Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

In 2020, the top three educational systems in the world were Finland, Denmark, and South Korea

This is based on developmental levels including early childhood enrollment, test scores in math, reading, and science in primary and secondary levels, completion rates, high school and college graduation, and adult literacy rates.

Finland's education system is a dream: early education is designed around learning through play, school meals are free, and universities are tuition-free for students coming from EU, European Economic Area (EEA) countries, and Switzerland. A majority of teachers also have a master's degree; in fact, basic education teachers are required to have them.

These findings suggest more evidence for why heuristics, or rules of thumb, are both so effective and ubiquitous. Consider a few from the financial world: Pay yourself first. Sell in May and go away. Buy and hold. Only use the principal. Buy low, sell high. The list could go on and on.

It’s no surprise that financial stress is draining. Anyone who’s worried over a budget or fretted about making the wrong investment choice or major purchase can recognize the telltale signs of such anxiety. But what’s actually happening to your brain when you feel under such pressure?

New research conducted by neuroscientist Sam Barnett, co-founder of ThinkAlike Laboratories and sponsored by Northwestern Mutual, offers a rare glimpse at the brain while it is making financial decisions—and finds that anxiety actually impairs our ability to make sound decisions.

Walking into a bar in India, it is hard to miss the bottles of Bira 91 beer. Featuring a cartoon monkey with a punk hairdo and one eye smaller than the other, the labels read: "Imagined in India".Despite only launching in 2015, Bira 91 is now immensely popular across a country dominated by ubiquitous Kingfisher.Entrepreneur Ankur Jain started the brand when he moved back to his native New Delhi after 10 years living in New York.

By the end of last year, annual production had increased 30-fold to 300,000 barrels of five different beers, and the company's annual revenues had reached $30m.At the same time Bira 91 had secured $35m of external investment, including from US venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

To do this Mr Jain decided to flatten the organisational structure of the business. His fellow directors saw their senior job titles and assigned seats in offices taken away, and now employees at Bira 91 sit around the same dinner tables, allowing junior and senior employees to freely exchange ideas.

For the last couple of years, I've been banging my spoon on my highchair about how Trumpism isn't a political or ideological movement so much as a psychological phenomenon. This was once a controversial position on the right and the left. Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon devoted considerable resources to promoting Trumpist candidates who supposedly shared President Trump's worldview and parroted his rhetoric, including anti-globalism, economic nationalism and crude insults of "establishment" politicians. Those schemes largely came to naught.

On the left, there's an enormous investment in the idea that Trump isn't a break with conservatism but the apotheosis of it. This is a defensible, or at least understandable claim if you believe conservatism has always been an intellectually vacuous bundle of racial and cultural resentments. But if that were the case, Commentary magazine's Noah Rothman recently noted, you would not see so many mainstream and consistent conservatives objecting to Trump's behavior.

Trump has said countless times that he thinks his gut is a better guide than the brains of his advisors. He routinely argues that the presidents and policymakers who came before him were all fools and weaklings. That's narcissism, not ideology, talking.

Not for the next few months. The government still doesn’t know how widely the coronavirus has spread across America because of repeated snafus creating a test and it will take time to contain it. Until then large parts of the economy —schools, sports leagues, workplaces, cultural sites — are likely to remain shut down or operating on a limited basis.

The economy could shrink as much as 4% to 5% in the second quarter and trigger a sharp increase in unemployment, according to the most pessimistic Wall Street forecasts. The last time that happened was during the 2007-2009 Great Recession.

The vast majority of economists predict the U.S. will start to rebound later in the year, though they are split over how soon and how fast. Some like Donabedian see a rapid recovery starting in the summer. Others predict a short recession that extends through the fall.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought much economic activity around the world to a halt, making a global recession appear inevitable — it could become a depression if policy makers don't act fast enough, according to Joachim Fels of Pacific Investment Management Co. 

On Sunday, the Federal Reserve sprang into action in an attempt to save the US economy from fallout amid the coronavirus pandemic. The central bank lowered its benchmark interest rate to near zero and said that it will increase bond holdings by $700 billion, among other measures. 

The task at hand for governments and central banks continues to be that the recession "stays relatively short-lived and doesn't morph into an economic depression," Fels said. This will require a "very large fiscal response" to support individuals and businesses adversely affected by the crisis, he wrote.

Now financially secure, he decided to retire, escape the rat race, manage his own capital, and enjoy life. Within months, however, he reached out to me for psychological guidance. His new life was anything but bliss. No longer “in the game”, he felt rudderless. Free time became a source of boredom. To his dismay, he was feeling less physically healthy than when he was working crazy hour

We are wired as meaning-makers. If we cannot find positive sources of meaning, we often gravitate to negative ones, amplifying our social, emotional, and physical concerns. When Terence retired, he left the arena that sometimes pushed him to exhaustion, but that also provided his success and challenge.

Perhaps it is this overarching sense of purpose that enables money managers to weather the ups and downs of markets and invest renewed energy in their craft. Like any entrepreneur, these managers are driven, not just by sound business plans, but by a meaningful vision that allows them to pursue their plans with uncommon zeal.

The stock market is not the economy. But rarely has the gap between Wall Street and Main Street felt so wide.

The United States is going through its worst race crisis since 1968 following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis. Riots have hit cities across the nation. Looting is rampant. And President Donald Trump is threatening to send in the military to stop the violence.

The civil unrest could exacerbate the coronavirus pandemic that has already killed more than 100,000 Americans. That in turn could deepen the economic collapse that has forced more than 40 million people to file for unemployment.

not to mention that letting yourself be jerked around by impulsiveness is a breeding ground for everything you essentially do not want.

1. Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through which you experience your life.

You must learn to let your conscious decisions dictate your day – not your fears or impulses.

On Saturday, former President George W. Bush released a short, heartfelt video offering words of support for a nation rocked by a staggering loss of lives and livelihoods during the coronavirus pandemic. In less than three minutes, a somber-voiced Bush expressed gratitude to the nation's medical professionals, called on Americans to protect their neighbors by keeping their distance from them and urged us to show empathy and kindness to all.

Come Sunday morning, President Donald Trump shared his view on the video in which he, true to form, made it all about himself and his grievances.

True, Trump has expressed some concern for the suffering of our fellow Americans and their loved ones -- but at callously low levels.

sweeping series of measures that pushed the 106-year old central bank deeper into uncharted territory.

central bank said it will buy unlimited amounts of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities to keep borrowing costs at rock-bottom levels -- and to help ensure chaotic markets function properly. It also set up programs to ensure credit flows to corporations as well as state and local governments.

unnerved investors are by the pandemic, the Fed’s moves failed to spark anything beyond a brief rally in stocks and corporate bonds Monday after weeks of staggering losses

If you want to optimize the impacts of your global development organization, I can’t stress enough the value of in-depth communications made possible when nonprofit leaders prioritize local language skills. Language skills need to be a priority for international nonprofits and should be something that is invested in. While for some organizations, making language fluency a prerequisite for employment may be a good idea, language is something that can always be learned. I have seen organizations provide their staff with three months of language classes as part of their initial orientations. Good language skills lead to better community engagement and can avoid the potential for things to get lost in translation.