Halloween statistics

http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/cb13-ff23.html

Halloween Oct. 31, 2013

Halloween, which dates back to Celtic rituals thousands of years ago, has long been associated with images of witches, ghosts and vampires. Today, Halloween has evolved into a celebration characterized by child-friendly activities, such as costumes, trick-or-treating and carving pumpkins into jack-o'-lanterns.

Trick or Treat!

41.1 million

The estimated number of potential trick-or-treaters in 2012 — children age 5 to 14 — across the U.S. Of course, many other children — older than 14 and younger than 5 — also go trick-or-treating.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012 Population Estimates <http://www.census.gov/popest/data/index.html>

115 million

Number of occupied housing units across the nation in second quarter 2013 — all potential stops for trick-or-treaters.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Housing Vacancies and Homeownership, Table 8 <http://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtabs.html>

93.3%

Percentage of households with residents who considered their neighborhood safe in 2011. In addition, 79.5 percent said there was no place within a mile of their homes where they would be afraid to walk alone at night.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Extended Measures of Well-Being: Living Conditions in the United States, 2011 <http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-570.pdf>

1,148

Number of U.S. manufacturing establishments that produced chocolate and cocoa products in 2011, employing 35,538 people. California led the nation in the number of chocolate and cocoa manufacturing establishments, with 122, followed by Pennsylvania, with 109.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 County Business Patterns <http://www.census.gov/econ/cbp/>

440

Number of U.S. manufacturing establishments that produced nonchocolate confectionary products in 2011. California led the nation in this category, with 56.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 County Business Patterns <http://www.census.gov/econ/cbp/>

Where to Spend Halloween?

Some places around the country that may put you in the Halloween mood are:
Tombstone, Ariz. (estimated population 1,358)
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012 Population Estimates
<http://factfinder2.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/PEP/2012/PEPANNRES/1620000US0474400>
Sleepy Hollow, Ill. (estimated population 3,339)
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012 Population Estimates
<http://factfinder2.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/PEP/2012/PEPANNRES/1620000US1770161>
Kill Devil Hills, N.C. (estimated population 6,827)
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012 Population Estimates
<http://factfinder2.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/PEP/2012/PEPANNRES/1620000US3735720>
Casper, Wyo. (estimated population 57,813)
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012 Population Estimates
<http://factfinder2.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/PEP/2012/PEPANNRES/1620000US5613150>
Scarville, Iowa (estimated population 71)
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012 Population Estimates
<http://factfinder2.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/PEP/2012/PEPANNRES/1620000US1971040>

Spooktacular Fun

4,575

The number of motion picture theaters (except drive-ins) where one could possibly enjoy a horrorfest. California (537), Texas (296), New York (272) and Florida (206) had the most of such establishments. There were 244 drive-in motion picture theaters in 2011 - Ohio, with 24, had the most.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 County Business Patterns <http://www.census.gov/econ/cbp/>

47,800

Acres of pumpkins harvested in the U.S. in 2012, with a total estimated production value of $148.9 million. Of the top six pumpkin-producing states, Illinois led the country by producing an estimated 556.3 million pounds of this vined gourd, followed by California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan. Pumpkins are frequently carved as decorations around Halloween.
Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service
<http://usda01.library.cornell.edu/usda/current/VegeSumm/VegeSumm-01-29-2013.pdf>

$165 million

The estimated seasonally adjusted annual rate of private nonresidential construction spending on theme/amusement parks for June 2013. Halloween events at theme/amusement parks can be frighteningly fun. For more information about construction spending, please visit:
<http://www.census.gov/constructionspending>.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Manufacturing and Construction Statistics
<http://www.census.gov/construction/c30/xls/privsatime.xls>

1,197

The number of costume rental and formal wear establishments; they had 6,936 paid employees (for pay period including March 12) across the nation in 2011.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 County Business Patterns <http://www.census.gov/econ/cbp/>

$1.1 billion

Dollar value of U.S. fresh apples exported in 2012. Mexico was the leading customer, purchasing $284 million worth. Whether bobbing for or dipping in caramel, apples can be a fun treat around Halloween.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Foreign Trade Statistics
<http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html>

Who You Gonna Call?

