Yesterday, when I chatted with a Knox alumnus, Governor Pritzker’s commencement address came up again. I shared how I wanted to go to Galesburg and how that didn’t happen, and he said, “It’s online; you can watch it!”
Indeed, I completely forgot that I meant to watch it! And yes, it’s not the same as being there in Galesburg, but still much better than not seeing it at all!
I watched it today, and cried a little bit (more than once), and listened to almost the whole ceremony, but to Pritzker’s address especially.
His closing remarks were: How do you know you are on the right side of history? The wrong side of history wants you to be afraid. The right side of history expects you to be brave.
Our country needs us to be brave; all of us, not just Knox graduates.
I do not know any of the 2025 graduates in person; still, I watched the ceremony and looked at their faces with hope. Watched until the last note of “For the long, long road to Alma Mater.” And it was inspiring.
On Friday, Boris received his passport with the new visa. He received an email last Thursday, and mailed his passport to the embassy immediately, but a week with both US and Finnish holidays delayed the processing. By then, there were additional worries because he had to travel with the EU during the first week of June, and he couldn’t do it without his passport, which was in transit.
Yesterday, we talked for a very long time, and finally admitted that we both were trying to hide from each other the extent to which we were affected by this three-month-long ordeal. We both confessed to each other that at some point, we accepted that this could be a permanent situation, and we couldn’t worry about it anymore.
I guess it’s good that we talked it through. Boris’ optimistic estimation of recovery time is “one more week.” As for me, I am not so sure. He told me that he can see that I still haven’t recovered from my big fight, and it shows in how I function.
As always, I am optimistic, so I hope that things will get better.
Mom wants her freedom, and it’s scary. I understand how she feels, and most likely, if I were in her place, I would feel the same way. I also understand that she can’t really process any new concepts, and I remember what the doctors in the hospital told me: at the end of the day, you do what you can do. I talked to one more potential caregiver last week, and I was trying to talk to my mom about bringing in one more person when I was away, but she was turning the conversation into her usual spiral, no matter where it would start and no matter how hard I tried.
Today, I took her to the matinee concert at the CSO, and she was upset, I am not sure with what, and then she didn’t like anything at the concert, starting with the first piece that was performed and ending with Christoph Eschenbach not wearing a bowtie. I am trying to distance myself from such situations, but at the same time, I always start to worry whether I am moving in the same direction.
I know that I have already started to forget words, and for the past two years, I have been trying to record all occurrences of forgotten words. I believe it was once in two months two years ago, then – once a month, and now almost weekly. The funny thing is that most of my forgotten words are food-related:). The rest are names of people (not the people I knew in the past, but celebrities) and names of places. Boris has nothing of it, and he remembers the names of my former co-workers better than I.
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Another topic my mom brings up frequently is a statement that she feels sorry for me because although I am an accomplished professional, I didn’t have “magical moments” in my life. I know exactly what she means because she often speaks with pride about some super weird relationships she had, when a guy from her work invited her to a theater or a concert once a month, and sometimes, they went to one of the imperial parks around Saint-Petersburg (actually, Leningrad at that time). She keeps saying that “these days, nobody can even imagine such relationships when there was nothing except for talking.” According to her, the best and most magical part of this relationship was that there was no kissing, no intimacy. They would go out once a month, and he would record tapes for her, and that was it. I can’t imagine why not having something like this in my life makes me “unhappy.” I honestly and truly believe that my life is as close to a fairy tale as possible, and the number of magical events that happened to me is way above the average :). Boris threw a dozen hypotheses, trying to explain what was behind this statement and what kind of reasoning could lead to this conclusion.
I might make a separate post about these hypotheses because I believe there could be some historical reasons for that.
A few weeks ago, I listened to a very interesting episode of “Hidden Brain.” I listen to them almost every Sunday on WBEZ, and I know that most of their podcast episodes are great and discuss unexpected topics. However, that one was especially interesting. I liked it so much that I listened to it one more time to make sure I captured all the details.
