Marry someone smarter than you are

That's the advice from the economist Charles Wheelan;

This was of the smartest things I ever did. I bring this up for three reasons. First, for all the controversy over marriage lately, there has been virtually no public discussion of the role that marriage plays in economic success. Those of you who took my economics and public policy classes may remember my favorite quiz question of all time: True or False: Dartmouth is the kind of place where assortive mating is going on. Parents, please don’t worry. This is a less sordid question than it would appear. The answer is true; it merely refers to the fact that highly educated people are likely to marry each other, as are poorly-educated people. The result magnifies many of our underlying social trends, including income inequality. 

To make it much more personal, and because I’ve vowed to speak about things that no one told me when I was in College, what I’ve learned over time is that the benefit of marrying my Phi Beta Kappa classmate, whom I met at orientation freshman week, is not merely that she is fun and beautiful, but that it’s like having another economic oar in the water. When I was getting a PhD, she was working. When she wanted to start a software company, I had a steady income. When I wanted to take a year off to write books, she had a steady income. You’re good at standardized tests; you get the pattern. In addition to all the things that Dr. Phil can tell you about marriage, I’m telling you that you’re getting a professional teammate for life. So pick wisely.

Now the second reason I bring this subject up is that a healthy marriage will make you… Yes, happy! We’ve got research on this, too. In fact, the economists even think they can quantify it. In terms of happiness and well-being, a healthy marriage is the equivalent of earning an extra $100,000 a year. That said, I would urge you not to tell your future spouse that he or she will be worth roughly a million dollars at the end of 10 years, as it never sounds as cool to everyone else as it does to the economists.

Finally, I bring up the benefit of smart partners because tomorrow is your chance! Everyone who is Phi Beta Kappa will be wearing pink and blue ribbons on their gowns. Folks, this is the equivalent of hunting smart fish in a barrel. After tomorrow, when you go into a bar or to your job or to the gym, the really smart people aren’t going to be wearing pink and blue ribbons! 

Now, let me point out to those of you wearing the pink and blue ribbons, it’s just tomorrow. When you’re done with Commencement, take them off. My wife sometimes wears hers around the house, and frankly, it’s unseemly.

Love is not expensive

Adopting My Daughter - Steven Levitt

See also Half the Sky

Thank a Teacher today

Since it’s back-to-school season across the country, I wanted to celebrate a group that is often maligned: teachers. Like so many others, it was a teacher who changed the direction of my life, and to whom I’m forever indebted.

-What Teacher Would You Like to Thank?

The Hacker Role Model

New Yorker profile of WikiLeaks Julian Assange;

Assange was born in 1971, in the city of Townsville, on Australia’s northeastern coast, but it is probably more accurate to say that he was born into a blur of domestic locomotion. Shortly after his first birthday, his mother—I will call her Claire—married a theatre director, and the two collaborated on small productions. They moved often, living near Byron Bay, a beachfront community in New South Wales, and on Magnetic Island, a tiny pile of rock that Captain Cook believed had magnetic properties that distorted his compass readings. They were tough-minded nonconformists. (At seventeen, Claire had burned her schoolbooks and left home on a motorcycle.) Their house on Magnetic Island burned to the ground, and rifle cartridges that Claire had kept for shooting snakes exploded like fireworks. “Most of this period of my childhood was pretty Tom Sawyer,” Assange told me. “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled. He absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to pronounce all the words that he learned...

While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. “The austerity of one’s interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me,” he said. “It is like chess—chess is very austere, in that you don’t have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.” Assange embraced life as an outsider. He later wrote of himself and a teen-age friend, “We were bright sensitive kids who didn’t fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable boneheads.”

When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendax—from Horace’s splendide mendax, or “nobly untruthful”—and he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks. He joined with two hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and they broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including networks belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book called “Underground,” which he collaborated on with a writer named Suelette Dreyfus, he outlined the hacker subculture’s early Golden Rules: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”

Memo to Self via Book Covers

"One interesting practical suggestion is to keep a "gratitude journal," in which you routinely list experiences and circumstances for which you are grateful."- Ben Bernanke

Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier, by Robert A. Emmons

Keep a Gratitude Journal- some reasons:

Spirituality: Those who regularly attend religious services and engage in religious activities such as prayer reading religious material score are more likely to be grateful. Grateful people are more likely to acknowledge a belief in the interconnectedness of all life and a commitment to and responsibility to others (McCullough et. al., 2002). Gratitude does not require religious faith, but faith enhances the ability to be grateful.

A related benefit was observed in the realm of personal goal attainment: Participants who kept gratitude lists were more likely to have made progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based) over a two-month period compared to subjects in the other experimental conditions.

Weekend Forum- Just love, Just laugh,

This week's question: How much patience do you need to be a parent?

Related:
The Best Parents Have Patience

How to Become a Patient Parent

Stubborn Pre-schoolers;

Three year olds: first, the sympathy. My grandfather always said about my brother at this age that he could wear out an iron horse and aggravate a fly to death.

I have a stubborn kid, too, still stubborn at 7 although better than he was at 3. Your daughter does sound like an extra handful though. First of all, see if you can get a book (from your local library) called "Your Three Year Old." This is part of a series written some years ago by a couple of psychologists and I have found it very useful in dealing with the psychological changes that happen as children grow older.

In the case of my son I am a single parent with no other support, so I really had to choose my battles to avoid getting totally flattened. If my son wanted to eat cereal every night for dinner for two months, that's what he ate. When we got into a fight in the morning about getting dressed warmly enough, I took him outside to feel the cool air, then he was usually good about dressing warmly enough.

The only advice I can offer you is to try to give your daughter a choice as much as possible, but not an unlimited choice. And as much as possible you make her decide, in a timely manner. So when you are fixing her hair, ask her how many ponytails she wants. When it is time to get dressed (and don't, by the way, say "Time to get dressed.") ask her to choose between pants and a dress. For dinner, you might offer her what the family is eating, or give her one other easy to fix option, such as cereal, make her decide, then stick with it.

A Parents' Primer on Patience

How to teach kids to be entrepreneurs