him. A contestant is faced with three doors. Behind one of them is a sleek new car. Behind the other two are goats.”
That’s all she wrote! I’ll be back tomorrow with more interesting stuff. See you then…