Brain Bites – Issue 7

Brain Bites are “now and then” updates regarding trends, statistics, and interesting info-bites in personal economics. These tasty tidbits help maintain your edge over an unpredictable future. Think of them as cerebral snacks for the hungry mind!

Everything’s coming up roses

Millennials are more confident about the nation’s future than older generations. That’s a reverse from the 1970s, when young Boomers were considerably less optimistic than their elders.
Ref: Fortune

Diamond parachute

On the occasion of his retirement in 2015, Yale University made a special, one-time payout of $8.5 million to former president Richard C. Levin. Mr. Levin’s lump sum payout, which came to $4.4 million after taxes, is among the largest ever in higher education.
Ref: Wall Street Journal

In debt to their eyeballs

Student debt now totals $1.2 trillion, doubling since the recession and up more than threefold over the past decade. Nearly 7 million Americans have gone at least a year without making a payment on their federal student loans, about 17% of all borrowers..
Ref: Wall Street Journal

A tough break for kids

Roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage of Europe. About a third of American children live apart from their fathers.
Ref: National Bureau of Economic Research

It’s the economy stupid

40% of Millennials say they still get money from their parents. While the majority are younger (18-25), 22% of 26-34 year-olds say they receive financial help. Even among Millennials who are married or living with a partner, a fifth continue to get help paying for things.
Ref: USA TODAY

Growing fewer entrepreneurs

The share of people under age 40 who own private businesses has hit a 24-year low—just 3.6%, down from 10.6% in 1989.
Ref: Fortune

Press 2 to say goodbye

Employees at Coca-Cola will no longer have access to voicemail in a move to boost productivity. Staff in Atlanta, where Coke has its HQ, were asked whether they’d like to keep voicemail and only 6% said yes.
Ref: Now and Next

Will that be 1 device… or 5?

Annual sales of smartphones exceeded 1 billion for the first time in 2014. Samsung retained the top spot for the year as a whole, taking 24.7% of the market compared to Apple’s 15.4%
Ref: Gartner

Fatal distraction

More than 40% of people between 19 and 39 years old say they text while they drive, and 10% of them say they do it regularly. Using your phone while driving may seem safe, say safety advocates, but roughly quadruples your risk of being in a crash.
Ref: AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety

Right to be forgotten, or license to hide?

Since May, 2014, Google has processed requests to remove nearly one million links from European search results for individual’s names, and approved one-third so far. But many requests aren’t about privacy, says Google. Rather, they’re attempts to hide already public information. Although news articles remain online, they would no longer appear in search results, undermining Internet users’ ability to find reliable information.
Ref: Wall Street Journal

Donor, watch thy wallet

In 2000, there were 643,000 charities registered in the United States. There are more than 1 million today. Last year alone, the IRS approved 94,000 new charities.
Ref: Charity Navigator

Sawbones becoming more upbeat

Since 2012 optimism has increased over 12 percentage points among physicians, from 32 to 44% optimistic. Overall, the survey shows low but improving morale, especially among younger, employed physicians.
Ref: Forbes

Too busy making $$$

Nearly 1 out of 3 of the world’s 100 top billionaires doesn’t have a college degree. They either never attended or finished school.
Ref: Workforce

Timing is everything

This year’s college graduating class is among the luckiest in decades, with an overall unemployment rate of 2.7% (April, 2015). Employers seem especially eager for graduates in science and technology.
Ref: U.S. Department of Labor

Easy come, easy go

At some point, 1 in 10 households will spend at least one year in the 1% earning bracket, say sociologists at Washington University. That statistics cuts both ways, though. More than half of Americans will experience at least one year of poverty too.
Ref: Fortune

Smile for the camera!

In 2014, Facebook unveiled an algorithm called “Deep Face” that can recognize specific human faces in images around 97% of the time, even when those faces are partially hidden or poorly lit. That is on a par with what people can do.
Ref: Science

The information in Brain Bites is sourced from a variety of usually reliable publications. Nevertheless, we cannot guarantee the accuracy or currency of this material and a degree of common sense should be applied before quoting it. If something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is.

Image credit: “Jelly Brain Dissection” by Guerilla Science (2010), licensed/modified (red ring removed) by permission of copyright holder.