The Sunday Best 02/09/2025

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Sunday Best where we bring you the best reads from across the internet.

This week we’re looking at more realistic social security proposals, if the AI boom is similar to the dot com boom, how to not freak out as an investment strategy, and to keep your personal finance as simple as possible.

We’re also reading some good advice for parents who are considering paying up for the Ivies, how bogus scholarly research is impacting our lives, your guide to Coast FIRE, physician burnout, and so much more.

Happy reading!

The Sunday Best 02/09/2025

A mix of tolerable benefit cuts and realistic revenue increases would make everyone better off. Here’s a proposal to fix social security that we could enact today.

It’s impossible not to wonder how much the current situation, with soaring valuations for a handful of technology stocks, resembles where we were 25 years ago, with the frenzy over AI now playing a role similar to that of the frenzy over the internet, a.k.a the dotcom boom, back then.

The media is going to overreact. Politicians are going to overreact. People on social media are going to overreact. Your co-workers are going to overreact. But freaking out because of the market is not an investment strategy.

The U.S. housing stock is increasingly aged, housing starts are only just beginning to catch up with the long-term average, and mortgage rates are much higher than they have been for years, making homeowners reluctant to sell. Here’s what it means.

Ironically enough, if there was one way for you to succeed as an investor, it would be to take a leaf out of casino books. Here are six ways you can tilt the odds in your favor as an investor.

Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.

Highly selective colleges don’t automatically make their students successful. There’s a whole body of data showing that students who are turned down by these colleges have similar economic outcomes to those who get in. That how you go to college matters far more than where you go to college.

“A watched pot never boils.” Just forget about it until you need the money. Then, look up your balance. Keep things simple and reap the rewards. 

To do a Coast Fire, you still have to save aggressively and leave below your means, but you don’t need to save quite as rigorously, and the trade-offs aren’t quite so austere. Here’s the ultimate guide to Coast Fire.

The problem is every strata of wealth on the spectrum inevitably wishes they were in the next rung up. It’s never enough. The perfect level of wealth is the one you’re content with. Unfortunately, many people never reach true contentment, no matter how much money they have.

It’s no secret that the journey to becoming a physician is both financially demanding and intellectually rigorous. The student loan debt incurred by graduates is one of the defining aspects of their careers, with medical school debt being a substantial drain on their earnings.

We’ve discussed physician burnout before and how it impacts the services that a primary care physician provides. But the real root of that burnout is a system that is simply too convoluted and overtaxed to work long-term, going so far as to be deemed a ‘public health crisis.’