In this episode, Shankar Vedantam talks to the economist Alex Edmans, the author of the book May Contain Lies, How Stories, Statistics and Studies Exploit Our Biases and What We Can Do About It. The episode is titled “When the Truth Lies,” and you can say the topic is confirmation bias, but actually, it’s way more than that. Alex Edmans says that we often think about misinformation as something spread by our enemies; however, quite often, we are our own enemies, and we provide false information to ourselves. He talks about “data mining.” I only knew the technical term, but Alex Edmas defines data mining the following way:
Data mining is that you start with a preferred result that you want to find, and then you mine the data, you run the data in so many different ways until you get a positive result.
He talks about the link between diversity in the company workforce and inability to find a direct link, even though he personally supports diversity:
Absolutely, and this is irrespective of your personal views on the topic. So personally, I believe that diversity is important. It’s an important thing. As an ethnic minority, it’s something which is dear to me. But I believe that as a scientist, you should be like an expert witness in a criminal trial. Your role as a scientist is to state the evidence, just like your role as a witness is to state the evidence clearly irrespective of your views of the issue.
Alex Edmans challenges several statements that the majority of us consider solidly -proven, like the 10,000 hours rule or the importance of breastfeeding for the child’s brain development (you can read all the details following the link above). But then the question comes, how we can combat these confirmation biases. Erdmans suggests using “consider the opposite” rule. Here is how he explains it:
So the consider the opposite idea is to try to get around this problem of confirmation bias. So again, what is confirmation bias? We latch on to something uncritically if it confirms what we want to be true, and we reject something out of hand if we don’t want it to be true. So why is this interesting? Because what it means is that we are able to show discernment. If there’s a study that we don’t like, we can come up with a whole host of reasons for why it’s unreliable. And so what I’m doing with the Consider the Opposite Rule is to try to activate the discernment that we already have and we use selectively for studies that we don’t like, but now apply it to studies that we do like. So maybe just by giving an example, this will come to life. So let’s say I want an excuse after finishing this podcast to drink loads of red wine. So I might look up on Google why red wine is good for your health, and I find studies that people who drink red wine live longer. But consider the opposite. We’ll ask, what if I found the opposite result? People who drink red wine live shorter. How would I try to attack that result? I might say, well, maybe people who drink red wine are poor. They can’t afford champagne. They have to drink red wine instead. And it’s that poverty which leads to a shorter life, not the red wine. Well, but now I’ve alerted myself to the alternative explanation of income being the driver. Then I should ask, is this the driver of the result that I do want? Again, red wine is correlated with longer life. Is it the case that the people who can afford red wine are richer and it’s their wealth that leads to the longer life? So the idea of considering the opposite is to trigger the discernment that we exercise selectively and make sure it’s now universal.
Another technique is exercising your curiosity:
So this is also interesting because often we think that just general knowledge is perhaps a way to avoid misinformation because the smarter we are, the more able we are to separate the weak from the chaff. But unfortunately, this is not the case. There are some studies which actually suggest that knowledge makes things worse because the more sophisticated we are, the more intelligent we are, the easier it is for us to slam evidence we don’t like, and to come up with reasons for why we don’t want to believe it. But again, we deploy this only selectively. We don’t deploy this to the evidence that we do like. So even if knowledge doesn’t work, well, actually curiosity does. So there was a study which looked at the effect of knowledge, found it had no effect, but curiosity did have an effect. So these researchers found that the more curious you were, the more balanced you were on issues such as climate change. In particular, your views in climate change were less linked to your political affiliation. So you were going based on the evidence, not based on your identity.
Two things happened yesterday. First, I was tagged in a LinkedIn post, and following the link, I got to listen to a podcast where people were talking about me. And I realized that it was the first time that somebody was talking about me, and it was not an interview or a panel, I was not involved in this podcast in any way, but people talked about me like “the fact of life.” (If you are curious, you can listen starting from 27:05)
The second thing was that I was looking for my own videos about bitemporal framework, and I found that Google classifies me as a public figure 🤨. The good part is that Google does not show anything bad or horribly personal about me, mostly my talks on Postgres, some articles and interviews, including the very old ones… So I guess it’s OK 🙂
There have been several personal finances-related publications in TIME magazine recently, and I read all of them because they help me to understand what others are having trouble with. I often talk to people who are “afraid of credit cards,” and I could never understand what’s the problem: using cards is convenient, and I record all my spending anyway; what’s it to be afraid of? I also never understood the recommendations to close all your credit cards. For me, it’s a gigantic convenience, and I could never understand how not having credit cards would help control spending.
