Seeking book about baseline life planning and expectations
In an attempt to find useful “base rate expectations” for the rest of my life (and how actions I might take now could set me up to be much better off 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 years from now) I’m looking for a book that describes the nuts and bolts of human lives. I want coherent discussion from an actuarial/economic/probabilistic/calculating perspective, but I’d like some soulfulness too. The ideal book would be published in 2010 and have coverage of the different periods of people’s lives and cover different aspects of their lives as well. In some sense the book would be like a nuts and bolts “how to your your life” manual. Hopefully it would have footnotes and generally good epistemology :-)
To take an example of the kind of content I would hope for (in a domain where I already have worked out some of the theory myself) the ideal book would explain how to calculate the ROI of different levels of college education realistically. Instead of a hand-waving argument that “on avergae you’ll make more with education” it would also talk about the opportunity costs of lost wages, and how expected number of years of work impacts on what amount of training makes sense, and so on.
To be clear, I don’t want a book that is simply about deciding when, how, and for how long it makes sense to train for a job. Instead I want something that talks about similar issues that I haven’t already thought about but that are important, so that I can be usefully educated in ways I wasn’t expecting. My goal is to find someone else’s scaffold to help me project when and why I should (or shouldn’t) buy a minivan, how much to budget for dentistry in my 50′s, and a breakdown of the causes of bankruptcy the way insurance companies can predict causes of death.
I was hoping that the book How We Live: An Economic Perspective on Americans from Birth to Death would give me what I want (and it is still probably my fallback book if I can’t find anything better) but it was written in 1983, and appears to be strongly oriented towards public policy recommendations rather than personal choice.
Books that may be conceptually nearby that seem non-ideal include:
Dear Undercover Economist: Priceless Advice on Money, Work, Sex, Kids, and Life’s Other Challenges—My second place fallback because it covers real life content, is from 2009, and the first book in the series was pretty solid on economic theory. The problem is that it seems like haphazard coverage of the subject matter rather than “a treatise” that aims to describe the full ambit of life issues, sort them by priority, and deal usefully with the big stuff.
The Average Life of the Average Person: How It All Adds Up—Just a collection of factoids, like the number of cumulative days the average person spends on the toilette, the value add is the collection and the juxtaposition. Mere factoids might actually be useful as a list of things to think about optimizing for long term impact? Not what I want, but potentially relevant.
The ABCs Of Strategic Life Planning—The first problem is that this appears to be a workbook with questionnaires (presumed target market is people dealing with akrasia) rather than a narrative of fact and theory (giving the logical scaffold for a general plan). The second problem is that the marketing means it is probably from the business/self-help genre from which I expect relatively little epistemic rigor.
The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want—This book covers the “softer issues” that I definitely care about and don’t expect to be covered by economists. It seems potentially interesting, but in addition to not covering the other subject areas, it sounds more like a literature review of positive psychology results than like a “normal life overview”.
The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World—It is good that this is recent (from 2008) but it is poorly reviewed, haphazard in subject, and full of shiny stuff that’s intended to be stimulatingly non-intuitive. I’m looking for meat and potatoes.
Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life—Purportedly a lot of economic theory (which is not what I’m looking for) and then some shiny examples that Freaknomics later (it was written in 1997) made somewhat trendy. However, the title sounds like the book could have been close to what I want.
Can anyone suggest a book that is “a coherent overview of the intersection of these books and anything else I forgot”? There may be no book that matches my ideal, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something pretty close to it exists that I just haven’t found yet.
Help appreciated!
The trouble with the sort of advice you seek is that it’s subject to the same principle that underlies the weak efficient markets hypothesis. If you believe you’ve found some information that will help you improve your life and get ahead, you should ask yourself why everyone else isn’t already following that same advice.
Now, there are several possibilities: perhaps the advice actually turns out to be bad when analyzed correctly, or it is in fact widely known and applied, but you were oblivious to it until now, or you are somehow specially privileged to be privy to this information, or you have a special talent from discerning truth from falsity among all the contradictory and unsubstantiated advice given by different people, or maybe the advice applies only to a rare sort of people to which you happen to belong. However, what is impossible is that there might exist public information that requires no special abilities to access, recognize as reliable, and apply in practice, and that would still enable you to get ahead in life—just like there is no possibility of such public information that would enable you to reap extraordinary profits from investment.
