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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (95620)	4/23/2002 11:24:37 AM
From: Michael Bakunin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

It's also possible that the students are smarter than the test writers. Viz. the 'wrong' examples they chose: 1) 70% say no liability if credit card is stolen (wrong because of the potential $50 liability): I have had fraudulent charges to my Visa card more than once. I have never had to pay a cent. The rules are one thing, and reality is another; I think the kids win here. 2) 80% say savings bonds or accounts offer the highest growth over 18 years of saving for a child's education (wrong, it's stocks) -- perhaps 80% of the kids these days are just making a bearish market call.. -g- 3) 45% say high inflation causes most difficulty for young working couples vs older people on fixed incomes; to the extent that home prices and COLA adjustments to pensions and social security are involved, they might again have been right after all. -mb

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (95620)	4/23/2002 4:19:54 PM
From: Night Trader	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

The people who set these questions have a weird way of looking at the future as if it's just a continuation of the past. You can't say that stocks will beat bonds over 18 years or even give a probability to it - it may or may not happen but the past tells you nothing as to how likely that is.There's a great article I read this morning that touches on this - I never knew Money magazine had such good writers!: "There's a lesson here. Whenever I hear the word "optimizer," I think of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose life's work was to try to establish what it truly means to know something. He once imagined someone who would "buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true." No matter how many times you reshuffle the past in your Monte Carlo machine, you're still drawing from the past to predict the future. You are reading from multiple copies of the same newspaper." datalab.morningstar.com