Damn, back at it again with the fresh links. Good mix this week, some markets, some psychology, some economics.
- Scott Sumner has a post about how bond yields aren’t surprisingly low on a real basis, which we all know is how you’re supposed to measure financial things. My favorite sentence is the last one:
If you want higher interest rates, tell the Fed to cut interest rates.
If more people understood what Scott is getting at, there would be a lot less wringing of hands about monetary policy.
- Psychologists at the University of Illinois (shoutout) took a look at blinking: the astounding thing here is that we don’t know how it works. Well, we know how a blink works, but we don’t have a good idea of why we perceive (or rather, don’t) blinks the way that we do.
It certainly doesn’t feel like someone is flicking the lights on and off. How can this be?
- h/t Tyler Cowen on this NYT piece about “The Paradox of Disclosure”: feels like a piece that applies to many fields, not just medicine.
Surgeons also gave stronger recommendations to have surgery if they discussed the opportunity for the patient to meet with a radiation oncologist.
- Last, I was recently digging into the relatively well-known BHB studies on Asset Allocation: this 2010 piece from Ibbotson I found to be a great and concise review of the original work and the subsequent literature. He succinctly sums up what is now 30 years of research, conventional wisdom, debunking, and myth.
So how should we interpret BHB’s 90+ percent? BHB captured the performance from both the market movement and the incremental impact of the asset allocation policy.
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