It seems to me that this implies that you won’t find any books of the sort you’re looking for, or worse yet, that you’ll find plenty of books giving false, unsubstantiated, and often contradictory advice. In particular, I don’t think popular microeconomics books can offer much useful advice beyond what’s already known as conventional wisdom and common sense. (And based on those I’ve seen, I’d say that the economists’ spherical-cow model of human behavior is often illuminating despite its simplicity, but sometimes it makes them miss the point spectacularly, mainly in situations where more subtle signaling considerations are crucial.)
It would be crazy to expect to reap “extraordinary profits” from knowing the average number of years a marriage lasts before a divorce, the primary causes thereof, and the average ages and costs to each participant.
It would be reasonable to expect that the knowledge could help someone to avoid a marriage that was likely to end in divorce, or to help them prevent divorce through something obvious like not spending enough time together.
I’m not looking for rocket science or magical secrets, I’m looking for an honest overview of the sturdy facts upon which normal lives rest :-)
JenniferRM:
Considering how many marriages fail with very sad (and costly) consequences, having useful knowledge that would enable you to avoid such an outcome definitely counts as “extraordinary profit” in my book!
The statistics you mention are easy to look up, but when it comes to an accurate model of the causes of marriage problems and the ways to solve and avoid them in practice, this is a very good example of an issue where good advice is extremely hard to separate from the torrents of unsubstantiated nonsense that are thrown in one’s face on every corner, and where it’s hard to overcome one’s own biases.
Such seemingly easy questions are often in fact extremely difficult! To get accurate answers to them, you have to fight your way through multiple thick layers of biases, rationalizations, and distortions. First you have the idealizations and rationalizations in the stories people tell themselves, then the tendency to pronounce respectably idealized opinions instead of realistic harshly cynical views—and last but not least, your own biases that may prevent you from accepting the often unpleasant truths.
But there are lots of pieces of public information that require no special abilities to access, recognize as reliable, and apply in practice, by the usual definitions of the words involved, and that lots of people would still benefit from following and don’t. Off the top of my head:
Don’t commit crime, morality aside, the rewards aren’t worth the risks.
Don’t take hard drugs like heroin, they really do screw you up.
The risk of being killed in an air crash is negligible. The risk of being killed in a road accident is anything but. Make your travel arrangements accordingly.
Don’t do crash diets, you’ll just put back all the weight as soon as you go off the diet. But do eat sensibly, keeping your weight down is a good thing.
If you’re going to have a credit card, don’t run up big debts on it.
Ration the amount of television you watch.
All straightforward advice, but millions of people suffer reduced quality of life or worse from failing to follow some of it.
It seems perfectly sensible to me to ask whether we can put together other straightforward pieces of advice that we would do well to follow but have thus far missed.
Sure, but to continue with the investment analogy, these pieces of advice would be equivalent to the advice that you should invest your money into assets with positive expected returns, and not into games of chance with negative expected gains. In other words, there exists a certain baseline level of conventional wisdom that is common knowledge, and the only people who don’t follow it are those who are exceptionally irrational, unintelligent, or suffer from poor self-control. So, the problem in those cases is how to overcome irrationality and lack of self-control, not how to acquire information, which is trivially available.
In contrast, what I meant by “getting ahead in life” is analogous to investing in an exceptionally profitable way, i.e. figuring out ways to make advantageous decisions beyond the trivially available common knowledge (possibly even contradicting it where it turns out to be inaccurate). Here, the same principle that underlies the weak EMH implies that public information will be worthless unless you’re exceptional in some way, since any broadly useful and unambiguous public information would already have become part of the universally known conventional wisdom.
