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 :-)
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.