89%

Percent of all households that had a cellular phone in 2011 compared with only 36 percent in 1998. The percentage of households with a cellular phone only (no landline) rose from less than 1 percent in 1998 to 28 percent in 2011.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Extended Measures of Well-Being: Living Conditions in the United States, 2011
<http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-570.pdf>

Following is a list of observances typically covered by the Census Bureau’s Facts for Features series:

• African-American History Month (February)
• Super Bowl
• Valentine's Day (Feb. 14)
• Women's History Month (March)
• Irish-American Heritage Month (March)/
        St. Patrick's Day (March 17)
• Earth Day (April 22)
• Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month (May)
• Older Americans Month (May)
• Cinco de Mayo (May 5)
• Mother's Day
• Hurricane Season Begins (June 1)
• Father's Day

• The Fourth of July (July 4)
• Anniversary of Americans With Disabilities Act (July 26)
• Back to School (August)
• Labor Day
• Grandparents Day
• Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15)
• Unmarried and Single Americans Week
• Halloween (Oct. 31)
• American Indian/Alaska Native Heritage Month (November)
• Veterans Day (Nov. 11)
• Thanksgiving Day
• The Holiday Season (December)

Editor’s note: The preceding data were collected from a variety of sources and may be subject to sampling variability and other sources of error. Facts for Features are customarily released about two months before an observance in order to accommodate magazine production timelines. Questions or comments should be directed to the Census Bureau’s Public Information Office: telephone: 301-763-3030; fax: 301-763-3762; or e-mail: <PIO@census.gov>.

Not Happy With Work? Wait Until You're 50 or So

http://www.moneynews.com/Personal-Finance/happy-work-wait-50/2013/10/27/id/533293

Budget battle's bite out of economy may cost billions

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101120605

Budget battle's bite out of economy may cost billions

   Text Size  

 Published: Thursday, 17 Oct 2013 | 9:33 AM ET

By: John W. Schoen | CNBC.com Economics Reporter

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Big costs to economy from DC brinksmanship

Thursday, 17 Oct 2013 | 10:01 AM ET

Steve Liesman looks at how the budget battle and resulting government shutdown has hurt the U.S. economy.

If the goal of the government shutdown was to help taxpayers by curbing government spending and boosting the economy, supporters of the idea got it all wrong.

As the dust settles, economists are adding up the collateral damage. And the results aren't pretty.

The loss of government services during the three-week shutdown will take a roughly $3.1 billion bite out of gross domestic product, according to economists at IHS Global Insight.

Getty Images

The U.S. Capitol building is shown on the morning after a bipartisan bill was passed by the House and the Senate to reopened the government and raise the debt limit, on October 17, 2013 in Washington, DC

That represents the hit from lost government services. The shutdown also forced non-government business losses, temporary layoffs and other interruptions in business spending. The full extent of the damage won't be known for some time. Economists at Standard & Poor's estimate the total cost at about $24 billion, or a 0.6 percent GDP haircut. Others estimate about half that.

The loss in U.S. economic prestige is equally hard to gauge.

"The exact impact on the rest of the economy will be hard to measure until delayed economic data are released," according to the note from IHS economists Doug Handler and Paul Edelstein.

But they estimate the economy will grow at just a 1.6 percent annual rate in the last three months of the year—less than the 2.2 percent they had expected if the government had stayed open.

Those tens of billions of dollars of lost economic activity (along with a shortfall in government taxes on that activity) were obliterated by a political standoff that produced little more than an agreement to try again to reach a long-term agreement in three months.

(Read more: Washington now the biggest risk to the US economy?)

The deal amounts to a three-month cooling off period, temporarily ending the insanity that descended on Washington three weeks ago, froze the government's budget authority Oct. 1 and threatened to force the Treasury to default on $12 billion in public debt.

Play Video

Sen. McCain: Republicans 'punished' most by shutdown

What has been done to the civilian sector...is so harmful, says Sen. John McCain, (R-AZ), discussing the impact of the government shutdown on American citizens as well as both political parties. Sen. McCain also shares his thoughts on how Congress can likely reach a compromise on the budget.