Apparently, I am in the minority. People are still shocked when I say I never had any credit card debt. I am extremely uncomfortable when, for some reason, I can’t record my daily expenses for a day or two, and losing my Excel files with expenses is my worst data loss nightmare. I need to know how much I spent this month, this year, and today in each expense category. As I mentioned recently, I am not a “saver”; I am at least half a “spender.” Still, I find it very difficult to understand the behaviors described in this article, and I am trying to understand them.
My credit card is a mangled thing. Its blue plastic backing is peeling so much that it doesn’t work in swipe machines; it looks like a dog chewed it up and spat it out. It seldom leaves my wallet anymore. But that doesn’t matter. In the two weeks before I wrote this story, I spent more than $4,000 on my card without laying eyes on it.
Each of these transactions was made online, where my card number is stored by Uber or Walmart or Google Chrome. That’s probably why I didn’t flinch when I spent $333 on groceries for a weekend with friends, or $48.34 on a pizza through Uber Eats, or even $1,533 for an Airbnb when my extended family comes to visit. Without having to type in my card number, the pain of the purchase was dampened.
Frictionless transactions are common in today’s economy—you can wave your cell near a cash register, press “buy” on Amazon without really knowing which credit card you’re charging, and send money to a stranger via your phone without having met them in person. There’s even a company, McLear, marketing a ring that you can use to pay for things.
These technologies, often referred to as “fintech,” for financial technology, make spending easier than ever before— and there’s growing evidence that they’re making us shell out more than we realize. With so many different accounts to keep track of and so many merchants smoothly debiting what we owe every month, we just keep on spending, whether we can afford it or not.
U.S. consumers spent a record $19 trillion in December 2023, up 6% from a year prior and 29% from February 2020. Spending has soared despite high inflation, high interest rates, and repeated commentary from economists that this ebullience can’t continue. And yet it has.
There are, of course, a few reasons why people are spending a lot of money right now. Consumers saved a lot of money when they were stuck at home during the pandemic, and now they’re making up for lost time by traveling, eating out, and doing all the things they couldn’t’ during quarantine. The government helped consumers feel flush by sending out stimulus checks and pausing student loan payments. After years of slow wage increases, workers’ payments are finally growing more quickly than prices, giving them extra pocket money.
But there’s one additional factor that has changed since the beginning of the pandemic: people are more accustomed to using financial technology to pay for things, which eliminates barriers that might have once slowed their spending. “Convenience makes it much easier to enjoy the process of shopping, removing the additional difficulties of buying things,” says Yuqian Xu, a professor at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School who has studied frictionless payment methods. Research shows that the more frictionless the payment method, the more money people spend.
By 2023, 73% of consumers had paid for something through a website or browser on a phone or computer, according to a McKinsey survey, up from 46% in 2019. People are also more comfortable using mobile payment apps like Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and Venmo; more than 53% of Americans surveyed by Forbes Advisor in 2023 said they used digital wallets more often than traditional payment methods.
Paying with a mobile phone is faster than using a credit card—it takes an average of 29 seconds versus 40, according to Xu, the UNC professor. That speed and convenience accelerates spending, Xu and her colleagues found in a July 2023 study that tracked spending after the launch of Alipay, a mobile payment service. It indicated that credit card transaction amounts increased by 9.4% once people could use a mobile device, while the frequency of transactions increased by 10.7%.
The result is a cycle of tech adoption that has loosened customers’ wallets. Once consumers started using mobile payments, they became more comfortable with making credit-card payments on their computers, and started moving more money digitally. And once they were comfortable spending money digitally, they started spending more money overall.
Elizabeth Mendoza, a 33-year-old who lives in Washington state, says she was getting her debt under control before the pandemic by setting aside cash twice a month for various budget categories like groceries, gas, or her cat. She found that she spent less using cash, because she would think twice about parting with a large bill.