To take one example mentioned in the post, when it comes to ROI on various education programs, you’ll notice that the public information is hopelessly confused and contradictory. For each source that suggests one thing, you’ll find another that claims the opposite, and also a third one that says they’re both unsubstantiated nonsense. Ultimately, if you want to make a decisions better than vague suggestions of your intuition and common knowledge—in other words, to do anything beyond merely avoiding decisions that are clearly crazy—you either have to be exceptionally capable of assessing the available information or privy to insider information.
One thing to look at might be the Occupational Outlook Handbook...
Also O*NET online. O*NET includes more info about Knowledge, skills and abilities you might need for a given job.
It seems to me that you’re looking for an impossible book—the world changes fast enough (and I think it’s been changing faster lately and likely to continue) that there’s no obvious way to know, for example, how much you should specialize.
At the moment, there are a lot of people who “did everything right” (followed standard advice on how to have a secure, prosperous future) and have taken considerable losses.
What they should have done instead isn’t obvious.
I’d be OK with a book that gave “all the usual advice” of this sort. I’m not expecting the book to describe an optimal life, just a semi-typical life and the logic that justified the decisions at each stage. Part of the reason that I’m looking for the book is so that I can try to merge this sort of bottom up “actuarial model” that has something like “the base rate for normal lives” with a top down analysis of possible future trends and how they may change people’s lives. Then I can look for places where those ways of thinking about the future seem to sharply diverge (signs of crisis or opportunity), and where they are likely to predict basically the same thing (things I’m more likely to be able to count on).
In the meantime it seems like there is potentially a lot of prosaic stuff of the sort that various old people would like to tell young people about how “not to make the retrospectively obvious mistake I made” with respect to actions at 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 and so on. Each of those ages makes me think of distinct sets of life challenges that I have relatively little personal experience with, but I imagine they could go a bit better if I did a little prep work in advance, guided by grounded data.
Maybe someone has already collated that data into a book for some reason? If so, I want to read it :-)
If you’re willing to start with the raw material, this might be an interesting question to raise at Metafilter—it’s got a lively and varied commenting community.
That seems like a good idea, but I’m afraid of spamming them. When I checked, they seem to have norms against what I’d want to do.
If anyone here is a member of Metafilter in good standing who could do an “Ask Metafilter” post on this subject, I would appreciate it :-)
Metafilter user 16609 (joined Oct 5 2002) here.
This indeed might make an interesting ask.metafilter question. That is by far the most useful part of the site. I have a backlog of questions I want to ask them and you can only ask one question per week so I cannot volunteer to ask it.
If you paid the 5$ signup and waited one week and asked your question you will get answers. I have no idea if you would get any good answers, let alone an answer worth 5$ to you, but you would get answers. There is no question in my mind that at least one time in the history of that website more than one person has paid the 5$ signup, waited one week, posted one question, and disappeared off into the aether.
I did the following google search:
lifehacks site:ask.metafilter.com
There were 62 hits. The first two I clicked on were useless, but you might like the third one I clicked on:
http://ask.metafilter.com/69892/Lifeplanning
You do not need a book for this. What you need is parents who succeeded in their own lives and a close relationship with them. Since I don’t have that, I wouldn’t mind the book you imagine is out there. It probably needs to have a long chapter on tips for managing resentment of all the people around us who have good relationships with their successful parents and for whom life is like a frolic in the park.
The closest thing I have seen to a book approaching your question is by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin Your Money or Your Life.
Thanks! The specific article you sent me to was very close to the reason I was looking for information here. There was a comment over there:
My goal in searching for this information is not to plan so much as to try to predict what will happen. What will I probably do? I want to write out the prediction and see how things go. Laugh. Then make a new prediction that will hopefully induce less laughter and more smug self confidence. Lather, rinse, repeat :-P
I tracked down a summary of the core concepts in “Your Money Or Your Life” that you mentioned. It looked like it would be helpful for anyone who is financially drowning because they are flinching around conscientious money management. Its not exactly what I’m looking for right now, however.
