But Why?

Bezos: social utility vs. net worth

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An interactive back-of-envelope tool that estimates the consumer surplus Amazon generates each year — AWS, retail, 3P marketplace, payroll taxes — and compares it to Jeff Bezos’s net worth. Move the sliders, change the assumptions, see whether the social utility argument holds up at your numbers.

Do men really not share the housework? It depends on what you count.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

News stories say married men don’t pull their weight at home. They’re usually counting only housework — cleaning, cooking, laundry. When you count everything a couple must do to maintain a household — market labor, commute, childcare, home maintenance, shopping, volunteering, and all the travel those require — married men and women with children contribute nearly identical total time: about 65 hours a week each. The difference is in the composition, not the total.

Your retirement luck depends on when you were born

Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A simulated investor puts $1,000/year of real (constant-purchasing-power) savings into the S&P 500 for 40 years. We run this for every starting cohort from 1950 to 1985, then again for 10-year careers from 1950 to 2015, and plot the final real net worth by starting year. Same plan, same index, same discipline — retirement wealth varies by 2.3× across 40-year cohorts purely on the year they happened to start. Over 10-year windows, several cohorts finish with less than they contributed.