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Want to be wealthier? Get married. According to a study published in Journal of Sociology, the net worth of a married person grows approximately 75 percent more during their thirties, forties, and fifties than the net worth of an unmarried person. (Thats per person in the relationship, not per couple.) Want to make a higher income, and feel more satisfied with your job? Get married. A Washington University in St. Louis study found that people with relatively prudent and reliable partners tend to perform better at work, earning more promotions, making more money, and feeling more satisfied with their jobs. What the researchers call partner conscientiousness predicts future job satisfaction, income, and likelihood of promotion (even after factoring in the participants original level of conscientiousness). According to the researchers, conscientious partners perform more household tasks, exhibit more pragmatic behaviors that their spouses are likely to emulate, and promote a more satisfying home life, all of which enables their spouse to focus more on work. As one researcher said, These results demonstrate that the dispositional characteristics of the person one marries influence important aspects of ones professional life. Or in non-researcher-speak, a good partner sets a good example and helps create an environment where you can be a better you. Other data backs up the above findings. A 2021 Census Bureau report found that married adults tend to earn substantially more than unmarried adults, and have three times the net worth. A 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey found that married couples spend about $10,000 less per person than unmarried people. Making more and spending less? Great formula for a higher net worth. Thats why deciding whom to marry is one of the most important decisions youll make where your overall happiness, career prospects, and financial success are concerned. Clearly, you have to choose the right person to spend your life with. But just as clearly, you have to choose to be the kind of partner they deserve to spend their life with. For example, a study published in Journal of Physical Activity and Health found that people in romantic relationships exercise less than people who are single, especially where moderate to vigorous physical activity (running, lifting weights, cycling, etc.) is concerned. Why? Become a couple and youre more likely to do couples things: eat meals together, watch TV together, hang out together. Over time, Lets go to the gym is much less likely to top the list, even if you consistently exercised before you became a couple. As the researchers write: For those with a partner, current (exercise) levels are substantially lower when the partner is present than when the partner is absent. When partners spend leisure-time activities apart, their (exercise) levels are higher than those of individuals without a partner.The results suggest that it is not the mere existence of a romantic relationship but the current co-presence with a partner that affects physical activity behavior. Bottom line? Spending time together means youre a lot less likely to exercise.And then theres this. A study published in Health Psychology found that after four years in a stable relationship, people tend to gain significantly more weight than they would from the natural result of aging. A Social Science & Medicine study found that people in a long-term relationship are more likely to gain weight, and less likely to exercise. (Unsurprisingly, the study also found that when a relationship ends, people tend to lose weight and exercise more.) When time together feels short, going to the gym doesnt sound like couples time. Granted, youre together . . . but only in proximity. The researchers also speculate that feeling secure in a relationship tends to cause people to focus less on their appearance, and therefore less on healthy behaviors, like exercise and diet, that affect appearance. Which takes us back to whom you choose to marry. Clearly you shouldnt choose your life partner on the basis of how conscientious they are, or whether you think they not only eat well and exercise but will continue to eat well and exercise. To paraphrase the Washington University in St. Louis researchers, marrying a conscientious partner could sound like a recipe for a rigid and lackluster lifestyle. But it does appear that having a conscientious and prudent partnerboth in a practical sense, and in a healthy lifestyle senseis an ingredient in the recipe for a better, more rewarding career, and for a healthier and longer life. So what should you do? Instead of expecting your partner to change some of their habits, think about what you can do to be more supportive of their goals. In a practical sense, maybe you can take on managing the finances. Or take care of more household chores, or repairs, maintenancethe things that keep your trains running on time. After all, the best way to lead is by example. Take health and fitness. You can decide to make exercising and eating better a priority, and do things to support that goal. You can take on the grocery shopping. You can cook some meals. You can fix a healthy lunch for your partner to take to work. You can choose to be the conscientious one. Thats the real key. Marrying the right person helps, but being the right person to have marriedbeing supportive, encouraging, and leading by exampleis the best way to help your marriage be successful, both practically and, more important, emotionally. Because the person you choose to marry mattersbut what you do for your partner, and what that does for your relationship, matters most. Inc.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump plans to use a key address Wednesday to try to convince Americans he can make housing more affordable, but he’s picked a strange backdrop for the speech: a Swiss mountain town where ski chalets for vacations cost a cool $4.4 million.On the anniversary of his inauguration, Trump is flying to the World Economic Forum in Davos an annual gathering of the global elite where he may see many of the billionaires he has surrounded himself with during his first year back in the White House.Trump had campaigned on lowering the cost of living, painting himself as a populist while serving fries at a McDonald’s drive-thru. But in office, his public schedules suggest he’s traded the Golden Arches for a gilded age, devoting more time to cavorting with the wealthy than talking directly to his working-class base.