Mona Chalabi is a data journalist who hand-draws beautiful, colorful and often surprising charts that add context, or scale, or feeling. Like her Pulitzer-prize winning work illustrating the barley-imaginable enormity of Jeff Bezos’s wealth compared to the median US household. Mona’s brand-new first book, Ten Lives, closely tracks the finances and fortunes of one person in each of the ten income brackets in the US, over the course of five years. It’s also accidentally part memoir, tracking and disclosing her own situation. She sits down to tell us about how uncomfortable these conversations were and are, how disclosing it all has changed and will change her life, and why she did it anyway.

Further reading:

Ten Lives by Mona Chalabi

9 Ways to Imagine Jeff Bezos’ Wealth

The story of Gaza’s destruction in 100 lives

High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, 2010

“Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world” A. T. Jebb, L. Tay, E. Diener, S. Oishi, 2018

What Now by Tareq Baconi

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For the past few years, there’s been a persistent and mystifying disconnect in the economy: the data show that the economy is doing great, but Americans have never been more bummed about it than they have been this year. This is showing up in weird ways: Usually when we feel bad or anxious about the economy we’ll spend less. But we just aren’t. What gives? To help us solve this macro mystery that’s been befuddling economists, we brought in an expert in the micro: Oyin Adedoyin, a personal finance reporter with The Wall Street Journal. She is out in the world talking with people about their finances, their hopes, and their economic stresses. Taken together, the stories she’s covered paint a nuanced and complex picture of our economic health. Based on that reporting, we sat down to try out some theories to explain this disconnect.

Further reading:

WSJ: They’re in Their 60s and Their Student Loans Won’t Let Them Retire by Oyin Adedoyin

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System via FRED: Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking: adults with 3 months emergency savings

University of Michigan: Survey of Consumers, survey questions

Bank of America Institute: Consumer Checkpoint: Strength in numbers

Foreign Policy: No One Has a Plan for American Decline by Nick Danforth

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Adriana Robertson is a law professor at the University of Chicago who, a decade ago, got fixated on index funds. They seemed so important – the best, or maybe only, good investing advice was to put your money in an index fund, right? So, she wondered, what exactly is an index fund? How does one get made? She poked around and couldn’t find research that answered her questions. So unfortunately she had to do it herself. And what she found was that these “passive” investing vehicles aren’t really passive at all. At the end of the day, somebody has to pick the stocks. She joins us to tell us what index funds – and for that matter, capital markets in general – are supposed to be doing, and if they are actually doing it.

Further Reading:

Adriana Z. Robertson - Passive in Name Only: Delegated Management and “Index” Investing

Harry Markowitz - Portfolio Selection

Lucian A. Bebchuk - The Case for Increasing Shareholder Power

Yueran Ma - What Adam Smith Didn’t Foresee About Capitalism

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