Warren Buffett is likely the best-known, most successful investor in the world today. The philanthropist and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has an estimated net worth of $158 billion and is known as the Oracle of Omaha for his ability to pick long-term investments. Hes also dedicated to sharing his wisdom with everyday investors, including beginners.
Here are Buffetts top three tips:
Principle No. 1: Invest Only in What You Understand
Buffett has famously advised, Never invest in a business you cannot understand.
In a letter to Berkshire Hathaways shareholders in 1996, Buffett explained the concept of a circle of competence: Basically, these are the fields that you truly understand and are knowledgeable enough to evaluate. You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many, Buffett said. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital. For example, Buffett famously stayed out of tech stocks early on because he felt he couldnt truly evaluate the investment opportunities himself.
At a 2019 stockholders meeting, Buffett advised investors to try and learn as much as they can about as many businesses as possible and then figure out which ones they truly understand and have knowledge on. That, he said, would put them ahead of most other investors.
If youre an investor whod like to build your own portfolio, sticking to what you know is vital. Youll be able to evaluate each business for yourself and understand the true relevance of new developments over time. Meanwhile, if youre investing in something just because someone else says its a good idea, youre entirely dependent on their judgment, which may not be as sound as they claim or believe it is.
If you dont have the time or inclination to study individual businesses thoroughly enough to make these judgments for yourself, Buffett recommends investing in an S&P 500 index fund as the best option for most investors.
Principle No. 2: Avoid Unnecessary Activity
You dont get paid for activity, you only get paid for being right, Buffett said in 1998.
Especially as a beginning investor, youll likely get the urge to react to news about the market or your individual investments immediately. Its easy to panic when an earnings announcement sends the value of your equity down 5% or more in a day.
But Buffett preaches patience: If youve done your due diligence and youre investing only in stocks you have strong reason to believe will pay off in the long run, a little market noise along the way shouldnt scare you off.
Inactivity strikes us as intelligent behavior,” he said in his 1996 letter. If youre sure youre investing only in strong, well-managed businesses, then you need to trade only when those qualities arent true anymore.
Stocks and the market tend to grow in value over time. By trading too frequently, you may find yourself reinvesting in stocks at higher prices than you originally bought them atlosing out on gains, dividend payments, and any trading fees in the processor losing out on higher long-term profits.
Principle No. 3: Make Every Investment Decision Count
In a speech at the USC Marshall School of Business in 1994, Charlie Munger, cofounder of Berkshire Hathaway, said that Buffett believes most investors would be better off in the long run if he could give each one a ticket with only 20 slots . . . representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime.
The root of this advice is the same as Buffetts other investing principles: A limit of 20 investments forces you to carefully consider every move, to be patient, and to not invest in businesses you dont understand. Youd also ensure youre confident enough about each investment that its worth missing out on another investment in the future.
Think about it: If you were buying a house or a car, would you buy it sight unseen, without an inspection, or on the word of some random person online? Probably not. Your investments deserve nearly as much deliberation.
Buffett said in 1996 that every investors goal should simply be to purchase stocks in businesses that they are virtually certain will be earning more money in 5, 10, or 20 years. This diligence and patience has made Buffett one of the richest men in the world and could help your portfolio as well.
As the founder of a high-growth SaaS business, Evan was the quintessential entrepreneur. Ideas and innovation were his strength, and they led to his success in attracting investors and inspiring his early hires. With the infusion of investment capital, the company entered a new stage of growth.
To scale successfully, the business needed to standardize operations and develop repeatable processes to reliably deliver services to its customers. But these were not Evans strengths. With a near-constant flow of ideas and a desire to resource them, he soon earned a new nickname among his team: chief distraction officer. Eventually, investors grew tired of Evans lack of focus and replaced him with a seasoned operator who had the operational capabilities necessary to grow.
The skills that make founders successful often become liabilities as a business builds. As executive coach Marshall Goldsmith says, What got you here wont get you there. Here are five leadership behaviors that break at scaleand where the fixes lie.
1. Creativity over Discipline
Evan was a perfect example of someone whose creativity and passion were a perfect fit for a founder. As his business progressed to the next stage of growth, the primary skill required was the ability to build out processes, to systematize the product so that it would be delivered to clients consistently every time. But highly entrepreneurial leaders often find it draining to limit their focus to only the one or two proven products.
Whats the solution for the mismatch of a founders talents to this later stage of growth? The most successful ones recognize new skills are needed, have the humility to accept their own limitations, find a great COO, and get out of that persons way.
