The obesity pay gap is worse than previously thought | Four Ways to Be Grateful—And Happier | The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury | Travellers face another year of disruption in 2024

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� � � � � � The obesity pay gap is worse than previously thought - The Economist    Obese people experience discrimination in many parts of their lives, and the workplace is no exception. Studies have long shown that obese workers, defined as those with a body-mass index (BMI) of 30 or more, earn significantly less than their slimmer counterparts. In America, several state and local governments are contemplating laws against this treatment. On November 22nd, one such ban came into force in New York City. Yet the costs of weight discrimination may be even greater than previously thought. “The overwhelming evidence,” wrote the Institute for Employment Studies, a British think-tank, in a recent report, “is that it is only women living with obesity who experience the obesity wage penalty.” They were expressing a view that is widely aired in academic papers. To test it, The Economist has analysed data concerning 23,000 workers from the American Time Use Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labour Statistics. Our number-crunching suggests that, in fact, being obese hurts the earnings of both women and men. The data we analysed cover men and women aged between 25 and 54 and in full-time employment. At an aggregate level, it is true that men’s BMIs are unrelated to their wages. But that changes for men with university degrees. For them, obesity is associated with a wage penalty of nearly 8%, even after accounting for the separate effects of age, race, graduate education and marital status. When we re-ran our analysis, using a different dataset that covers nearly 90,000 people, from the Department of Health and Human Services, we got similar results. Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Four Ways to Be Grateful—And Happier - The Atlantic    Ancient philosophers proposed it, modern researchers have confirmed it: Being thankful is good for you. Gratitude is very similar to exercise. We all know it’s good to be grateful and show it—just as we all know it’s good to go to the gym and work out. Both practices will make life better. But just as fitness demands that we make a routine and overcome a natural desire to do nothing, so also we need to make a habit of being grateful, even if we don’t feel it. And not just on one Thursday—all year round. We have lots of fitness regimens to choose from but, unfortunately, few gratitude workouts. And we rarely find gratitude influencers on social media. As a rule, we need to fashion our own gratitude program. So here’s a start, based on the wisdom of the great philosophers. If you follow these suggestions with a little discipline, you will conquer ingratitude and reap the reward that comes from showing true appreciation. Continued here � � � � � � The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury - The Atlantic    How a small-town auto mechanic peddling a green-energy breakthrough pulled off a massive scam Jeff Carpoff was a good mechanic. But as a businessman, he struggled. In the two decades since high school, he’d lost one repair shop after another, filed for personal bankruptcy, and watched a lender foreclose on the small house in a California refinery town where he’d lived with his wife and two young kids. By 2007, he was 36, jobless, and adrift. Yet there, at his life’s lowest, the remarkable happened. A contraption he’d rigged up in his driveway—a car trailer decked with solar panels and a heavy battery—got the attention of people with real money. Carpoff could scarcely have imagined it. He’d never gone to college and had no experience in green technology. His invention, he thought, was “crazy, harebrained.” But investors saw the makings of a clean-energy revolution. Continued here � � � � � � Travellers face another year of disruption in 2024 - The Economist    Nobody enjoys starting or ending a hard-earned holiday by wasting hours in an airport waiting for a flight. Alas, that is what many travellers will face in 2024. People have recovered their appetite for whizzing around the world. The UN World Tourism Organisation estimates the global number of travellers will be at 95% of pre-pandemic levels in 2023, up from 63% in 2022, driven by a post-pandemic “revenge tourism” boom. Business travel is also rebounding faster than expected: the Global Business Travel Association now anticipates a return to pre-pandemic levels of business-travel spending in 2024, rather than its previous estimate of 2026. For the airline industry, however, restoring capacity has not been straightforward. Reversing the mass lay-offs triggered by the pandemic is taking time. With demand for flights outstripping supply, prices have risen faster than inflation, padding airlines’ profits. But operations are buckling under the pressure. In America, the share of flights delayed continues to rise. Continued here

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