Brain Bites – Issue 12

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!

They went that-a-way

The percentage of adults living in middle-income households now stands at 50%, compared with 61% in 1971. Some 121 million Americans lived in middle-class households in 2015, slightly less than the combined number of upper-income adults (51 million) and those at the lower tier (70 million).
Ref: Pew Research

An expanding problem

In 2015, some 38% of Americans were obese. A waist is a terrible thing to mind.
Ref: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Odds you’ll score?

To better deliver clarity of meaning to forecasts, the intelligence community has adopted a scale that applies numbers to words: 100% (certainty); 93% (almost certain); 75% (probable); 50% (chances about even); 30% (probably not); 7% (almost certainly not); 0% (impossibility).
Ref: Good Judgment Project

Loyalty has its rewards

Supermarkets and pharmacies offer discounts when you sign up for their loyalty cards. But your buying records are being sold to life and health insurance companies, who use them to evaluate your rates based on your food and nonprescription drug purchases. Buying something for a friend or relative? The database still logs you as the end user.
Ref: Bottom Line

Don’t bug me, bro

Facebook has 1.55 billion users worldwide and often alerts them to the anniversary when they first friended another user. Though FB has only been around for 11 years, last year a software bug in the site’s coding told users to celebrate their almost half-century of FB camaraderie with certain friends. Oops.
Ref: USA Today

Neck and neck

Women may be outnumbered in the top ranks of corporate America, but they aren’t being underpaid. Compensation for female chief financial officers at S&P companies in 2014 outpaced that of their male counterparts ($3.32M for women compared to $3.2M for men).
Ref: Equilar

Game of drones

Industrial robots will likely perform nearly half of all manufacturing tasks by 2025, up from about 10% today.
Ref: BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research

I can’t get no satisfaction

A career as a software developer or engineer comes with no guarantee of job satisfaction. A survey last year of 5,000 such workers at both tech and non-tech firms found that many of them feel alienated, trapped, underappreciated, and otherwise discombobulated. Only 19% of tech employees said they were happy in their jobs and only 17% said they felt valued in their work.
Ref: TINYPulse

Love and learn

Living together for 7 years—or any amount of time—does not make you a married couple. A handful of states, including Alabama and Colorado, recognize common-law marriage, meaning that a couple may be legally treated as married if they live as a family and present themselves as a husband and a wife. Same-sex relationships or marriages are never recognized as common law.
Ref: LegalZoom

Watch the skies for a winner

Buying a lottery ticket is fun but behavioral economists say it’s financially foolish. The jackpot for the Powerball draw that took place on January 16, 2016 was $1.6 billion, with a 1 in 292 million chance of winning. You are around 4 times more likely to be killed by an asteroid impact this year.
Ref: The Economist

It’s all relative

Forty percent of all new marriages in the U.S. are remarriages for one or both of the partners. In addition, a little more than 40% have at least one step-relative.
Ref: Pew Research

The crack of doom

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons. The Bulletin created a metaphorical “Doomsday Clock” that reflects how vulnerable the world is to catastrophe from global nuclear weapons modernization, unchecked climate change, and emerging technologies. Midnight on the clock symbolizes apocalypse. Last year, the clock was adjusted from 5 minutes to midnight to 3 minutes to midnight, with a warning that humanity remains in serious danger. The clock was previously at 3 minutes to midnight in 1984 when talks between the U.S. and the Soviets virtually stopped. At the end of the Cold War in 1991, the clock was 17 minutes to midnight.
Ref: Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Tough going for black moms

Today more than 70% of all black births are to unmarried women, twice the white percentage.
Ref: Education Next

The best laid plans

Workers age 25 and over who planned to work past 65 increased from 11% in 1991 to 36% in 2015. According to a University of Michigan study, however, 37% of respondents didn’t reach the retirement age they had set when they were 58. The primary reason for retiring early was health problems, followed by layoffs or business closings and familial issues, such as a spouse retiring.
Ref: Employment Benefit Research Institute

Put on a smiley face!

Oxford English Dictionary declared an emoji its 2015 word of the year. Emojis originated in Japan in the late 1990s and once they were incorporated into Unicode (an international standard), they became accessible and easy to use. 74% of Americans use emojis every day.
Ref: SwiftKey

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.