Everything is Your Fault: From Work to Love

Blaming other people for your misfortunes is often the easy thing to do.  Our country is filled with finger pointing, from the streets of New York City to the halls of Washington DC.  Let's take for example finding a job.  One can blame any of the following for his/her unemployment: the giant economic recession, outsourcing, illegal immigration, our education system, poor parenting, bad luck, affirmative action, and many more.

However, how will attributing one's unemployment to these factors help the individual except give some sort of short-term psychological relief to protect one's own ego?  The reality could very well be that at least one of those factors contributes to his/her joblessness.  But in order to be proactive, he/she must focus on the variables that are within the individual's control such as networking, improving interviewing skills, acquiring more employable skills, et cetera.  Only that proactive mindset will significantly help increase the odds of finding employment.

The same thing is true for relationships.  Let's say your dating life is not what you'd like it to be.  Perhaps you continuously end up in unsatisfactory relationships or you can't seem to get enough dates.  You can blame your ex-es, upbringing, physical unattractiveness, men, women, work, school, expenses, sexism, racism, feminism, divorce, pornography, social media and many other things.  But where will this sort of mindset get you?  Will this really help you attain the romantic life you desire?  For the overwhelming majority, there are countless factors that can be controlled (e.g. better grooming, building a strong social network, taking up interesting hobbies, better time management).  If you are in a bad relationship, you must realize that at least part of it is your responsibility and you must think about what you can do to improve your situation.  It will probably be extraordinarily difficult but the onus will be on you to do what you think you should do.  A big part of it will be knowing what you want and what you need to do.  If you want a serious long-term partner, take the steps you need to take in order to accomplish that; going to a college alumni gathering is probably more effective than going to a nightclub.

I'm not suggesting that you constantly criticize yourself such that your self-esteem breaks down.  Just keep in mind that there is almost always something you can do to improve your life.  You are in control of your life and no one else is.  Always make sure to keep it that way.

Race Relations and America as a Superpower

This idea grew out of a conversation I was having with my dad.  He mentioned something very interesting about the difference between China and America which made him feel quite secure that America is not in any immediate danger to lose its position as a global superpower.  The idea is simple: the Chinese don't really care if China does well, they care if the Chinese do well.

Being Chinese, Korean, Indian, Kenyan, or Italian has much more to do with your ethnic heritage, not necessarily where you were born and have a citizenship.  So if a Chinese person emigrates from China to another country to become successful, then that is still considered a win for the Chinese and, in a sense, for China as well.  Koreans generally think in this way too.  This is where America's strength comes in.

Take a look at our Olympic team.  No other country has the diversity of ethnic groups that we do.  In fact, I think that is why we are able to do relatively well compared to China, a country with more than four times our population and much stricter training regimens facilitated by human rights violations.  The other countries are only good at a handful of events: Jamaica for track, South Korea for archery, Canada for skating.  Also, take a look at our international math and science Olympiads where we have many Asians representing the US.  Also, our major cities are more ethnically and culturally diverse than any other countries'.

However, a couple of things we need to improve upon are our immigration and tariff policies.  In the long run, we will be better off if we were more accepting of foreigners and foreign goods.  Improving both would create more competition in the marketplace that can help drive down costs and improve total economic surplus.  We will be able to get the best goods and services for the best price, and will force domestic producers to become more efficient and productive and consumers will benefit from lower prices and higher quality.

We live in a very special place where you can be born in the country and automatically gain citizenship and the ability to become the leader of the free world.  We went through many difficult hurdles to lessen the racial tensions that have been around since the founding of our nation but they were all stepping stones for us to improve our moral and economic prosperity.  We need to continue improving America's race relations to keep us ahead of every other prospective superpower.  If we don't, then I'm betting on China to be the next global economic powerhouse for years to come.

How Race Affects Educational Attainment

Contrary to mainstream belief, statistics show that being black or Hispanic in America increases an individual's expected years of schooling as soon as you control for one variable.  Any guesses on what that variable may be: parents' income, parents' educational attainment, urban school district, family owning a home, gender?  The correlations between years of educational attainment and being black or Hispanic are still negative after adjusting for something that is seemingly as important as family household income.  The answer: achievement test score.

For students who performed equally well on an achievement test given to a sample of 3796 high school seniors, being black or Hispanic will add a little more than .3 years of schooling.  (For those of you who care, this result is statistically significant at the 1% level using a 2-sided t-test.)  If you ignore controlling this variable, being Hispanic subtracts .2 years and being black subtracts .5 years of schooling.  In addition, a regression on students who performed above the 96th percentile shows that race no longer becomes a (statistically) significant factor and expected years of schooling increases to 15.5 years.

Controlling for end-of-high-school academic achievement being the primary corrector the mainstream bias about race and education may not be a surprise for some, myself included.  The more interesting phenomenon is the positive correlation between race and schooling after controlling for achievement.  I don't have any good idea why this is the case.  Feel free to share any hypotheses you may have.

