Freakest Links

Trying out the new Blogger interface. We'll see how it works.

Well, as always, Freakonomics has put up some more interesting articles, this time on their Friday FREAKest links. My favorites? The Conflict History Map - give it a shot, it is a really neat interface. It's yet another example that peace is a weird thing - war is far more common. The other that I particularly enjoyed - JP Morgan Explains the Euro Crisis With Legos.

How much do I need to retire?

Preach it brother!!

Asking the Right and Wrong Questions

Allow me to give a couple excerpts:

1. How much of your current salary will you need in retirement?
2. What is your risk attitude on a seven-point scale?

From my perspective, these are remarkably useless questions ....

In one study, we asked people the same question that financial advisors ask: How much of your final salary will you need in retirement? The common answer was 75 percent. But when we asked how they came up with this figure, the most common refrain turned out to be that that’s what they thought they should answer. And when we probed further and asked where they got this advice, we found that most people heard this from the financial industry. .... 75 percent was the rule of thumb that they had heard from financial advisors. You see the circularity and the inanity: Financial advisors are asking a question that their customers rely on them for the answer. So what’s the point of the question?!

In our study, we then took a different approach and instead asked people: How do you want to live in retirement? Where do you want to live? What activities you want to engage in? And similar questions geared to assess the quality of life that people expected in retirement.

....

But it turns out the second question is equally problematic. To show this, we also asked people to tell us how much risk they were willing to take with their money, on a ten-point scale. For some people we gave a scale that ranges from 100% in cash on the low end of the risk scale and 85% in stocks and 15% in bonds on the high end of the risk scale. For other people we gave a scale that ranges from 100% in bonds on the low end of the risk scale and buying only derivatives on the high end of the risk scale. And what did we find? People basically looked at the scale and said to themselves “I am a slightly above the mean risk-taker, so let me mark the scale at 6 or 7.” Or they said to themselves “I am a slightly below the mean risk-taker, so let me mark the scale at 4 or 5.” In essence, people have no idea what their risk attitude is, and if they are given different types of scales they end up reporting their risk attitude to be very different.

So we have an industry that asks one question it’s giving the answer to, and a second question that assumes that people can accurately describe their risk attitude (which they can’t).