“At the end of the day, it’s the investors and billionaires at Davos who have his attention, not the families struggling to afford their bills,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank.Trump’s attention in his first year back has been less on pocketbook issues and more fixed on foreign policy with conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine and Venezuela. He is now bent on acquiring Greenland to the chagrin of European allies a headline likely to dominate his time in Davos, overshadowing his housing ideas.Trump noted the Europeans’ resistance, telling reporters Monday night, “Let’s put it this way: It’s going to be a very interesting Davos.”The White House has tried to shift Trump’s focus to affordability issues, a response to warning signs in the polls in a year where control of Congress is at stake in midterm elections.About six in 10 U.S. adults now say that Trump has hurt the cost of living, according to the latest survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It’s an issue even among Republicans, who have said Trump’s work on the economy hasn’t lived up to their expectations. Only 16% say Trump has helped “a lot” on making things more affordable, down from 49% in April 2024, when an AP-NORC poll asked Americans the same question about his first term.The president is banking on investment commitments from billionaires and foreign nations to create a jobs boom, even as his broad tariffs have crimped the labor market and spurred inflation. Trump supporters who attend his rallies which the president resumed last month are left to trust that Trump’s business ties can eventually help them.This strategy carries political risks. Voters are more interested in the economy they’re experiencing in their own lives than in Trump’s relationships with billionaires, said Frank Luntz, the Republican-affiliated pollster and strategist.“If you’re asking me, ‘Are billionaires popular?’ The answer is no and they’ve haven’t been for some time,” said Luntz, who last year identified “affordability” as a defining issue for voters. Wooing billionaires instead of the working class Since Trump’s first term in 2017, the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans have seen their wealth increase by $11.98 trillion to $23.46 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.The magnitude of those gains dwarfs what the bottom 50% of households the majority of the country received during the same period. Their net worth rose by $2.94 trillion, roughly one-fourth what the top 0.1% got.One of the biggest concerns for voters is the cost of housing. In recent weeks, Trump has floated proposals like reducing interest rates on home loans by buying $200 billion in mortgage debt and banning large financial companies from buying homes. Yet those efforts would do little to address the core problem in the housing market: a multi-year shortfall in home construction and home prices that have generally risen faster than wages.Trump regularly points to the investments made by the wealthy and powerful as signs of economic growth to come. To encourage billionaires to deliver, Trump in his first year pursued policies on artificial intelligence and financial regulation that can benefit the wealthy, along with tax cuts, reduced IRS enforcement and fewer regulatory burdens for large-scale investments.“Most billionaires don’t share the interests of the working class,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written about the “wealthification” of U.S. politics. “The ultrawealthy love tax cuts and deregulation, and those preferences make it difficult for government to provide the help that working class people want.”Trump has been trying to sell tax breaks on tips and overtime pay from what is known as the ” One Big Beautiful Bill ” as benefiting workers. But a Congressional Budget Office analysis indicated that middle-class families may only see savings of $800 to $1,200 a year, on average, while the top 10% of earners would receive $13,600. A separate analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a think tank, said those earning above $1 million would save on average $66,510 this year. The company Trump keeps Trump regularly holds public events with the wealthy and powerful at the White House and beyond. He jetted to the Middle East and Asia with billionaires in tow as he had foreign countries announce investment commitments, promising that the money would flow down into factory jobs for the middle class.At a September dinner with tech billionaires, Trump said it was an honor to be surrounded by the likes of Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg.“There’s never been anything like it,” Trump said. “The most brilliant people are gathered around this table. This is definitely a high-IQ group and I’m very proud of them.”The White House said the previous Biden administration had alienated the business community to the detriment of the economy. “President Trump’s pro-growth policies and friendly relationships with industry titans, on the other hand, are securing trillions in investments that are creating jobs and opportunities for everyday Americans,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said.Last month, Trump celebrated a charitable contribution of $6.25 billion to the “Trump” investment accounts for children by Michael Dell. It was a chance to talk about economic inequality but also another opportunity for Trump to showcase his relationship with billionaires.Trump takes phone calls from billionaires and CEOs to chat about business, politics and interests such as his planned White House ballroom. He regularly peppers his speeches with shoutouts to Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, whose net worth was estimated by Forbes at roughly $162 billion as of Sunday.He’s installed billionaires in his inner circle such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (net worth: $3.3 billion) and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff (net worth: $2 billion). He put Elon Musk (net worth: $780 billio) in charge of slashing government payrolls before a dramatic falling-out and, later, a public reconciliation.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a briefing last month portrayed Trump’s own status as a billionaire as a positive for him with voters.“I think it’s one of the many reasons they reelected him back to this office, because he’s a businessman who understands the economy and knows how to fix it,” she said. Josh Boak, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