I also ran the google search you suggested, looked through the results, and find two more interesting books in the process, like the one’s in the original article they are not exactly what I want, but they are in the ballpark:
Lifemaps : A Step-By-Step Method for Simplifying 101 of Life’s Most Overwhelming Projects
Lifescripts: What to Say to Get What You Want in Life’s Toughest Situations
I’m not sure which of the many norms you’re referring to.
Unfortunately, I’m an occasional reader at MeFi, and can’t help out with the culture. It might be worth asking about, either at Mefi, or at Ask Metafilter.
JenniferRM:
In my experience, when it comes to sincere advice from older folks, it’s extremely difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. This is both because the world is changing very rapidly these days and because, contrary to the usual saying, most people’s hindsight is very far from 20⁄20. People are often oblivious to how much things have changed since their youth, and unable to distinguish true instances of correct and incorrect planning from random luck.
A huge problem here is that honest reflection about one’s past mistakes, missed opportunities, and suboptimal decisions tends to be very painful and unpleasant, and people consequently prefer to tell themselves (let alone others!) a highly distorted and idealized story of their life and accomplishments. When they’re giving advice, this problem is exacerbated by their additional propensity to signal respectability by telling an idealized story about how things should work in an ideal world, not an honest-to-God cynical story about how they really work. (For which I can’t really blame them, considering how often the latter would sound crude and offensive. Of course, as with most human hypocrisy, this idealization mainly happens at unconscious levels, not as conscious deception.)
Yes, but thoughtful older people exist who probably do have insights of the sort I’m thinking of, and their existence constitutes evidence that the information I’m looking for could be collected by someone. Since the information exists and the world is vast, it would not surprise me if someone, somewhere, collected it up for a book that would help me.
Maybe they wrote it in 1973 instead of 2008, but that would still be helpful I think. Heck, in some ways it might be more helpful if it was really high quality and then I could diff that versus 2010 to see what has changed and what has remained stable. The stable bits would be interesting precisely because of their stability.
The trick is, I’m not sure how to track the information down. I need the right keywords or an author’s name or a good URL and I was hoping LW could help me out on that front :-)
While I was reading this the type of book that came to mind to look for was a memoir. Possibly the memoirs of an actuary, or someone else who is in a position to create such an analysis of their own life. I don’t know of any, but it does seem like a slightly different place to try looking.
Hidden order isn’t the book you’re looking for. It tries to explain everyday life using economic theory, but doesn’t do that much in advice giving. It is well worth reading if you aren’t that familiar with economics though.
I don’t know of a single book that does all of what you are looking for, but here are a few books that come to mind.
Richard Florida’s book Who’s Your City?. Florida says that where to live is arguably the important choice a person can make regarding their future. He used a bunch of statistics (albeit with his own made-up indices) in his earlier book The Creative Class, so he probably uses some in this book too (I’ve only read bits of it.)
John Gottman has studied marriage and found what works with real couples who come to his lab. He can predict with about 90% accuracy whether a couple will be together in 10 years after listening to them discuss a contentious issue for 15 minutes. He has also written academic papers about mathematical modelling of human relationships, including how partners influence the mood of each other when one is happy and one is sad. He’s written a number of books for the general public on these topics. My favourites so far are And Baby Makes Three: The Six-Step Plan for Preserving Marital Intimacy and Rekindling Romance After Baby Arrives… and Why Marriages Succeed or Fail but they are all good, and there is some overlap of material in each of them.
Seeking out old people and listening to their stories and asking them questions that you care about might be better than reading books about them, especially since most interviewers seem to ask such generic and clicheed questions. But some people have gone out and collected stories and advice. Here’s one such project: The Legacy Project
In Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking, Roger Martin uses a metaphor of the opposable thumb to explain the idea of holding two opposing models of how something works in mind, until coming to a better model that supercedes them. The book has case studies and stories, but not statistics. It’s marketed as a business book, but I think it could be a life lesson sort of book too. I’m not sure whether it matches what you’re looking for.
Unfortunately, most of the time I think one has to look up the statistics for each individual issue. (As an aside, the biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in the USA is from medical bills, and as a Canadian who has universal health care I find this both appalling and explanatory of some of the differences in American and Canadian culture.)