The agreement approved Wednesday restores budget authority until January 15 at current spending levels, including back pay for furloughed government workers, and extends Treasury's borrowing authority until February 7.

It also releases the government from the hostage crisis that began with sweeping demands from House Republicans aimed at "defunding" the administration's health care law, President Barack Obama's signature domestic program, which began enrolling uninsured Americans on Oct. 1.

The only concession in the final deal was an agreement to verify the incomes of people signing up for health plans and looking for government subsidies to help pay the premium. A tax on medical devices—once high on the list of House GOP demands—remains unchanged.

The overall damage would have been much greater if the debt limit had been breached. That would have stopped a large chunk of government spending that continued flowing through the economy.

Government spending on Medicare and Social Security, nearly half of total government spending, was not affected because those checks are paid by trust funds that aren't subject to the annual budget process. Same for the roughly 7 percent of spending that goes to pay interest on the national debt.

Military servicemen and women continued to get paid, but civilian contractors were furloughed. That lost spending amounted to about three-tenths of a percent of annual GDP.

Some orders for government supplies were put on hold. But those orders will have to be made up later, so there was likely little lost production during the past two weeks.

"For a brief shutdown, it seems unlikely that contracted production of defense-related goods (mostly weapons systems, munitions, and petroleum) would be even temporarily curtailed," wrote economists at Macroeconomic Advisors.

While some deferred business will be made up in the weeks and months ahead, other losses are permanent.

Businesses catering to tourists visiting national parks, for example, can't make up the revenue on lost hotel bookings. Recreation in national parks, wildlife refuges, forests, marine sanctuaries, and other federally managed lands and waters contributed more than 600,000 jobs to the economy in 2010.

Realtors are reporting that some home sales are being canceled because of delays in mortgage approvals. That's because lenders couldn't confirm income tax returns and Social Security data. Furloughs at the Federal Housing Administration produced a backlog in loan processing for first-time homebuyers.

(Read more: Shutdown is having 'notable impact' on mortgages)

For those who had sold their old house or moved out of an apartment, that delay meant a surprise out-of-pocket cost to find alternate housing. (On the other side of the ledger, the hotel or temporary landlord made an extra month's rent.)

Most commentators observed that the stock market "remained relatively calm" throughout the two-week Congressional break with reality, but many individual investors weren't as assured. In the first week after the shutdown, the net value of market losses came to more than $400 billion. The market then staged a rally that added back more than $800 billion in net value. If you didn't panic, you came out ahead. If you sold into that trough, you lost money.

Longer-term damage is the toughest to estimate.

With the holiday shopping season approaching, consumer sentiment fell this month to its weakest level in nine months, according to the widely watched survey by Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan. The drop was driven by a gloomier outlook about the economy – which typically prompts consumers to tighten up on their spending.

(Read more: Shoppers slash holiday spending plans amid crisis)

"The ongoing government shutdown was a significant factor in this decline, and unfavorable references to government economic policy were mentioned spontaneously by 35 percent of consumers, a new all-time high," according to economists at Barclays.

Consumers are also more worried about their job prospects.

While the deal struck Wednesday allowed the government to avoid an outright default on its debts, the political spectacle also horrified government and business leaders around the world. The hard cost of the loss of confidence won't be known for months or years. To the extent it discourages investments, it will hamper the already weak recovery.

A lot depends on whether the three-month extension produces a resolution to the underlying political standoff. If no agreement is reached the next time the debt ceiling approaches, confidence will fall further.

"The U.S.'s prestige in global financial markets and world capitals will continue to deteriorate if we lurch from crisis to crisis," said the IHS economists.

—By CNBC's John Schoen. Follow him on Twitter 

@johnwschoen

.

Economics Nobel Price 2013

http://www.npr.org/2013/10/14/233889206/three-u-s-economists-win-nobel-prize?ft=1&f=1017

Three U.S. Economists Win Nobel Prize

by ASSOCIATED PRESS

October 14, 2013 7:29 AM

Americans Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller won the Nobel prize for economics on Monday for developing new methods to study trends in asset markets.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three had laid the foundation of the current understanding of asset prices.

