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Grad School: Higher Degrees of Debt
Ryan Sager
Money and Your Mind
Financial Advisers Flunk Undercover Sting; Sager: A new study finds advisers often put client interests second to their own.
SmartMoney.comBy now, you may have realized that you aren't always the most rational manager of your money. Chasing returns. Buying into bubbles. Selling into troughs. Keeping too much in cash or company stock. Heck, even if you keep a textbook, ...
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How Big Cities Can Lead to Small Thoughts
WSJ.comCities are famous for being incubators of creativity and ideas, fueled by diversity and constant exposure to people unlike ourselves. But two new studies on friendship and people's cellphone habits complicate that picture by offering ...
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Frog Hair to Woolies: Dust Bunnies by 173 Other Names; Regional Dictionary Travels America; New England's Willywags
WSJ.comWhat do you call those soft rolls of dust that collect on the floor under your bed? Many people know them as dust bunnies. But in parts of the Northeast, you'd call them dust kitties; in the South, house moss; in Pennsylvania, you ...
Watch the Debates. Mute the Ads; How you watch this fall's GOP debates -- and other political events -- could change your spending patterns, research suggests.
SmartMoney.comAs the 2012 presidential race heats up, candidates will be on the air trying to win your vote. But inadvertently, they may just convince you to buy a new car or change your brand of toothpaste.
Does Sex Really Sell? Yes. But not always -- and not for the reasons you'd think.
SmartMoney.comSex sells. That's the conventional wisdom, anyway. It's why Andie MacDowell is in so many shampoo ads. It's why George Clooney could sell tequila shots to pregnant women. And it's why beer commercials are, well, beer ...
Why We're Lousy Predictors; Two new studies offer insight into our terrible forecasting skills.
SmartMoney.comHumans love predictions. We speculate for years about who will win the next presidential election. We fill out Final Four tournament brackets. We check the seven-day forecast — even though the morning newscast is often wrong about the ...
Tipping Doesn't Reward Good Behavior
SmartMoney.comAn urban legend about the origin of tips has it that the term comes from signs hung on boxes put out at British pubs in the 18th century to solicit gratuities: To Ensure Promptness. The tale is apocryphal, but it encapsulates our accepted ...
Do Celebrity Endorsements Work?
SmartMoney.comIn the end, Gilbert Gottfried didn't know quack about Aflac -- or about keeping his Tweeter shut when a bevy of indefensible and unfunny tsunami jokes popped into his head over the weekend. The incident makes you wonder why Aflac hired ...
Can Buying Generic Lower Your Self-Esteem?
SmartMoney.comThis Valentine's Day, you might want to go with the generic box of chocolates to save some money. But a new study finds you may pay for that cheaper chocolate in another way—in reduced self-esteem.
The Psychology of Real Estate
SmartMoney.comIf you've ever house-hunted, you've probably got a sense that real estate purchases don't represent consumers at their most rational. Did you like a house or apartment more, or less, depending on whether it was sunny the day ...
Why Men Should Shop Alone
SmartMoney.comWhy don't men typically go shopping together? Perhaps they've intuited that things could get a lot more expensive that way. While people in general – and guys in particular – may see shopping as a utilitarian pursuit, social ...
The Present Paradox
SmartMoney.comGift giving is irrational, as plenty of economists have groused about. In “Scroogenomics,” the economist Joel Waldfogel argues that “massive holiday spending has the potential to do a terrible job matching products with users.” The ...
Upbeat Workers, Upbeat Investors
SmartMoney.comTHE OLD SONG TELLS US, “Whistle while you work.” But does happiness make us more productive? When you’re trying to figure out which companies will succeed, should you be looking for employees with their nose to the grindstone or with a ...
Feeling Blue? Leave Your Wallet at Home
SmartMoney.comWe like to think most of our purchases have some rhyme or reason. If we buy a sweater, it’s because winter is coming and we need some warm clothes. If we buy a new car, it’s because the old one could stand to be retired. If we buy a new ...
