These Charts Show Just How Much Puerto Rico Is Shrinking

The Obama administration has made the mass departure of people from Puerto Rico a central part of its pleas for congressional action to help the commonwealth, warning that the out-migration is worsening the island’s crippling debt crisis by depleting its tax base. Since most departing Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens, move to the United States mainland and lean Democratic, the warnings carry a subtext for immigration-wary Republicans: Act now to help the island, or face the political fallout later.

A new report released on Thursday provides new insight into the acuteness of the crisis. The Pew Research Center analysis of the latest county-level census data shows just how much the faltering economy and accompanying exodus have drained the island of its people, painting a bleak picture that can only add urgency to efforts underway in Congress.

Puerto Rico’s population was 3.47 million in 2015 -- 9 percent, or 334,000 people, smaller than it was in 2000, according to Pew.

Not surprisingly, the lion’s share of the drop -- some three-quarters -- occurred from 2010 to 2015, as the island’s troubles mounted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Pew created an animated graphic comparing Puerto Rico's growth in previous decades with the recent decline and illustrating where declines have been largest. San Juan, the island's capital city, has been hit hardest, losing 10 percent of its population, or 40,000 people, since 2000.

Pew points to Puerto Rico’s prolonged economic malaise as the primary culprit for its shrinking population. Economic opportunity, according to census data cited by the study, is the main reason Puerto Ricans give for moving to the mainland U.S.

But the report also notes another byproduct of the poor economy: It has depressed the fertility rate, making it less likely that people who stay on the island will replace the people who leave.

Puerto Rico has dramatically raised taxes and cut spending in recent years to pay down a debt burden of over $70 billion, which the island’s government says it will never be able to pay in full. The effect of the austerity has been to both severely limit the ability of the island's economy to recover -- it has an 11.7 percent unemployment rate, more than twice that of the mainland U.S. -- and hollow out key social services, like health care and education.

That is one reason the White House has said that “without congressional action the situation [in Puerto Rico] could soon become a humanitarian crisis” -- even as other observers, like Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), say that crisis has already arrived.

And the island could soon face new legal troubles, if, as many expect, it is unable to make bond payments to creditors due in a few weeks.

Puerto Rico needs help from Congress because as a U.S. commonwealth it occupies a gray zone that has deprived it of many of the economic liberties available to states. Chief among those is the ability to extend federal Chapter 9 bankruptcy protections to municipalities.

Puerto Rico’s government says that without the ability to restructure its debts in a judicially supervised process, it will never be able to recover economically. The commonwealth argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday that it has the right to pass local bankruptcy laws in the absence of federal protections. If the court rules in the island’s favor, it would allow Puerto Rico to reduce the amount its municipal utilities owe, which, at $20 billion, is only a fraction of its overall debts. A decision in the case is expected by the end of June.

Regardless of how the high court rules, however, aid for the island may soon be on its way. House Republicans are hard at work on legislation that would open the door for the island to restructure debts in exchange for financial reforms overseen by a Washington-based fiscal oversight board. House Democrats have said they believe their colleagues are negotiating in good faith.

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Why You Should Spend Your Money on Experiences, Not Things

When you work hard every single day and there's only so much money left after your regular expenses, you have to make certain it's well spent. Spend your limited funds on what science says will make you happy.

The Paradox of Possessions

A 20-year study conducted by Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University, reached a powerful and straightforward conclusion: don't spend your money on things. The trouble with things is that the happiness they provide fades quickly. There are three critical reasons for this:

• We get used to new possessions. What once seemed novel and exciting quickly becomes the norm.



• We keep raising the bar. New purchases lead to new expectations. As soon as we get used to a new possession, we look for an even better one.



• The Joneses are always lurking nearby. Possessions, by their nature, foster comparisons. We buy a new car and are thrilled with it until a friend buys a better one--and there's always someone with a better one.

"One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation," Gilovich said. "We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them."

The paradox of possessions is that we assume that the happiness we get from buying something will last as long as the thing itself. It seems intuitive that investing in something we can see, hear, and touch on a permanent basis delivers the best value. But it's wrong.