Note: I used STATA to run regressions on this data set supplied by Professor Cecilia Rouse of Princeton University.

6 Easy Ways to Get People to Like You Immediately

Here are some techniques that I've learned and implemented to become more social.  I understand that
"easy" is relative but these should not be too difficult (or at least the learning curve is not steep).

1. Smile- More specifically, use a Duchenne smile!  This probably the simplest one but some people just don't know or care about it's effectiveness.

2. Never say "no"- Eliminate the word "no" from your daily speech and see what happens.  This will help you to avoid putting others down.

3. Focus on the person to whom you are talking- Focus the initial dialogue on the other person and listen carefully to what he/she has to say.  People love talking about themselves and their interests and having someone who will listen to them.

4. Remember people's names- A person's name is the sweetest sound to that person's ears.  Make a conscious effort to remember people's names as soon as you meet them.

5. Make eye contact- I frequently struggle with this one but eye contact is crucial.  You will appear more confident, trustworthy, and even attractive.  Next time you talk to new people, find out their eye colors within the first few seconds.  You can just focus on one eye as you converse with them.

6. Match their energy levels- If a group of people are lively and you come in with very low energy, they're not going to accept you in a welcoming way.  That said, if you notice someone is in a mood to relax, you might want to think twice before interacting with him/her to get pumped up for the next UFC event.  Some recommend mirroring the other's body language but I believe this will naturally happen if you two are on the same level and communicating well.

These are probably the simplest ones most people can use instantly.  More advice is covered in Dale Carnegie's classic How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Some tips are a bit more difficult for many folks (e.g. apologizing immediately, not criticizing others, applying social psychological techniques to persuade people).  I hope this helped :)

Building Strength Without Bodybuilding

Almost a year ago, I adjusted my weightlifting routine to put much greater emphasis on strength training than on muscle building.  Since then, my bodyweight decreased about 25 lb but my strength and power improved noticeably.  I'll briefly share how my training routine changed.

During my senior year of college, I experimented with a bodybuilding method called High Intensity Training (HIT).  The former Mr. Olympia, Dorian Yates, would be the most famous example of a HIT disciple.  The basic idea is that only one grueling set is needed to sufficiently stimulate a muscle to grow.  This is counter to the traditional model of the Arnold-esque high volume, multiple sets per exercise format.  Thus, HIT is supposed to build muscle more efficiently by cutting the amount of time you spend at the gym by a significant amount.  I was normally in and out of the gym in 30 minutes.  (Not too surprisingly, this is the cornerstone for Timothy Ferriss' bodybuilding foundation in his book, The 4-Hour Body.)  A good article that explains the philosophy behind HIT is here.

I definitely did pack on the most mass in my life from that training.  However, I didn't feel that I was very strong for my size.  Also, I had a rather embarrassing bowling accident in August 2012 that forced me to stop working out for about a month because I tore a muscle in my lower back.  I figured that once I hit the gym again, I will focus on strength to bring my numbers back up.

I began with Rippetoe's Starting Strength format of focusing on squats, deadlifts, bench presses, shoulder presses, and rows (instead of power cleans).  I eventually put in power cleans and felt a night and day difference in my energy levels.  My body felt much more dynamic and the strength I developed from the other lifts felt more transferable with my increased ability to generate fairly high velocities with heavy weights (aka power).

I eventually plateaued, so I am currently using Jim Wendler's 5/3/1 periodization, adding power snatches and front squats.  Here is my schedule:

Monday

Power clean

Deadlift (Conventional with hook grip)

Press

Barbell curl

Wednesday

Power snatch

Front squat (Clean grip)

Barbell row

Dip

Friday

Squat (Olympic)

Bench

Chin up

I have italicized the main lifts where I follow the 5/3/1 template.  The assistance exercises are always done last and are done for five sets of 10+.  Wendler recommends running hill sprints but I can't find any good hills so I try to use incline treadmills for my conditioning days.  Stretches are to be done before and after every workout and make sure to use warm up sets.

A big takeaway is that hypertrophy does positively correlate with strength gains but you have to focus one of them to have proper training goals.  I may not be as big as I was last year but I feel more energetic and athletic than I have felt in a long time.  Female Olympic weightlifters in the lighter classes repeatedly prove that smaller people can be extraordinarily strong and powerful given the proper training, nutrition, supplementation, recovery, and motivation.

What is Money?

We all spend it.  We all save it.  We all want more of it.  What is it?  This may sound like a silly question but the answer is not entirely obvious.  Let's briefly explore this phenomenon.

The concept of money has changed over the years but for our purposes, we can discuss the present-day functions of money.  In fact, by definition, money is anything that fulfills certain primary functions in the market.

1. MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE: Money can be used for the payments of goods and services.  This circumvents a lot of the problems that arise from a pure barter system.