While it's hard to predict whether stock or bond prices will go up or down in the short term, it's possible to foresee movements over periods of three years or longer, the academy said.

"These findings, which might seem surprising and contradictory, were made and analyzed by this year's laureates," the academy said.

Fama, 74, and Hansen, 60, are associated with the University of Chicago. Shiller, 67, is a professor at Yale University.

American researchers have dominated the economics awards in recent years; the last time there was no American among the winners was in 1999.

The Nobel committees have now announced all six of the annual $1.2 million awards for 2013.

The economics award is not a Nobel Prize in the same sense as the medicine, chemistry, physics, literature and peace prizes, which were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in 1895. Sweden's central bank added the economics prize in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/10/14/233934871/americans-win-economics-nobel-for-interpreting-stock-prices?ft=1&f=1017

Americans Win Economics Nobel For Interpreting Stock Prices

by BILL CHAPPELL

October 14, 2013 8:50 AM

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces the winners of the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in Stockholm Monday. The prize went to U.S. professors Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller.

Claudio Bresciani/AP

Three American professors have won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Economics for their work in identifying long-term trends in the prices of stocks and bonds, based in part on analyzing the role of risk.

Professors Robert J. Shiller of Yale University and Eugene F. Fama and Lars Peter Hansen, both of the University of Chicago, won "for their empirical analysis of asset prices," the Royal Swedish Academysaid in announcing the honor Monday.

"The Laureates have laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices," the academy said. "It relies in part on fluctuations in risk and risk attitudes, and in part on behavioral biases and market frictions."

The economists' research spans decades, stretching back to the 1960s. They pursued their theories independent of one another, laying the groundwork for the rise of index funds and "behavioral finance," which takes investors' motivations and limitations into account.

Here's how the academy summarized their contributions:

"Eugene Fama and several collaborators demonstrated that stock prices are extremely difficult to predict in the short run, and that new information is very quickly incorporated into prices. These findings not only had a profound impact on subsequent research but also changed market practice. The emergence of so-called index funds in stock markets all over the world is a prominent example."

"Lars Peter Hansen developed a statistical method that is particularly well suited to testing rational theories of asset pricing. Using this method, Hansen and other researchers have found that modifications of these theories go a long way toward explaining asset prices."

"Robert Shiller ...found that stock prices fluctuate much more than corporate dividends, and that the ratio of prices to dividends tends to fall when it is high, and to increase when it is low. This pattern holds not only for stocks, but also for bonds and other assets."

Fama, 74, began his work in the mid-1960s; as Bloomberg notes, he is often called the "father of modern finance."

In an interview with the academy conducted minutes after the phone call informing him of his win, Fama explained that he might not have embarked on his legendary career, if he hadn't lost his passion for studying French.

"In my junior year in college, I was getting kind of tired of French. So, I took an economics course, and I loved it," he said. "The rest of my two years in college I spent in economics."

In winning the Nobel, they will split a cash award of 8 million Swedish kroner, a bit more than $1.2 million.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/14/233936819/economics-nobel-nobody-knows-what-stocks-are-going-to-do-today?ft=1&f=1017

Economics Nobel: Nobody Knows What Stocks Are Going To Do Today

by JACOB GOLDSTEIN

October 14, 2013 9:04 AM

The Nobel Foundation

If you want to honor today's Nobel laureates in economics, turn off CNBC and ignore everyone who says they know what the stock market is going to do today, tomorrow, or next week.

The award went to three economists — Eugene F. Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert J. Shiller — for their work studying asset prices.

One key finding in Fama's research is that nobody knows whether the stock market is going to go up or down in the short run. Shiller found that, over the long run (years), the stock market as a whole does tend to follow a predictable pattern.

A fun detail about today's award: Fama and Shiller have a long-running debate over bubbles. Shiller is perhaps the most famous contemporary chronicler of bubles (he wrote a book called Irrational Exuberance). Fama thinks the term bubble is used too often and too sloppily.