The Power of Experiences

Gilovich and other researchers have found that experiences--as fleeting as they may be--deliver more-lasting happiness than things. Here's why:

Experiences become a part of our identity. We are not our possessions, but we are the accumulation of everything we've seen, the things we've done, and the places we've been. Buying an Apple Watch isn't going to change who you are; taking a break from work to hike the Appalachian Trail from start to finish most certainly will.

"Our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods," said Gilovich. "You can really like your material stuff. You can even think that part of your identity is connected to those things, but nonetheless they remain separate from you. In contrast, your experiences really are part of you. We are the sum total of our experiences."

Comparisons matter little. We don't compare experiences in the same way that we compare things. When people are asked if they'd rather have a high salary that was lower than that of their peers or a low salary that was higher than that of their peers, a lot of them aren't sure. But when they are asked the same question about the length of a vacation, most people choose a longer vacation, even though it is shorter than that of their peers. It's hard to quantify the relative value of any two experiences, which makes them that much more enjoyable.

Anticipation matters. Gilovich also found that anticipation of an experience causes excitement and enjoyment, while anticipation of obtaining a possession causes impatience. Experiences are enjoyable from the very first moments of planning, all the way through to the memories you cherish forever.

Experiences are fleeting (which is a good thing). Have you ever bought something that wasn't nearly as cool as you thought it would be? Once you buy it, it's right there in your face, reminding you of your disappointment. And even if a purchase does meet your expectations, buyer's remorse can set in: "Sure, it's cool, but it probably wasn't worth the money." We don't do that with experiences. The very fact that they last for only a short time is part of what makes us value them so much, and that value tends to increase as time passes.

Bringing It All Together

The temporary happiness achieved by buying things only provides "puddles of pleasure." In other words, that kind of happiness evaporates quickly and leaves us wanting more. Things may last longer than experiences, but the memories that linger are what matter most.

What makes you happier, experiences or things? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

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Should We Cancel Daylight Saving Time?

It's one of those debates that arises at the same time each year, like whether we should still celebrate Columbus Day, or what it's still okay to wear as a Halloween costume. This weekend, like every March, thousands of groggy Americans will wonder, "Why do we even still have daylight saving?"

Questioning the wisdom of daylight saving time is not new. It's almost inevitable, as only 70 countries around the world observe it, and not even all 50 U.S. states! (Arizona and Hawaii opt out.) Even John Oliver, patron saint of explaining silly things, dedicated a segment to the tradition last year. 

But according to many experts, DST isn't going anywhere soon. So what do campaigners hope to change this year -- or ever?

A Century of Falling Back

Contrary to a popular misconception, daylight saving was not created for the benefit of farmers. It's actually an energy conservation strategy that dates back to World War I. In April 1916, Germany became the first country to set its clocks one hour forward, in hopes of minimizing the cost of artificial lighting and saving fuel for the war effort. The U.K., France and the U.S. all soon followed suit. 

America canceled the time change just seven months later, although some cities like New York and Boston continued the convention. And in 1942, another wartime president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, once again reinstated it across the country.  

Daylight saving as we know it was established by the Uniform Time Act of Congress in 1966, which set its parameters from April to October. "This strikes me like the last time we had a sensible compromise on the DST issue," Michael Downing, the author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, told The Huffington Post. "What followed was, in the classic American style, an effort to push DST to its economic limits."

By 1975, the six-month window became eight months of shifted time, when Congress reasoned that if a little saving was good, more saving could be even better. A 1974 study issued during the oil embargo crisis suggested that daylight saving would conserve the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil every day. 

In 2005, the most recent major change to DST policy, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which officially shifted DST from October and April to November and March.

Has Time Run Out For DST?

James Proud, a British entrepreneur who settled in San Francisco, certainly thinks so. He launched a Twitter campaign this week called "Stop DST," asking people to tweet at their congressional representatives and senators to end daylight saving time in their state.

"Daylight saving was created to save energy, and it doesn't really do that," Proud said, "but what's even worse are its negative health effects. It's both antiquated and harmful."

Daylight saving has been linked to a surprising number of health issues, including strokes and heart attacks, but Proud has a particular interest in the topic because of its disruptive effects on sleep. He's the founder of Hello, a health startup that makes a sleep tracker called Sense. Because of this, he's particularly concerned by the effects of daylight saving time on circadian rhythms -- people's 24-hour sleep-wake cycles.