2. High Appetite for Risk
When starting out, its important to take risks, try new things, learn from your mistakes, and try again. As companies scale, though, the focus should turn to building stability and predictability. Sudden shifts in strategy and focus cause uncertainty and inconsistency, which erode the trust and confidence of customers, employees, and investors.
How do leaders balance the need for continuous innovation with stability and predictability? Former Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg offer a great framework for continuing to innovate as you scale: the 70/20/10 rule. The idea calls for allocating 70% of capital to the core business, 20% to emerging products and services, and 10% to the cutting-edge, higher-risk ideas. This framework ensures that innovation is always happeningbut not at the expense of the core business.
3. Command-and-Control Leadership
Founders are notorious for having their hands in every decision, from product development and pricing to the paint color of the office. As the company scales, this level of involvement is no longer possible. Founders have to bring on new leaders to mobilize, motivate, and manage a larger number of employees. But bringing in leaders is the easy part: Moving to distributed leadership, where the company is truly led by a team instead of an individual, is harder.
Distributed leadership calls for founder CEOs to step out of the day-to-day operational decisions, delegate, trust, and empower those on their team to drive results. Allowing others to share the management responsibilities pays enormous dividends. Beside the obvioushaving others to lean on for their knowledge and expertiseit also helps to ensure the stability and continuity of the business. Only by distributing leadership will CEOs be able to elevate their role to focus more on leading strategy.
4. Open-Door Communication
Early-stage leaders enjoy the close proximity of their team and the ability to communicate in real time. It can be really challenging for CEOs to break the habit of communicating informally and directly with everyone at the company.
To scale successfully, a CEO needs to shift to more measured and intentional communication. As Google was growing rapidly in the early 2000s, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin faced the challenge of shifting from being player-coaches who shared an office with fellow software engineers to becoming key executives of a publicly traded company. To help themand their employeesenforce new and necessary boundaries, the two hired a key executive assistant. That new hire served as a filter for their email and a bouncer for their office, with their role empowered to moderate the flow of people in and out so the executives could be more disciplined with their time and focus.
5. Valuing Relationships over Accountability
A key ingredient to building a successful company is a high-performing teamand most startups dont begin with one. Founder CEOs often describe their initial team as a family who have bonded with each other through the intense challenges of the startup experience. Sometimes, early employees are actual familysiblings, spouses, and children are often part of the act, bringing all of their relationship dynamics with them.
High-performing teams, by contrast, run on accountability. Those who are not able to deliver the required results wont make it, regardless of their relationship to the founder. Adding accountability structures like job descriptions, goal-setting, and performance management helps to ensure the team is on track to execute. These processes also help to shine a light on anyone who is unable to adapt to the new demands of the larger and more complex organization. Inevitably, founders will be forced to make some difficult decisions regarding some of the early team members to make way for new talent who can drive results and take the business to the next level.
Building a sustainable, stable growth engine with double-digit year-over-year growth is hard. Each new stage of growth brings new challenges that require a different set of skills. The most successful leaders are those who understand the need to adapt their behaviors to meet the next stageand what it demands.
Have you heard of Maycember? According to social media, it’s a term that describes the hectic nature and mounting expenses families face around May, particularly parents with children, due to the increased cost of everything from graduation gifts to summer camps and family vacations, which combined with inflation (and tariffs), have made May feel extra expensive, just like the winter holiday season.
That’s as total spending for college and graduation gifts is expected to reach a record $6.8 billion in 2025, up from $6.1 billion in 2024, according to the National Retail Federation. And U.S. consumer spending was up in May 2024, even as prices remained stable; the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index was unchanged last May but still marked a 2.6% year-over-year rise, according to financial news site Finimize. (On the consumer side, spending increased by 0.2%, maintaining momentum from Aprils 0.1% rise, aided by a 0.5% bump in personal income.)
May often feels like a second December because so many expenses pile up at once, Isabel Barrow, executive director of financial planning at Edelman Financial Engines, told CNBC.
Some of those expenses include graduation, Mother’s Day, camp, summer travel, and weddings. Some families might also have higher grocery bills when children come home from college to visit for July 4, or throughout summer until Labor Day weekend. And the end of spring brings a flurry of activities that mark the end of the school year and the beginning of summer, which can often require paying up for tickets, gear, or other related expenses, including school events like dance or music recitals, kids’ sports tournaments, field trips, and end-of-year projects.
But just where exactly did the term “Maycember” come from, anyway? The word got out after the Holderness family, popular on social media, posted a funny YouTube video that went viral, garnering 270,000-plus views. The family has since posted another Maycember parody. Meanwhile, a number of parents have also taken to social media to post and commiserate about Maycember; a recent Instagram post from Scary Mommy got more than 23,000 likes and even more shares.
