Category: Personal Finance

Last month I took a look at a question with some relevance to me personally: should I buy a new car? In a similar vein, this week I’d like to take a look at a question that a lot of my peers are currently facing, and one that I faced myself a few years ago. That is, I’d like to take a look at whether going back to school to get an MBA is worth it or not.

This is an example of a cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analyses can aid our decision-making in a lot of situations. They can be used to figure out:

• which R&D project a company should devote resources to
• what price to buy a factory for
• whether you should make an investment in your own education

The basic idea behind a cost-benefit analysis to see if an MBA is worth it is 1) measure the total costs of getting an MBA, 2) define a baseline against which we will measure the “MBA bump”, 3) measure how much we can beat this baseline by, by getting an MBA, and 4) somehow account for the timing of these costs and benefits.

Lots of different topics this week– investing, Mueller, AOC, minimum wage law. If you have to pick one, read the AOC interview at New Yorker.

• Should You Take the Annuity or the Lump Sum? Of Dollars And Data. HT Barry Ritholtz.
• If I Had Five Minutes to Question Robert Mueller. Lawfare Blog.
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the 2020 Presidential Race and Trump’s Crisis at the Border. New Yorker. Highly recommended.
• How U.S. Tech Giants are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State. The Intercept.
• Minimum Wage Employment Effects and Labor Market Concentration. SSRN. One of several recent-ish papers that have changed my mind on the economics of minimum wage hikes. I now think there’s pretty good economic evidence that increasing minimum wages is a good idea in most places. “Our findings provide direct empirical evidence supporting the monopsony model as an explanation for the near-zero minimum wage employment effect documented in prior work.” HT Tyler Cowen.

• Democratic Debate Ignores Illegal Immigration’s Cause: No Visas. Cato Institute.
• How China Really Sees The Trade War: Xi Still Believes He Has The Upper Hand. Foreign Affairs.
• The Fed is doing something new: listening to low-income workers. Vox.
• If Only Turing Was Alive To See This. Slate Star Codex. Machines pretending to be humans pretending to be machines pretending to be machines– awesome!
• The Law That Makes It Easy to Go to War with Iran. New Yorker. As a veteran it drives me nuts that Congress has ceded its national security responsibilities to the President.

Last week, President Trump announced a change to federal healthcare rules which will affect employers that offer Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs). HRAs are vehicles which employers fund with tax-free money for an employee to use to purchase healthcare. Before this recent rule change, HRAs were not allowed to be used to purchase health insurance on the individual market. Starting in 2020, employers will be allowed to fund HRAs instead of offering group insurance policies to their employees.

• SNAP Caseload and Spending Declines Have Accelerated in Recent Years. CBPP. The recovery is real but no one seems to believe it. Times are pretty good!
• Biofuels Haven’t Cut Gasoline Prices Or Emissions. Oilprice.com. US – Iran conflict just took a huge step down the “unintentional war” path. Not good.
• US Accuses Iran of Oil Tanker Attacks. Rigzone.
• Brexit: UK firms ‘not even close to ready’ for no deal. BBC. My bet is that most firms would figure it out quickly when the time comes, but that’s a very low-confidence bet. Lots of risk here still.

Continuing a streak of going heavy on off-topic articles. But… DINOSAURS!!

• Make School Hard Again. Reason. HT Tyler Cowen.
• The Day the Dinosaurs Died. New Yorker. “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark.”
• Josh Brown: The power of compounding can help you double your money, again and again. CNBC & Ritholz Wealth Management.
• What a War With Iran Would Look Like. Foreign Affairs. “Even if neither side wants to fight, miscalculation, missed signals, and the logic of escalation could conspire to turn even a minor clash into a regional conflagration.” I’ll add an extra quote, not included in this article, from Eisenhower: “Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing.”
• Maybe Big Businesses Aren’t So Bad At Innovation. Futurity.org. “The idea that large firms can buy small firms to replace their own R&D is just disastrous. If we have to start rebuilding the R&D engine from scratch, it will be impossible,” Knott says. “The second is that large firms shouldn’t try to operate like small firms to become more productive—they already are more productive.”