Last year, German researchers suggested that our body clocks never really adjust to daylight saving, which causes a host of health problems. Till Roenneberg, a chronobiologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, told National Geographic that because of DST, "The majority of the population has drastically decreased productivity, decreased quality of life, increasing susceptibility to illness, and is just plain tired."

The week after daylight saving also typically leads to a spike in fatal traffic accidents -- about a 17 percent increase, according to the University of Colorado. This can be attributed both to disrupted sleep schedules and the shift of daylight hours from the morning to the evening.

Proud hopes to start a Twitter conversation around the hashtag #stopDST, but he's not the only one campaigning against it. Sheila Danzig, a Florida resident who evaluates people's degrees for immigration purposes, has been pushing to end daylight saving for 20 years through her website, StandardTime.com. 

What's changed in her decades lobbying for the issue? "Basically nothing," Danzig said. "Every couple of years a new initiative comes to light -- like the one in California this year -- but I'm not getting my hopes up."

Over 82,000 people have signed Danzig's petition to Congress over the years. In theory, an act of Congress -- just like the act that extended DST in 2005 -- could instantly fix this problem by picking one time convention for the whole country, according to Vox.

But a telling split among the signatories of Danzig's petition is that though nearly all of them -- about 97 percent, by her estimate -- agree daylight saving is negative, they can't seem to agree on which way to turn the clocks if it were abolished. "About 70 percent wants permanent daylight saving time, and 30 percent think we should stick to standard time all year round," she said.

A Rite of Spring

"Ultimately, daylight saving is an economic tradition. And all economic choices involve tradeoffs," said behavioral economist David Gerard. "Even if we decide to abolish daylight saving, there would be a large contingent of unhappy people."

Some such people are shift workers, students and parents of schoolchildren, all of whom get to enjoy an extra hour of daylight after work or class with DST. Plus, the restaurant and leisure industry loves the extra evening retail activity DST allows.

Daylight saving has also been linked to lower crime rates, due to the"deterrent effect" of longer daylight. Basically, more light increases a criminal's chances of being seen by witnesses or police, which discourages criminal activity. 

Gerard also pointed out that an extra hour of daylight has vastly more impact in the American South, where the sun sets earlier, even in the summer, than in the north. "In Wisconsin, where I live, the summer sun would set at 8:00 p.m. even without DST, since we're so far north. But it sets earlier the further south you go, which is why residents of southern states may value DST more."

Finally, although about a dozen states are seriously weighting proposals to switch time zones, it won't be easy even if they have their residents' support. States can elect to exempt themselves from DST, like Arizona, but they need permission from the Department of Transportation to switch time zones.

For legislators, and campaigns like Proud's and Danzig's, the real challenge is keeping the momentum of their campaign beyond the two relevant weeks of the year. Danzig, like many veteran activists, seems paradoxically both resigned and tenacious. And Proud, whose web and Twitter campaign reflects a new generation's engagement with a thorny problem, has modest goals, too.

"We want to start the conversation now, while people are complaining; that's the easy part," he said. "And then transfer that sentiment into legislation -- somehow."

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10 Troubling Habits of Chronically Unhappy People

Happiness comes in so many different forms that it can be hard to define. Unhappiness, on the other hand, is easy to identify; you know it when you see it, and you definitely know when it's taken ahold of you.

Unhappiness is lethal to everyone around you, just like second-hand smoke. The famous Terman Study from Stanford followed subjects for eight decades and found that being around unhappy people is linked to poorer health and a shorter life span.

Happiness has much less to do with life circumstances than you might think. A University of Illinois study found that people who earn the most (more than $10 million annually) are only a smidge happier than the average Joes and Janes who work for them.

Life circumstances have little to do with happiness because much happiness is under your control--the product of your habits and your outlook on life. Psychologists from the University of California who study happiness found that genetics and life circumstances only account for about 50% of a person's happiness. The rest is up to you.

"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself." - Benjamin Franklin

Unhappy Habits

When people are unhappy, it's much more difficult to be around them, let alone work with them. Unhappiness drives people away, creating a vicious cycle that holds you back from achieving everything that you're capable of.

Unhappiness can catch you by surprise. So much of your happiness is determined by your habits (in thought and deed) that you have to monitor them closely to make certain that they don't drag you down into the abyss.