Twice a year, New Yorkers and visitors are treated to a phenomenon known as Manhattanhenge, when the setting sun aligns with the Manhattan street grid and sinks below the horizon framed in a canyon of skyscrapers.
The event is a favorite of photographers and often brings people out onto sidewalks on spring and summer evenings to watch this unique sunset.
The first Manhattanhenge of the year takes place Wednesday at 8:13 p.m., with a slight variation happening again Thursday at 8:12 p.m. It will occur again on July 11 and 12.
Some background on the phenomenon:
Where does the name Manhattanhenge come from?
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson coined the term in a 1997 article in the magazine Natural History. Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, said he was inspired by a visit to Stonehenge as a teenager.
The future host of TV shows such as PBSs Nova ScienceNow was part of an expedition led by Gerald Hawkins, the scientist who first theorized that Stonehenge’s mysterious megaliths were an ancient astronomical observatory.
It struck Tyson, a native New Yorker, that the setting sun framed by Manhattan’s high-rises could be compared to the sun’s rays striking the center of the Stonehenge circle on the solstice.
Unlike the Neolithic Stonehenge builders, the planners who laid out Manhattan did not mean to channel the sun. It just worked out that way.
When is Manhattanhenge?
Manhattanhenge does not take place on the summer solstice itself, which is June 20 this year. Instead, it happens about three weeks before and after the solstice. That’s when the sun aligns itself perfectly with the Manhattan grid’s east-west streets.
Viewers get two different versions of the phenomenon to choose from.
On May 28 and July 12, half the sun will be above the horizon and half below it at the moment of alignment with Manhattan’s streets, according to the Hayden Planetarium.
On May 29 and July 11, the whole sun will appear to hover between buildings just before sinking into the New Jersey horizon across the Hudson River.
Where can you see Manhattanhenge?
The traditional viewing spots are along the city’s broad east-west thoroughfares: 14th Street, 23rd Street, 34th Street, 42nd Street, and 57th Street.
The farther east you go, the more dramatic the vista as the sun’s rays hit building facades on either side. It is also possible to see Manhattanhenge across the East River in the Long Island City section of Queens.
Is Manhattanhenge an organized event?
Manhattanhenge viewing parties are not unknown, but it is mostly a DIY affair. People gather on east-west streets a half-hour or so before sunset and snap photo after photo as dusk approaches. That’s if the weather is fine. There’s no visible Manhattanhenge on rainy or cloudy days, and both are unfortunately in the forecast this week.
Do other cities have henges?
Similar effects occur in other cities with uniform street grids. Chicagohenge and Baltimorehenge happen when the setting sun lines up with the grid systems in those cities in March and September, around the spring and fall equinoxes. Torontohenge occurs in February and October.
But Manhattanhenge is particularly striking because of the height of the buildings and the unobstructed path to the Hudson.
In cities across the U.S., the housing crisis has reached a breaking point. Rents are skyrocketing, homelessness is rising and working-class neighborhoods are threatened by displacement.
These challenges might feel unprecedented. But they echo a moment more than half a century ago.
In the 1950s and 1960s, housing and urban inequality were at the center of national politics. American cities were grappling with rapid urban decline, segregated and substandard housing, and the fallout of highway construction and urban renewal projects that displaced hundreds of thousands of disproportionately low-income and Black residents.
The federal government decided to try to do something about it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson launched one of the most ambitious experiments in urban policy: the Model Cities Program.
As a scholar of housing justice and urban planning, Ive studied how this short-lived initiative aimed to move beyond patchwork fixes to poverty and instead tackle its structural causes by empowering communities to shape their own futures.
Building a great society
The Model Cities Program emerged in 1966 as part of Johnsons Great Society agenda, a sweeping effort to eliminate poverty, reduce racial injustice and expand social welfare programs in the United States.
Earlier urban renewal programs had been roundly criticized for displacing communities of color. Much of this displacement occurred through federally funded highway and slum clearance projects that demolished entire neighborhoods and often left residents without decent options for new housing.
So the Johnson administration sought a more holistic approach. The Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act established a federal framework for cities to coordinate housing, education, employment, health care and social services at the neighborhood level.
To qualify for the program, cities had to apply for planning grants by submitting a detailed proposal that included an analysis of neighborhood conditions, long-term goals and strategies for addressing problems.