In a 2010 interview with the New Yorker, Fama brought up Shiller, suggesting he was always saying things were bubbly:

New Yorker: There were some people out there saying this was an unsustainable bubble...

Fama: Right. For example, (Robert) Shiller was saying that since 1996.

New Yorker: Yes, but he also said in 2004 and 2005 that this was a housing bubble.

Fama: O.K., right. Here's a question to turn it around. Can you have a bubble in all asset markets at the same time? Does that make any sense at all? Maybe it does in somebody's view of the world, but I have a real problem with that. Maybe you can convince me there can be bubbles in individual securities. It's a tougher story to tell me there's a bubble in a whole sector of the market, if there isn't something artificial going on. When you start telling me there's a bubble in all markets, I don't even know what that means. Now we are talking about saving equals investment. You are basically telling me people are saving too much, and I don't know what to make of that.

Shiller cited that Q&A with Fama in a column he wrote earlier this year:

Maybe the word bubble is used too carelessly.

Eugene Fama certainly thinks so. Fama, the most important proponent of the "efficient markets hypothesis," denies that bubbles exist. As he put it in a2010 interview with John Cassidy for The New Yorker, "I don't even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don't think they have any meaning."

In the second edition of my book Irrational Exuberance, I tried to give a better definition of a bubble. A "speculative bubble," I wrote then, is "a situation in which news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process amplifying stories that might justify the price increase." This attracts "a larger and larger class of investors, who, despite doubts about the real value of the investment, are drawn to it partly through envy of others' successes and partly through a gambler's excitement."

That seems to be the core of the meaning of the word as it is most consistently used. Implicit in this definition is a suggestion about why it is so difficult for "smart money" to profit by betting against bubbles: the psychological contagion promotes a mindset that justifies the price increases, so that participation in the bubble might be called almost rational. But it is not rational.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/14/234234987/how-do-we-know-what-we-know-three-nobel-winning-approaches

How Do We Know What We Know? Three Nobel-Winning Approaches

by PIETRA RIVOLI

October 14, 2013 6:18 PM

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces the winners of the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in Stockholm Monday. The prize went to U.S. professors Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller.

Claudio Bresciani/AP

Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics today for their efforts to answer to a key question: How do the prices of assets like stocks and real estate behave over time?

They came to rather different answers to that question. The markets are rational and efficient, Fama has argued; not so much, has been Shiller's reply. This difference has been widely discussed today.

But it's also worth pointing out how differently these three economists study the world, which points to a much bigger question: How do we know what we know in economics, or indeed in any social science? The three winners of today's Nobel Prize in economics differ not only in their conclusions, but also in their ways of knowing.

Fama is an empiricist, and studies the world of asset prices from his computer screen. For nearly 50 years he has been examining price movements, minute by minute year by year. Perusing the 105 research papers on Fama's CV makes clear his way of knowing: Millions of "observations" that is, price data points — examined with exactitude. From these millions of data points – consistently observed — Fama has discerned what is. In this way of knowing, one need not venture out. The beauty of staying inside is the consistency of the weather: it is possible, in empirical testing, to control for much of the messiness outside. A "clean" empirical test a good one.

Shiller, on the other hand, is nothing if not out. Though his early methods were similar to Fama's, Shiller's recent work begins with the premise that the world cannot be understood through data points alone. His work pioneered the use of psychology in understanding market behavior, inviting the messiness of the human mind into the conversation. While Fama watched price behavior, Shiller watched human behavior, and then developed ideas about the mechanisms by which one influenced the other.

Hansen is a scientist's scientist, the quantitative heavyweight of the three. Unlike Fama or Shiller, he has no position to defend. Instead he has made his mark designing ways to statistically ask and answer questions about how prices behave. His contribution is in accurate and creative measurement. Advances in measurement advance our ability to incorporate the messiness of the world into clean empirical tests, in fact, to bring Shiller and Fama into one another's orbit.

How do we know what we know? We examine data, we study people, and then we measure everything as best we can. We need all three.

