The Psychology of Money. Morgan Housel
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel страница 5
Название: The Psychology of Money
Автор: Morgan Housel
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Личные финансы
isbn: 9780857197696
isbn:
Take retirement. At the end of 2018 there was $27 trillion in U.S. retirement accounts, making it the main driver of the common investor’s saving and investing decisions.5
But the entire concept of being entitled to retirement is, at most, two generations old.
Before World War II most Americans worked until they died. That was the expectation and the reality. The labor force participation rate of men age 65 and over was above 50% until the 1940s:
Social Security aimed to change this. But its initial benefits were nothing close to a proper pension. When Ida May Fuller cashed the first Social Security check in 1940, it was for $22.54, or $416 adjusted for inflation. It was not until the 1980s that the average Social Security check for retirees exceeded $1,000 a month adjusted for inflation. More than a quarter of Americans over age 65 were classified by the Census Bureau as living in poverty until the late 1960s.
There is a widespread belief along the lines of, “everyone used to have a private pension.” But this is wildly exaggerated. The Employee Benefit Research Institute explains: “Only a quarter of those age 65 or older had pension income in 1975.” Among that lucky minority, only 15% of household income came from a pension.
The New York Times wrote in 1955 about the growing desire, but continued inability, to retire: “To rephrase an old saying: everyone talks about retirement, but apparently very few do anything about it.”6
It was not until the 1980s that the idea that everyone deserves, and should have, a dignified retirement took hold. And the way to get that dignified retirement ever since has been an expectation that everyone will save and invest their own money.
Let me reiterate how new this idea is: The 401(k)—the backbone savings vehicle of American retirement—did not exist until 1978. The Roth IRA was not born until 1998. If it were a person it would be barely old enough to drink.
It should surprise no one that many of us are bad at saving and investing for retirement. We’re not crazy. We’re all just newbies.
Same goes for college. The share of Americans over age 25 with a bachelor’s degree has gone from less than 1 in 20 in 1940 to 1 in 4 by 2015.7 The average college tuition over that time rose more than fourfold adjusted for inflation.8 Something so big and so important hitting society so fast explains why, for example, so many people have made poor decisions with student loans over the last 20 years. There is not decades of accumulated experience to even attempt to learn from. We’re winging it.
Same for index funds, which are less than 50 years old. And hedge funds, which didn’t take off until the last 25 years. Even widespread use of consumer debt—mortgages, credit cards, and car loans—did not take off until after World War II, when the GI Bill made it easier for millions of Americans to borrow.
Dogs were domesticated 10,000 years ago and still retain some behaviors of their wild ancestors. Yet here we are, with between 20 and 50 years of experience in the modern financial system, hoping to be perfectly acclimated.
For a topic that is so influenced by emotion versus fact, this is a problem. And it helps explain why we don’t always do what we’re supposed to with money.
We all do crazy stuff with money, because we’re all relatively new to this game and what looks crazy to you might make sense to me. But no one is crazy—we all make decisions based on our own unique experiences that seem to make sense to us in a given moment.
Now let me tell you a story about how Bill Gates got rich.
Luck and risk are siblings. They are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort.
NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success—both your own and others’: “Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.”
Bill Gates went to one of the only high schools in the world that had a computer.
The story of how Lakeside School, just outside Seattle, even got a computer is remarkable.
Bill Dougall was a World War II navy pilot turned high school math and science teacher. “He believed that book study wasn’t enough without real-world experience. He also realized that we’d need to know something about computers when we got to college,” recalled late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
In 1968 Dougall petitioned the Lakeside School Mothers’ Club to use the proceeds from its annual rummage sale—about $3,000—to lease a Teletype Model 30 computer hooked up to the General Electric mainframe terminal for computer time-sharing. “The whole idea of time-sharing only got invented in 1965,” Gates later said. “Someone was pretty forwardlooking.” Most university graduate schools did not have a computer anywhere near as advanced as Bill Gates had access to in eighth grade. And he couldn’t get enough of it.
Gates was 13 years old in 1968 when he met classmate Paul Allen. Allen was also obsessed with the school’s computer, and the two hit it off.
Lakeside’s computer wasn’t part of its general curriculum. It was an independent study program. Bill and Paul could toy away with the thing at their leisure, letting their creativity run wild—after school, late into the night, on weekends. They quickly became computing experts.
During one of their late-night sessions, Allen recalled Gates showing him a Fortune magazine and saying, “What do you think it’s like to run a Fortune 500 company?” Allen said he had no idea. “Maybe we’ll have our own computer company someday,” Gates said. Microsoft is now worth more than a trillion dollars.
A little quick math.
In 1968 there were roughly 303 million high-school-age people in the world, according to the UN.
About 18 million of them lived in the United States.
About 270,000 of them lived in Washington state.
A little over 100,000 of them lived in the Seattle area.
And only about 300 of them attended Lakeside School.
Start with 303 million, end with 300.
One in a million high-school-age students attended the high school that had the combination of cash and foresight to buy a computer. Bill Gates happened to be one of them.
Gates is not shy about what this meant. “If there had been no Lakeside, there would have been no Microsoft,” he told the school’s graduating class in 2005.
Gates is staggeringly smart, even more hardworking, and as a teenager had a vision for computers that even most seasoned computer executives couldn’t grasp. He also had a one in a million head start by going to school at Lakeside.
Now let me tell you about Gates’ friend Kent Evans. He experienced an equally powerful dose of luck’s close sibling, risk.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen became household names thanks to Microsoft’s success. But back at Lakeside there was a third member СКАЧАТЬ