While working as an engineer at Tesla, Niccolo Cymbalist never planned to start a business. But he’d been considering an idea for new technologyan autonomous, wind-powered cargo ship. Then, while on paternity leave in 2024, he discovered a free program that helps scientists and engineers launch businesses for the first time. Weeks after finishing the program, called 5050, Cymbalist had launched a startup called Clippership. The companys first ship is being built in the Netherlands this year. Without the accelerator, he says, the company likely wouldnt exist. The program has now helped scientists and engineers launch 100 businesses, from Huminly, which uses enzymes to make clothing infinitely recyclable, to Plasmidsaurus, which offers ultra-fast DNA sequencing. [Photo: courtesy Fifty Years] The course is run by Fifty Years, a San Francisco-based VC firm focused on deep tech that tackles the worlds largest problems, from disease to climate change. Soon after the firm started a decade ago, the team saw that good ideas were stuck in academic labs. The transition from academic scientist to founder is actually much more difficult than the transition from sophomore dropout to founder, for a whole host of reasons, says Seth Bannon, a founding partner at Fifty Years. Because of that, the best people to start these startupsthe scientists that invented the technologyweren’t doing that. So we said, ‘okay, can we help fix that?’ [Photo: courtesy Fifty Years] From idea to startup Potential founders go through a 13-week programwith some in-person weekends and weekly Zoom sessionsthat helps them figure out if their idea is worth pursuing and whether it’s ready to commercialize. The founder of Plasmidsaurus, for example, who was a postdoc at Caltech, initially joined the program planning to turn his lab research on synthetic gene circuits into a medical product. But the 5050 team helped him realize that it was around 10 years from being commercializable, and one of his other ideastechnology he’d developed to speed up his own researchwas ready now. The company is growing quickly. “At year one, they just crossed a $50 million run rate,” Bannon says. “They’ve been profitable every month since they started. And they’re now one of the most beloved names in biology.” [Photo: courtesy Fifty Years] Participants also learn how to build a startup team, understand what makes founders successful, and decide if entrepreneurship is a fit for them. “One of the workshops that we do is the ‘story of self,’ where it’s a deep dive into their core motivationtheir entire story of life and like what they’re doing today to really make sure that they’re actually pursuing something that they’re really really excited about,” says Ale Borda, who runs the 5050 program. “Then they can use that same story to share about their work and why they will go through walls to enable this to happen.” [Photo: courtesy Fifty Years] They learn about how to communicate differently. “In academia, just as one example, you are taught to communicate with data, data, dataand then here are the 10 ways my data might be wrong,” Bannon says. While that’s good for research, “if you communicate that way as a startup founder, you will have trouble hiring anybody, you’ll have trouble raising money, you’ll have trouble getting press,” he says. “And so you have to learn to talk in directionally correct abstractions.” Universities often also have programs to help move tech to the market, but schools are disconnected from the startup world, and Bannon says the programs aren’t very effective. (Mentors might be Fortune 500 executives, for example, rather than other startup founders with direct experience.) There are also conflicts of interest. Universities own the IP for new inventions scientists develop on campus; scientists have to go through a complicated process of negotiating for the rights to the tech. The program at 5050 includes coaching onnavigating that process. Turning scientists into founders So far, the approach is working. “The stat we’re most proud of is that 96% of the teams that went out to raise a round were able to,” says Bannon. “That’s an insanely high stat for a program that accepts people who don’t have companies when they join.” In the current political climate, as federal funding cuts have hit university labs, the program is already seeing an increased interest from scientists at a career crossroads. “A lot of them are seeing that they might not be able to continue their life’s work in academia anymore,” Bannon says. “Some of them happen to be lucky and be in a spot where maybe it could be a startup.” In the short term, he says, funding cuts might lead to more startups, though they’ll slow down future growth. [Photo: courtesy Fifty Years] Of the 100 companies that have launched from the program so far, around half wouldn’t have started without it. Others launched faster than they would have. “I probably would have started a company, but it almost certainly wouldn’t have been at the time that I did,” says Daniel Rahn, a former SpaceX engineer who launched Metal as Fuel, a company that makes metal fuels to decarbonize heavy industry. “These are counterfactual companies,” says Bannon. “These companies are combating the climate crisis, they’re defeating disease, they’re doing important stuff. And so it just feels really, really good to help companies come into existence that wouldn’t otherwise.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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