The Misery Index at the Kitchen Table
In the 1970s, an American economist named Arthur Okun did something almost no economist ever does. He built a measure of the economy that a tired person could understand at the end of a long day. He...
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In the 1970s, an American economist named Arthur Okun did something almost no economist ever does. He built a measure of the economy that a tired person could understand at the end of a long day. He...
There is a warning light for recessions. Not a prophet, not a rumor, not an uncle who says he can feel it in the market. An actual, public, checkable gauge that has flickered before most American...
Martha is a widow. She is stretching her late husband's retirement savings across her bills, and the prescription costs are the hardest part. Her daughter, Ann, is a grown woman who always seems to...
Paul and Arlene had been married eight years, and the marriage had a fault line running through the living room. Paul loved sports: watching them, playing them, filling his free hours with them....
In 1978, two men who had just been fired from a hardware company sat across a table from one of the richest men in America and lost sixty billion dollars over a used car.
Around 2004, one of the most successful restaurant founders in America sat down to persuade his wife to give up her job. Not because she was failing at it. Peggy Tsiang Cherng held a doctorate in...
The breakfast was going wrong. Justin Whitmel Earley, a business lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, was on a mountain-cabin vacation with his wife and their four boys, and the family had walked into a...
In one Richmond, Virginia household, Wednesday night is date night. Not usually dinner out. Most weeks it is nothing more than two tired parents putting their phones away after the children's bedtime...
Ken Wilson, a fifty-five-year-old Evangelical father whose family had held its faith for five generations, explained to a team of researchers why he was grateful he married inside it: "What you're...
In 2001, a couple in western France bought a house together for 60,980 euros, then spent the next year improving it: new heating, insulation, electricity, a bay window. He ran a construction...
On paper, French law is careful about what one spouse owes the other when a long marriage ends. Article 271 of the French Civil Code instructs judges to weigh a considered set of criteria before...
Fabienne and Eric Callies ran a plant nursery in eastern France: 1,600 square meters of greenhouses, owned by Eric and his mother. For the first seven years of their marriage, Fabienne worked in that...
Everybody knows that money ruins families. It is one of the few beliefs that survives every border: the American sitcom knows it, the Nollywood drama knows it, the proverb in every language knows it....
Most financial advice arrives as a list, and the list never ends. Save more. Budget better. Avoid debt. Diversify. Start a side hustle. Buy land. Don't buy land yet. For a young couple or a...
Picture a young couple, married two years, doing the arithmetic of their life at the kitchen table. Salary, rent, school fees looming somewhere in the future, a savings account that a hard month...
James Hughes spent decades as an American trusts and estates lawyer to some of the wealthiest families in the world, and out of all those years he kept returning to one observation that should not be...
It is eleven at night and the "Thompsons" are sprawled on their bed, which is piled not with pillows but with data for tomorrow's sales presentation. Their teenage children are doing homework down...
Jackie Joyner-Kersee is, by many accounts, the greatest female athlete of the twentieth century: three Olympic Games, two heptathlon gold medals, world records that stood for decades. Her coach,...
In 1864, a twenty-two-year-old named Gerard Adriaan Heineken bought a brewery in the heart of Amsterdam. He knew nothing about brewing. A century and a half later, the company carrying his name is...
Sara was, by every account, a gifted entrepreneur: competent, highly energetic, the kind of person who builds things. She started a temp agency and pleaded with her husband, Jeff, to join her. He...
At her first meeting with her new financial planner, Molly brought a gift: a hand-crocheted hat for the planner's baby son. That detail matters, because it tells you who Molly was. Warm, generous,...
Somewhere in your house, on paper or in an abandoned app, is a budget you built with real hope. Categories for food, transport, school fees, airtime, a modest line for enjoying your life. It lasted...
Every young couple gets the pitch eventually, and it never arrives sounding like a pitch. It arrives sounding like an opportunity that respects you. A friend from church has joined a land-buying...
In 1997, a widow walked into the High Court in Nairobi to ask for something that should have been simple: legal authority to administer her late husband's estate. She and her husband had built that...