New York City neighborhoods designated for revitalization with funding from the Model Cities Program. [Map: The City of New York, Community Development Program: A Progress Report, December 1968]
Federal funds went directly to city governments, which then distributed them to local agencies and community organizations through contracts. These funds were relatively flexible but had to be tied to locally tailored plans. For example, Kansas City, Missouri, used Model Cities funding to support a loan program that expanded access to capital for local small businesses, helping them secure financing that might otherwise have been out of reach.
Unlike previous programs, Model Cities emphasized what Johnson described as comprehensive and concentrated efforts. It wasnt just about rebuilding streets or erecting public housing. It was about creating new ways for government to work in partnership with the people most affected by poverty and racism.
A revolutionary approach to poverty
What made Model Cities unique wasnt just its scale but its philosophy. At the heart of the program was an insistence on widespread citizen participation, which required cities that received funding to include residents in the planning and oversight of local programs.
The program also drew inspiration from civil rights leaders. One of its early architects, Whitney M. Young Jr., had called for a Domestic Marshall Plan a reference to the federal governments efforts to rebuild Europe after World War II to redress centuries of racial inequality.
Civil rights activist Whitney M. Young Jr. helped shape the vision of the Model Cities Pogram. [Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images]
Youngs vision helped shape the Model Cities framework, which proposed targeted systemic investments in housing, health, education, employment and civic leadership in minority communities. In Atlanta, for example, the Model Cities Program helped fund neighborhood health clinics and job training programs. But the program also funded leadership councils that for the first time gave local low-income residents a direct voice in how city funds were spent.
In other words, neighborhood residents werent just beneficiaries. They were planners, advisers and, in some cases, staffers.
This commitment to community participation gave rise to a new kind of public servant what sociologists Martin and Carolyn Needleman famously called guerrillas in the bureaucracy.
A Model Cities staffer discusses the program to a group of students gathered at Denvers Metropolitan Youth Education Center in 1970. [Photo: Bill Wunsch/The Denver Post via Getty Images]
These were radical plannersoften young, idealistic and deeply embedded in the neighborhoods they served. Many were recruited and hired through new Model Cities funding that allowed local governments to expand their staff with community workers aligned with the programs goals.
Working from within city agencies, these new planners used their positions to challenge top-down decision-making and push for community-driven planning.
Their work was revolutionary not because they dismantled institutions but because they reimagined how institutions could function, prioritizing the voices of residents long excluded from power.
Strengthening community ties
In cities across the country, planners fought to redirect public resources toward locally defined priorities.
In some cities, such as Tucson, the program funded education initiatives such as bilingual cultural programming and college scholarships for local students. In Baltimore, it funded mobile health services and youth sports programs.
A mobile dentist office in Baltimore. [Photo: Robert Breck Chapman Collection, Langsdale Library Special Collections, University of Baltimore]
In New York City, the program supported new kinds of housing projects called vest-pocket developments, which got their name from their smaller scale: midsize buildings or complexes built on vacant lots or underutilized land. New housing such as the Betances Houses in the South Bronx were designed to add density without major redevelopment taking placea direct response to midcentury urban renewal projects, which had destroyed and displaced entire neighborhoods populated by the citys poorest residents. Meanwhile, cities such as Seattle used the funds to renovate older apartment buildings instead of tearing them down, which helped preserve the character of local neighborhoods.
The goal was to create affordable housing while keeping communities intact.
An Atlanta neighborhood identified as a candidate for street paving and home rehabilitation as part of the Model Cities Program. [Photo: Georgia State University Special Collections]
What went wrong?
Despite its ambitious vision, Model Cities faced resistance almost from the start. The program was underfunded and politically fragile. While some officials had hoped for US$2 billion in annual funding, the actual allocation was closer to $500 million to $600 million, spread across more than 60 cities.
Then the political winds shifted. Though designed during the optimism of the mid-1960s, the program started being implemented under President Richard Nixon in 1969. His administration pivoted away from people programs and toward capital investment and physical development. Requirements for resident participation were weakened, and local officials often maintained control over the process, effectively marginalizing the everyday citizens the program was meant to empower.
In cities such as San Francisco and Chicago, residents clashed with bureaucrats over control, transparency and decision-making. In some places, participation was reduced to token advisory roles. In others, internal conflict and political pressure made sustained community governance nearly impossible.
Critics, including Black community workers and civil rights activists, warned that the program risked becoming a new form of neocolonialism, one that used the language of empowerment while concentrating control in the hands of white elected officials and federal administrators.
A legacy worth revisiting
Although the program was phased out by 1974, its legacy lived on.
In cities across the country, Model Cities trained a generation of Black and brown civic leaders in what community development leaders and policy advocates John A. Sasso and Priscilla Foley called a little noticed revolution. In their book of the same name, they describe how those involved in the program went on to serve in local government, start nonprofits and advocate for community development.
