What We’re Reading
Here are a few good articles the Collaborative Fund team came across this week.
HR
What I hear in a typical interview:
Interviewer: “Welcome! Please lie to me about your relevant work experience?”
Employee: “[Extrapolates, expands, and exaggerates]”
[…]
Employee: “Now, please lie to me about a typical day at your company?”
Interviewer: “[Skips, skims, and smoothes over].”
This seems unlikely to create a strong lasting relationship. It is like getting married after the first few dates, when everyone is only sharing their most generous assessments of themselves.
Inflation
U.S. college tuition is growing at the slowest pace in decades, following a nearly 400% rise over the past three decades that fueled middle class anxieties and a surge in student debt.
Tuition at college and graduate school—after scholarships and grants are factored in—rose 1.9% in the year through June, broadly in line with overall inflation, Labor Department figures show. By contrast from 1990 through last year, tuition grew an average 6% a year, more than double the rate of inflation.
Fooled you
The placebo effect. This probably applies to a lot of stuff in life:
A 2014 review of 53 trials that compared elective surgical procedures to placebos found that sham surgeries provided some benefit in 74 percent of the trials and worked as well as the real deal in about half.
Within your means
A great piece on the social pressure of frugality:
I like that we live well within our means. It brings me immeasurable happiness, quite frankly. But there is a lingering social pressure. A fear of a stigma that occasionally whispers from some deep recess in my mind. In general I’m not a person who is given to care much what other people think about me. (Seriously, ask my wife about this one). But even with that as a core position, I feel some unspoken social pressure to consider a “nicer” house. A newer house. A bigger house. Vaulted ceilings, big bathrooms, big closets, all of the accouterments that prove that I’ve made it.
Growth
Lyft is on fire:
Total revenue generated by Lyft drivers, or the company’s gross bookings, grew about 25 percent to more than $1 billion in the second quarter from more than $800 million in the previous period, according to people familiar with the matter. That’s a faster rate thanUber, which told investors earlier this month that it expected gross bookings would increase in the “mid-teens” for the quarter.
Left in your own head
We show that people are more successful in enjoying their thoughts when instructed to do so. We present evidence in support of four reasons why this is: without instructions people do not realize how enjoyable it will be to think for pleasure, they do not realize how personally meaningful it will be to do so, they believe that thinking for pleasure will be effortful, and they believe it would be more worthwhile to engage in planning than to try to enjoy their thoughts.
Enjoy your weekend.