But once COVID-19 hit, Mendoza got into the habit of buying things online and saving her credit card information in different apps. Soon, she found herself back in about $20,000 worth of debt. “Once I stopped using my cash,” she says, “I stopped paying attention to what I was doing.”
In October 2023, Mendoza vowed to get out of debt and removed her credit card from any app that would save it, including Apple Pay. She creates colorful envelopes every month to put her cash in to make the process more fun. It’s more of a hassle to buy things online now since she has to go find her wallet and type in her information. But she says it’s made a huge difference in her spending. “It’s just so easy to fall into using your credit card and not keep track of what’s going on,” she says.
Economists refer to the way people organize and spend their money as mental accounting. Humans are often irrational with the way they choose to spend and save money—splurging with a $100 bill found on the sidewalk while fastidiously saving every penny of their salary, for instance, or spending more money on the same item if they’re paying via credit card than if using cash.
Mental accounting is a big reason people spend more with frictionless payments. Consumers think of new apps like Buy Now Pay Later or Apple Pay as a separate budget category that enables new spending, says Michael Gelman, a finance professor at the University of Delaware. In an experiment, Gelman tracked the behavior of consumers who had received a random credit card in the mail. While those consumers’ spending behavior on their old credit cards remained the same, they started to splurge on their new one, dropping 26% more than people who had not received a new card. “Once you open a new budget category, you manage it separately,” he says. “It can have an effect on total consumption: you consume more because you have the opportunity.”
Yanibel Colon, a 35-year old account manager who lives in the Bronx, was once the type of person who would buy things with cash and use her credit cards for emergencies. But cooped up at home during the pandemic, she started putting more things on her credit card, and using Buy Now Pay Later services. She mentally categorized Buy Now Pay Later spending as cash, which got her into trouble. “I was like, ‘Well, it’s not a credit card, I don’t have payments,” she says. Now, she sets a budget every month for certain categories like food, and makes sure she doesn’t exceed them, no matter how she is paying.
Strong consumer spending has helped stimulate the economy and provided healthy profits for companies that depend on the American consumer. Walmart, for instance, saw online sales grow 17% in the last quarter, and made about $1.2 million a minute in 2023. Amazon reported its highest operating profit in history in its February earnings report.
But many American consumers are spending beyond their means. Household debt reached a record $17.5 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2023, and has increased by $3.4 trillion since the end of 2019, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Credit card debt has “passed a milestone,” says Michele Raneri, VP and head of U.S. research and consulting at TransUnion. Credit card balances now stand at $1.05 trillion, 13% higher than a year ago. The percent of credit card balances that are 90 days or more delinquent ticked up in the last quarter of 2023, according to the New York Fed, reaching nearly 10%.
That’s partly because people have a hard time keeping track of all the places they’re spending money, credit counselors say. The rise of digital payment systems like Apple Pay and Buy Now Pay Later “creates this scattered universe of different payment options that can lead to overspending and financial instability.” says Bruce McClary, senior vice president at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC), the largest nonprofit financial counseling organization in the U.S.
“People ask me, ‘How could you let this happen,’” says Britt Reynolds, 28, who uses TikTok to chronicle her journey getting out of $36,000 of debt. “I want to say, ‘Credit card companies gave me a $43,000 credit line, and spending money is the easiest thing in the world.’”
Tanya Menendez, the co-founder and CEO of Snowball Wealth, a financial tracking and education app, says she frequently sees clients who have lost track of their spending because of the many ways they can pay for things. She recently held a workshop for clients and asked them to estimate how much they spent every month on ride-share apps like Uber. They’d estimate they spent $400, she says, only to find that they spent double that on average.
Many of the apps that helped people track their spending have disappeared in recent years. Mint, the personal finance app, will be shutting down on March 23, according to Intuit, the company that owns it. There aren’t many good free options left. “Tracking your spending is really difficult,” Menendez says. “It’s like a vitamin that people aren’t taking.”
Credit counselors have a variety of tips to help combat overspending on frictionless transactions. Jessica Spangler, a money educator whose book, Invest Like a Girl, comes out March 26, recommends not storing payment information in apps. She also tells people to set up their phones so that they get a notification every time they make a purchase, no matter what payment method they use. “That way you’re not just swiping into the void,” Spangler says.