Some habits lead to unhappiness more than others do. You should be especially wary of the ten habits that follow as they are the worst offenders. Watch yourself carefully to make certain that these habits are not your own.

Waiting for the future. Telling yourself, "I'll be happy when ..." is one of the easiest unhappy habits to fall into. How you end the statement doesn't really matter (it might be a promotion, more pay, or a new relationship) because it puts too much emphasis on circumstances, and improved circumstances don't lead to
happiness. Don't spend your time waiting for something that's proven to have no effect on your mood. Instead focus on being happy right now, in the present moment, because there's no guarantee of the future.

Spending too much time and effort acquiring "things." People living in extreme poverty experience a significant increase in happiness when their financial circumstances improve, but it drops off quickly above $20,000 in annual income. There's an ocean of research that shows that material things don't make you happy. When you make a habit of chasing things, you are likely to become unhappy because, beyond the disappointment you experience once you get them, you discover that you've gained them at the expense of the real things that can make you happy, such as friends, family, and hobbies.

Staying home. When you feel unhappy, it's tempting to avoid other people. This is a huge mistake as socializing, even when you don't enjoy it, is great for your mood. We all have those days when we just want to pull the covers over our heads and refuse to talk to anybody, but understand that the moment this becomes a tendency, it destroys your mood. Recognize when unhappiness is making you antisocial, force yourself to get out there and mingle, and you'll notice the difference right away.

Seeing yourself as a victim. Unhappy people tend to operate from the default position that life is both hard and out of their control. In other words, "Life is out to get me, and there's nothing I can do about it." The problem with that philosophy is that it fosters a feeling of helplessness, and people who feel helpless aren't likely to take action to make things better. While everyone is certainly entitled to feel down every once in a while, it's important to recognize when you're letting this affect your outlook on life. You're not the only person that bad things happen to, and you do have control over your future as long as you're willing to take action.

Pessimism. Nothing fuels unhappiness quite like pessimism. The problem with a pessimistic attitude, beyond it being hard on your mood, is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you expect bad things, you're more likely to get bad things. Pessimistic thoughts are hard to shake off until you recognize how illogical they are. Force yourself to look at the facts, and you'll see that things are not nearly as bad as they seem.

Complaining. Complaining itself is troubling as well as the attitude that precedes it. Complaining is a self-reinforcing behavior. By constantly talking--and therefore thinking--about how bad things are, you reaffirm your negative beliefs. While talking about what bothers you can help you feel better, there's a fine line between complaining being therapeutic and it fueling unhappiness. Beyond making you unhappy, complaining drives other people away.

Blowing things out of proportion. Bad things happen to everybody. The difference is that happy people see them for what they are--a temporary bummer--whereas unhappy people see anything negative as further evidence that life is out to get them. A happy person is upset if they have a fender bender on the way to work, but they keep things in perspective: "What a hassle, but at least it wasn't more serious." An unhappy person, on the other hand, uses it as proof that the day, the week, the month, maybe even their whole life, is doomed.

Sweeping problems under the rug. Happy people are accountable for their actions. When they make a mistake, they own it. Unhappy people, on the other hand, find problems and mistakes to be threatening, so they try to hide them. Problems tend to get bigger when they're ignored. The more you don't do anything about a problem, the more it starts to feel as though you can't do anything about it, and then you're right back to feeling like a victim.

Not improving. Because unhappy people are pessimists and feel a lack of control over their lives, they tend to sit back and wait for life to happen to them. Instead of setting goals, learning, and improving themselves, they just keep plodding along, and then they wonder why things never change.

Trying to keep up with the Joneses. Jealousy and envy are incompatible with happiness, so if you're constantly comparing yourself with others, it's time to stop. In one study, most subjects said that they'd be okay with making less money, but only if everybody else did too. Be wary of this kind of thinking as it won't make you happy and, more often than not, has the opposite effect.

Bringing It All Together

Changing your habits in the name of greater happiness is one of the best things that you can do for yourself. But it's also important for another reason--taking control of your happiness makes everyone around you happier too.

What do you do to make yourself happy? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

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The Robots Are Coming For Wall Street

When Daniel Nadler woke on Nov. 6, he had just enough time to pour himself a glass of orange juice and open his laptop before the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly employment report at 8:30 a.m.

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