2. UNIT OF ACCOUNT: In this context, money provides a way of measuring the value of goods and services in the marketplace.  This also means that every unit of money is worth the same.  My dollar bill is equal to anyone else's dollar bill, assuming none of them is counterfeit; this property of sameness is called fungibility.

3. STORE OF VALUE: Whatever money you make and have left after your expenditures can be reliably saved without losing value.  Some people argue about this point because inflation depreciates the purchasing power of money.

4. STANDARD OF DEFERRED PAYMENT: Money is the accepted means of repaying debt from a loan.

Many forms of currency existed before paper money, or banknotes, first emerged (Tang Dynasty China, 7th century).  People have used metals such as gold and silver but also shells, rocks, beads, and salt ("salary" comes from the Roman word for salt).  The problem was that these other forms of exchange had problems with portability, one of the four primary monetary functions, or some combination.

Originally, paper money were banknotes which were IOUs from a bank.  These were checks that could be traded in for metal coins at the bank.  As nations became more advanced and unified, federal banks set the standard notes for a given country.  Still, the paper notes derived their value from the promise of gold or silver.

What we use in the United States is called fiat money.  When you hold that green, miniature portrait of Benjamin in your hand, you are holding a piece of paper that has been legally approved (legal tender) by the U.S. Federal Government as U.S. money.  There are some nuances with this non-intuitive derivation of value but it boils down to trusting the federal government (its credit) since the bills themselves have no intrinsic value; in some sense, they're just paper.  The important takeaway is that U.S. dollar bills are not convertible by law to anything else (like gold and silver) and their value isn't fixed.  This can easily be witnessed by observing the fluctuating currency exchange rates between the dollar and the euro.

There are two things that significantly affect the value of the dollar, the supply of and demand for U.S. dollars.  The Federal Reserve constantly prints out money to inject the economy with more cash which leads to inflation.  Inflation is a purely monetary phenomenon where the prices of goods and services increase together.  This is why the value of one dollar today is worth more than the value one dollar next year.  Another way the dollar can lose value is if people (including foreigners) become less trustful of the American federal government.  In this sense, there is a certain vulnerability to fiat money since it is entirely reliant on U.S. credit.

Now that we have some understanding of our monetary system, it should be obvious that a lot is at stake if the U.S. economy remains in deep debt to other countries and falls into a deeper recession.  Simply printing out more money and selling bonds to other countries may provide short-term solutions but we need to come up with better solutions now for the long-run.  Both parties disagree on tax raises and spending cuts which puts us in an uncomfortable situation.  The only policy that both agree on is improving public education because that really is the best option for long-run economic growth, investing in human capital for a more productive workforce.

You Can't Rely on Social Security

Do you know how much the average U.S. senior citizen receives per month from Social Security?  It's around $1,200 per month.  The disturbing truth is that for most retired people, their Social Security checks make up most of their monthly benefits.  That's not a lot of money to live on so millions of older Americans are just barely getting by.  Up to my parents' generation, this is approximately how much they should expect from Uncle Sam.

An even more disturbing truth is what my generation is expected to receive from Social Security.  (Note: My generation is Generation Y, people born in the mid-80s to the late 90s.)  Our predicted benefits will be around $600 per month!  This is the result of our present debt being delayed to burden the future generations.  Obviously, pretty much no one can live off of $600 a month so there needs to be a solution.

In order for people to retire comfortably, they need to purchase annuities.  What exactly is an annuity?  An annuity is a series of future payments from an investor who is asking you for a certain amount of money today.  For example, you give him $100,000 today and for the next 10 years he will pay you $14,237.75 at the end of each year.  Nice deal, right?  This is assuming an interest rate of 7%.

You can also invest in bonds with coupons attached to them.  For example, you give a company $135,117.91 today and you will receive $12,000 at the end of each year for 10 years and $100,000 at the end of the tenth year (in addition to the $12,000 for that year).  This is also assuming an interest yield rate of 7%.

The problem is, many Americans don't have enough savings to invest in.  There are some psychological factors and perhaps one solution may to be to significantly raise taxes so that our Social Security benefits would increase.  Unfortunately, this would probably be political suicide so no politician would actually put that on his or her platform.

My proposal is that we need to radically change our public education curricula at the high school and even middle school level.  We need to teach young Americans basic economics and finance.  They need to know about the different financial instruments out there, including derivatives.  They need to understand how insurance works and why people take these unfair gambles.  (Answer: People are risk averse.)  They need to learn how to save money so that they can make more money on their own to invest in their retirement funds.  They need to be more informed citizens about how the economy functions as a whole, that we're all in this together in this increasingly more global network.

I understand that there's beauty to analyzing Shakespeare and knowing the periodic table of elements can broaden our understanding of how materials work, but I think given the current state of affairs in our country, informing our youth about financial topics is a bigger priority.