Where you’re born matters more for boys.

Jon Stewart on baltimore schools.

Kitces has an interesting post on wash sales. IRS will probably rule on this in typical timely fashion, maybe the next 5 years.

Good Sumner post on the proper measure of well-being. He is consistently very good at making sure things are measured properly.

Atul Gawande with a piece on healthcare. Maybe this is how America spends so much GDP on it?

The dangers of using poll results to describe public opinion.

Overview of a few estate planning strategies. When it comes to multi-generational planning the devil is in the details, but a good overview article.

People are bad at understanding currencies and exchange rates.

Civil Discourse. If more discussions happened with this level of quality, the world would be a better place. The topic of discussion is interesting too, the so-called “Growth Mindset”.

Tren Griffin on Julian Robertson.

Tim Ferriss on Brian Koppelman’s podcast. Interesting guys to listen to. They spent about 30 seconds on it, but the “microbiome” is really blowing up these days. If you haven’t heard of it you will. Not sure if too many things are being claimed of it now, but I can pretty much guarantee that people are going to start attributing things to it that are completely unrelated. For example, the attribution of weight gain to microbiome imbalances (versus eating too much) I find extremely suspect.

Ben Bernanke’s post on the taylor rule – Lines up with a lot of market monetarists who think rates should have gone negative (see: Europe) after 2009. I’m not sure if the equilibrium rate crossing back over and being higher than the fed funds means following the rule implies a rate increase, or whether you have to make up for some sort of “rate debt” and let the actual rates remain lower than the taylor rule implies to get back to ‘normal’.

Sumner – lots of my favorite posts of his are these shorter ones where someone has addressed a point he made, but is using faulty logic (or is reasoning from an identity).

Tren Griffin, a dozen things I’ve learned – These are always worth the read, and the archive is well worth an afternoon (or a whole day). This one on Irving Kahn, someone I had never heard of, but who undoubtedly had an excellent mind. Points 2 and 12 were my favorites.

Fireside Markets Podcast – A pretty light week for financial planning articles, so here’s a podcast. This one all about 401ks/how to increase savings rates in America. I’ve really enjoyed this series so far.

My plan is to save some of the good links I read for posterity. Or myself, when I mention them in conversation but can’t find them for the life of me. I haven’t figured out if this will be weekly, monthly, or just whenever I feel like it, but since I just started, I’ll go back an arbitrary amount of time.

Michael Kitces puts out his links each week, always pretty good. This week’s was particularly chock-full of interesting articles. I won’t bother curating them since he already did it. Needless to say, if you’re in financial planning, you should read what he puts out each week.

Optimal asset location, back-to-back Kitces, though this link is original content from him. Article on asset location. Kitces touches on how low-interest rate environments affect things, though he mostly focuses on the fact that most theoretical CFA-type analyses assume stocks use turnover assumptions which are implausibly low (see: dividends).

“Rates are artificially low” – I’ve been hearing this one more and more lately. This article from Scott Sumner helps make the point that rates are only too low if they are below equilibrium, and if equilibrium is ~2% inflation, then rates are artificially high.

Don’t penalize savers – Scott Sumner – I think one of the biggest topics that Americans will have to grapple with in the coming years is whether pre-retirement spending should be given a “bonus” by giving more tax-payer subsidized post-retirement income to those with less assets (and therefore less other income). My description is already feeling convoluted, but Scott’s example is great.

California drought – too many people in too dry of a climate?

Video games make kids smarter. Or smart kids like video games. Or something.

That goes back about a month… there were probably five times that many articles that deserve links, but I’m bad at capturing them all.