
The Social Security COLA Tracks a Basket Retirees Don’t Buy
The annual cost-of-living increase that lands in the bank accounts of more than 70 million Social Security recipients is not, in any practical sense
I encourage readers to post their favorite popular economics books in the Comments below.
This is my ’15 Minute’ version —- the best list I can think up in fifteen minutes.
Some of these venture into sociology a bit.
1, 2, 3 tie
These three are in a class by themselves…..
Peter Warburton, Debt and Delusion.
Frederik Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
4. David Landes, The Wealth and Povery of Nations
5. Francis Fukuyama, Trust
6. John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went
7. Charles Morris, Money, Greed, and Fear.
8. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, Peter Bernstein. For a modern rendition of the same story, be on the lookout for Aaron Brown’s book, Red-Blooded Risk. I’m looking for this book to have a lot of buzz in late 2025, 2024.
9. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Hal Varian. This was the gameplan for Google’s takeover of the world.
10. Butterfly Economics, Paul Omelrod.

The annual cost-of-living increase that lands in the bank accounts of more than 70 million Social Security recipients is not, in any practical sense

Two official earnings figures disagree because they answer different questions: the Census Bureau measures a household, the BLS an hourly wage.

A dollar figure arrived at in the first year of the Kennedy administration is still the starting point for deciding who is poor in the United States.