@chenda: "We Made a Garden" by Margery Fish, the memoir of her late mid-life marriage to a grouchy old man with whom she created a garden, and their constant squabbles over whether the paving should be completely cleared of vegetation or casually draped with flowering herbs, should be read by all women before entering into late mid-life marriage.
@Jean:
There are currently approximately 2 arable acres (.8 hectares) and $50,000 capital/wealth (inclusive of public/state assets) and 8.5 years (by adulthood )of education per human on the planet. IOW, this is approximately what you would give to each player at the beginning of a new equitable round of Monopoly (although, obviously, still putting aside other discriminatory factors such as IQ, beauty, caste, vigor, etc.)
An acre (unstacked as just one floor in a building) in Manhattan is currently priced at around $57.5 million (down 7% from last year) while an average acre of farmland in the U.S. is currently priced at around $4000 (up 7% from last year.) All other things being equal, the return on any kind of trade is well-correlated with number of electrical outlets per acre. IOW, your best bet for winning the game of Monopoly is to head for the city acreage.
Wall Street is located in Manhattan. Therefore, even if you are currently rough camping for free in the Hiawatha National Forest and gnawing on solar-dried venison and berries for your lunch, if you have $50,000 or more invested in the U.S. stock market, you are still de facto trading in the bright lights of the big city at maybe 1 degree of separation from best rate of return, and generating an income above the global median. This is the genius of ERE.
The question at hand, I believe, is whether the recently accelerated due to Covid pandemic distribution of functional "electrical outlets" to beaches, farm houses, and mountainsides all over the planet has significantly altered this correlation. For instance, if 40 hours/week working in an office with 45 minute communte is a big stick, but 20 hours/week working on the beach is a significantly smaller stick, AND working remotely also still provides "direct line to Manhattan" at lower degree of separation than passive investment, where might new break-even rate of return be found?
As somebody who is currently part-time employed at the task of educating disadvantaged children in basic mathematics, I do think depreciation of educational assets does come into play at some juncture, even though we tend to dismiss it in alignment with highly valuing individual liberty. This is the tension at Wheaton Level 5 which is magnified by the new plethora of WFH, gig, contract, etc. opportunities. A Bachelor's Degree is equivalent to 7.5 extra years over the current global median education or approximately 7.5 X $16,000 = $120,000 at minimum in the U.S. (not including loss of income due to time invested in studying, which would make this number much larger.) So, maybe you have $200,000 you saved invested in the stock market, and another $200,000 worth of education/training which you are depreciating due to early retirement; the new reality makes it very tempting to just plug your educational assets back in to "the city" for however many hours or however many pieces of work still seem interesting, enjoyable, or of value to general society.
jacob wrote:We're talking high school students who can now find the result of a nonlinear regression because calculators have made it simple but not know what 7*5 is because learning that by rote is still hard.
Yeah, don't even get me started on this one. Just last week, I helped my disadvantaged students make personalized packs of flash cards using blank index cards and markers. Some of my affluent private high school students still use their fingers to add positive numbers, and adding negative numbers to positive numbers is the ultimate conceptual barrier which makes them auto-grab their calculators. Watch out folks if you're hoping a human without the aid of an AI will be able to successfully double your morphine dose when you find yourself in hospice nursing home in 2053.
It is really complicated (the opposite of simple) to make a toaster from scratch.
My sister and her study partner made a (very dangerous!!) toaster from scratch in the 6th grade. I did genetic experiments breeding mice. This was alternative education in the late 1970s, which allowed for students to design much of their own curriculum/projects.