Pietra Rivoli is Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.


http://www.npr.org/2013/10/14/233930030/3-american-economists-win-nobel-prize?ft=1&f=1017

3 American Economists Win Nobel Prize

by STEVE INSKEEP and ZOE CHACE

October 14, 2013 7:46 AM

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Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller won the 2013 economics prize for their work on developing new methods to study trends in asset markets. They will share the $1.25 million prize.

Copyright © 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

OK, the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics was awarded today to three American men - Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, Robert Shiller. The Nobel committee cited their research in the predictability of stock prices, as well as other asset prices. We're going to find out more now from Zoe Chace of NPR's Planet Money team. She's on the line. Hi, Zoe.

ZOE CHACE, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.

INSKEEP: Each of these guy's names is a little familiar, I think to the layman, especially maybe Shiller. Who are they?

CHACE: So, all right. These guys, they're kind of, it's kind of the perfect example of what economics is, that these three guys won. Because Fama thinks one thing and Shiller kind of thinks the opposite. And that's sort of what economics is, is like an argument...

INSKEEP: And both won it together, OK, fine. Go on.

CHACE: Yeah, but if you put them together, there's sort of some logic to it. It's both about predictability in the stock market, and sort of what stock prices mean.

Fama, the first guy, the research that he did is basically that the price of a stock is kind of the perfect amount of information. The market absorbs information really quickly and prices, stocks exactly appropriately. So...

INSKEEP: OK.

CHACE: Like, quarterly earnings come out, or something like that, the stock market reacts right away. That's a perfect assimilation of new information.

INSKEEP: OK.

CHACE: Like that's great information.

INSKEEP: Investors are watching and people make their conclusions and it's a collective conclusion. OK.

CHACE: Yeah, sales are up, people buy the stock, you know, that's logical and that makes sense. But Shiller looked at stock prices and asset prices kind of over a longer period of time and he kind of puts the heart into it. He says people are crazy and people are emotional and sometimes they will just buy up, you know, a whole bunch of things just because they're excited about it. And it's not really the price of something; how popular something is isn't necessarily a perfect piece of information because we're crazy and we get excited. And so, that is not really absorbed very, you know, into the price of something.

INSKEEP: Robert Shiller, isn't he the guy whose name is on the Case-Shiller Index, which has to do with home prices and so forth?

CHACE: Yes. He is the guy.

INSKEEP: Which, of course, that's something - that's a market that's had quite a lot of craziness in recent years, as all of us know.

CHACE: Yes. So Shiller's kind of the father behavioral finance, basically. Like, he's a really famous guy and he predicted the tech bubble in 2000. He predicted the real estate bubble of 2008 because he sees bubbles as a kind of natural outgrowth of the human emotion that comes along with investing money. And so, the Case-Shiller Home Price Index is something that's really popular because that's a way to look at, you know, like, confident people are feeling in the economy.

INSKEEP: OK.

CHACE: Confidence is really - that's what investing is all about.

INSKEEP: OK, so you got one guy who thinks the market is rational and another guy who thinks the market is irrational. And we have this third guy, Hansen. Who's he?

CHACE: Yes. Hansen is the math guy. He came up with the model that you can sort of use to prove your assumptions. I can't really get into it because the math is complicated...

INSKEEP: Right.

CHACE: ...and it's a little bit beyond me, beyond us, probably. But what it is, is that you can use his model to prove Shiller's point and you can use his model to prove Fama's point, which are sort of opposite points...

(LAUGHTER)

CHACE: ...but that's economics. You know, it's an argument.

INSKEEP: OK. We were wondering if these guys, since they won the Nobel Prize for the predictability of the markets, if they were able to make themselves rich. But I'm guessing from what you said, maybe not.

CHACE: No. They can invest their couple hundred thousand dollars each in the markets, but they don't know what they're going to get. That's how the markets work.

INSKEEP: Zoe, thanks very much.

CHACE: Thank you.

INSKEEP: That's NPR's Zoe Chace of our Planet Money team. And again, the Nobel Prize winners in economics - Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller. You heard it right here on MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

Copyright © 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

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