McClary, of NFCC, recommends having only a few accounts where you spend money so you can more easily track them. It’s easy, he says, to set up new accounts through Google Pay, for example, and then forget which credit card it’s linked to, which makes it harder to calculate whether you’re overspending. And those mobile accounts aren’t doing you any favors—the more time you have to think before you make a purchase, he says, the more likely you’ll evaluate whether you can afford it.
As for me, I’ve started putting reminders on my calendar to check my credit card balances so that I can track how my spending on apps is piling up. Not that it’s easy. Digital payments are swift but the process of logging into my account to track them is a headache that involves remembering bank passwords and logins and then waiting for the bank to send me a code to verify my identity. If spending money was as hard as tracking it, we might not do so much of it.
I submitted the last chapter today at 5:04 AM. The reason why it was a last-minute thing was that Anna had a lot of unforeseen circumstances that slowed down her work. Still, we managed to do it on time, and that’s important for me! Even when the publisher assumes that everybody will be late, it is still important. There will still be some work with our technical reviewer, and we still need to write the Acknowledgments section, but we are done with the submission.
So, how do I feel about it? It should have been easier than the first edition, and in some sense, it was, but it was more difficult in many ways. We had a new editor, and the whole work was way more formal than the first time. Granted, we were already educated and knew how we should proceed, but I still think that with our previous editor we would feel differently.
And If and when we will be doing the third edition, I am not going to do it in summer 🙂
The first edition is still sells surprisingly well, judging by the royalties, but I still do not know how to figure out how many copies were sold. I asked about it while our first editor was still there, and he said “he will find out,” but it never happened.
I was lucky since the Red Line train approached the station just as I walked down the stairs. I hopped into the nearest door and looked around to find a place to sit. The open spot seemed to be almost too narrow for me to fit, but in the car full of Cubs fans, I was not going to miss this opportunity.
I apologetically squeezed myself in, and an older gentleman on my left assured me that he was not that big and that I was fine.
In a couple of minutes, looking at me browsing my phone screen, he asked me what I was doing for a job. I replied, and since he looked puzzled, I explained to him, alluding to the search for products on Amazon. He said it was cool, and he was “just a retired forklift driver.” And then he told me that he wanted to start driving a semi because it’s a better pay, and we talked about that, and he mentioned that he worked for Pepsi, and I told him that I worked for Pepsi in the past and that I did this warehouse automation. I still remembered all technology, and he nodded approvingly: I see that you know what you are talking about! Then he said that he was originally from Michigan, and I said I have a friend there whom I visit, and we talked about what we like in Michigan.
We talked all the way to Wilson, discussing Cubs and Sox fans and the Red Line reconstruction and children and grandchildren, and then we shook hands, and he disembarked, waving me goodbye.
Thank you so much, Mister Retied Forklift Driver, for not asking where my accent was from!
Boris went to Saint Petersburg for a couple of days: one more attempt to fetch his money (unsuccessful), officially closing all relationships with all Russian academic institutions, and some other stuff. When he called me, I asked him sarcastically how it feels to be in the rear of the enemy; he replied very seriously: the worst thing is that they don’t understand that they are enemies!
I think he is getting this kind of shock each time he goes there, and each time I am shocked when I hear these reports from him: for the vast majority of Russian, “nothing is happening; life goes on.”
We both heard it many times, but it still feels too absurd to accept: people are crying about “unprovoked terrorist attacks on peaceful Russian citizens,” and they “do not know” about airstrikes in Kyiv. Because they do not want to know. Because they repeat the same propaganda cap that “Russia only strikes military structures.” They “do not know”; they do not want to know about children dying. Yes, there are no reports about that in the official Russian news, but everybody has VPN to do Instagram ad Facebook, so people choose not to check the alternative sources; they choose not to know… And not just the older generation (Igor sadly reports this state of mind after each conversation with his grandfather), but the younger one. Undergrads. PhD students. We should have accepted that a long time ago, but it still strikes…
Hettie's Reflections 