What Centuries of Mistakes Can Teach Us About Saving For Retirement
From hoarding cash to buying stocks, a new book traces 300 years of financial advice and shows why what feels safe keeps changing.
Illustration by Kimberly Elliott
Over the past 35 years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of financial planners, money managers, researchers, academics, benefits consultants and everyday Americans in order to write hundreds of stories about retirement. I’ve learned plenty about smart saving — and the common mistakes people make — and I’ve been lucky enough to apply some of that wisdom to my own investments.
But much of what we think we know about saving and investing today is based on a relatively short span of time. Behavioral scientists call this tendency to overemphasize recent experience and assume tomorrow will resemble today “recency bias.”