The Dangers of Confident Investing
SmartMoney.comConfidence is a funny thing. Those who deserve it tend to lack it. Those who least warrant it are often overencumbered by it. And getting it can be your downfall. So just how prone are we to overconfidence? And what does it mean for our ...
The Urge to Bet Could Help You Save
SmartMoney.comBuying a lottery ticket and flushing money down a toilet offer roughly the same rate of return, yet the former remains extremely popular among Americans — particularly low-income Americans. If only lottery-ticket buyers put that money into ...
Why You Failed the Taste Test
SmartMoney.comIf you have ever painted a room, you may have come to the conclusion that eggshell differs from alabaster only in its alphabetical distance from “white” – even as your spouse demands an opinion.
Active vs. Idle: Which Makes Us Happier?
SmartMoney.comThe old cliché that idle hands are the devil's workshop dates back at least to Chaucer, but never have our hands been as occupied as they are today. Email, Internet-everywhere, the 24-hour office — sometimes it seems we’ll do anything ...
Beauty and the Buck: A Financial Tale
SmartMoney.comIt’s tough to be beautiful. Attractive people are treated unfairly in the job market. They’re treated unfairly in school. They’re even treated unfairly in court.
Investing as a Competitive Sport
SmartMoney.comThe playground. Getting into college. The job market. We’re always competing. In the movies, it���s the underdogs who usually win. The competition fires them up, and they take the big dogs down. But is that really how the human competitive ...
Is Loyalty to Apple Rational?
SmartMoney.comPerhaps it’s not nice to pile on Apple right now, as it prepares to address the gadget world about its embarrassing antenna problems on the iPhone 4. Nonetheless, Apple’s problems — not just the antenna issue, but the broader issues of a ...
Seeking Happiness? Avoid Piles of Money
SmartMoney.comOnce upon a time, “Money can’t buy happiness” was just something poor people told each other to feel better than rich people — and occasionally rich people agreed, so as to sound modest. How surprised everyone was, then, when modern ...
Stock Shopping? Be Sure to Eat First
SmartMoney.comThinking about investing in a stock? Buying a lottery ticket? Deciding between two cars? Watch what you’ve been eating, touching and smelling.
Can a Vacation Help Boost Your Portfolio?
SmartMoney.comIt’s almost the end of June. Have you taken a vacation yet? Are you putting it off? Well, don’t. I don’t mean to alarm you, but science is pretty clear on this point: It’s time you got the hell out of town.
Investing and Lady Luck: The Odd Couple
SmartMoney.comIn Hong Kong, license plates are a bit of a big deal. You can get a number assigned by the government — between 1 and 9999 — or, since 2006, you can get a custom plate. But you can also get really fancy: If you don’t like your ...
Betting on an Overconfident CEO
SmartMoney.comSurveying the national landscape, one could be forgiven for failing to identify one of the keys to economic success: overconfidence. Overconfidence, after all, is what tells an oil company to drill for oil so deep underwater that no one can ...
Risky Business: Investors and Hindsight
SmartMoney.comWhen the Deepwater Horizon rig sank into the Gulf of Mexico on April 22, something remarkable happened: Millions of Americans became retrospective experts on deepwater oil exploration. Of course, an accident like this was just around the ...
More Money or More Friends? Pick One
SmartMoney.comHow painful is a colonoscopy? How is it similar to raising children (parents may be able to venture a guess on this one)? And what does it have to do with measuring the well-being of a country?
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Ryan Sager
Ryan Sager is the deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal's Saturday Review section and writes the Money & Your Mind column for SmartMoney magazine.
Previously, he wrote the blog Neuroworld for True/Slant and was a member of the editorial board of the New York Post and editorial features editor of the New York Sun.
He is the author of "The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party" (2006) and has written for Reason and the Atlantic.
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The Corner Office
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General Dynamics Changes Tactics
The defense contractor faces a tough enemy: potential cuts in defense.