It also left an imprint on later policies. Efforts such as participatory budgeting, community land trusts and neighborhood planning initiatives owe a debt to Model Cities insistence that residents should help shape the future of their communities. And even as some criticized the program for failing to meet its lofty goals, others saw its value in creating space for democratic experimentation.
A housing meeting takes place at a local Model Cities field office in Baltimore in 1972. [Photo: Robert Breck Chapman Collection, Langsdale Library Special Collections, University of Baltimore]
Todays housing crisis demands structural solutions to structural problems. The affordable housing crisis is deeply connected to other intersecting crises, such as climate change, environmental injustice and health disparities, creating compounding risks for the most vulnerable communities. Addressing these issues through a fragmented social safety netwhether through housing vouchers or narrowly targeted benefit programshas proven ineffective.
Today, as policymakers once again debate how to respond to deepening inequality and a lack of affordable housing, the lost promise of Model Cities offers vital lessons.
Model Cities was far from perfect. But it offered a vision of how democratic, local planning could promote health, security and community.
Deyanira Nevárez Martínez is an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The days are getting longer, sunnier, and warmer in the western hemisphere. Those bright summer days have a bigger impact on the workforce and the physical office than you may think. The obvious ones are longer lunches and fewer people in the office due to vacations. Yet when everybody is in the office, there is one common human habit happening during the summer that is often overlooked. One that undermines employee productivity and increases a buildings carbon emissions.
The productivity killer? Sunshine. Not that anybody is against it, but when the sun is at its highest and hottest, sun glare and heat penetrating the glass panes in office buildings prompts employees to leave their desks. They either spill over into another area of the office, disrupting colleagues, or they leave. Meanwhile, the air conditioning continues to blast, cooling unoccupied areas, wasting energy, increasing operational costs, and elevating the buildings CO2 emissions.
Office insight reduces carbon emissions
Since buildings account for almost 40% of the worlds carbon emissions, with heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems being among the largest contributors, having insight into human behavior in the office can help reduce those emissions. This issue is not new, but the data to prove its impact on the workforce and planet has only been recently uncovered.
For example, a global, well known Silicon Valley tech company took a closer look at how their workforce is using the office. Their goals were to improve collaboration, productivity, and energy efficiency.
The company installed sensors that combine AI and body heat sensing technology to understand anonymous human movements in the office. At the large tech company, they aggregated 3-months worth of office data and identified human occupancy patterns. The analysis led to specific recommendations to improve the companys office energy efficiency.
Below are actual recommendations from the report:
Weekday early mornings and evenings: Reduce HVAC setpoints before 8:00 a.m. and after 6:00 p.m., when saturation rates are consistently low.
Midweek daytime control: Reduce airflow to 50% capacity outside of the following high-demand periods: Monday at 11:00 a.m., Tuesday and Wednesday between 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m., and Thursday between 9:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m.
This data can also be used to make decisions about window shades, insulation, and lighting.
Office layout impacts productivity
Going beyond an understanding of how employees move around the office, the tech company was also able to infer actions and interactions among employees.
Being able to visually depict human movements without identifying individuals provides genuine data into corporate culture and employee engagement. The actions are far more insightful than any feedback an employee survey could offer.
For example, the frequency of impromptu meetings based on chair rollbacks. Also, seeing a cluster of humans congregating in the hallway for a short period of time, especially when the gathering is not held at the top of the hour or at the half hour.
From a workforce perspective, office layouts also impact productivity and energy efficiency. This reality is not lost on employers and property managers as the latest JLL Global Office Fit Out Cost Guide 2025 reveals. The report cites an increased focus on in-office attendance, employee experience, and sustainability performance on investing in high quality workspaces. This explains why the average global office fit-out cost is increasing.
Understand the workforce needs
However, the latest design trends may not align with the workforce needs and/or reflect the corporate culture. For example, another insight the tech company gained from the sensors was that individuals were reserving conference rooms for themselves. This ties up meeting space for others and puts unnecessary demands on the HVAC system that is set to accommodate large groups. It is also an indicator that the open office layout increases noise levels and is not conducive to supporting focused work.
You can gain a better understanding of how the workforce uses the office without compromising privacy. Aggregated data on occupancy, foot traffic, human interactions, and their impact on energy consumption can lead to more comfortable, productive, and energy-efficient offices. And having that knowledge before undertaking a costly office renovation can make a big difference in ensuring the building aligns with the needs of the workforce as opposed to making employees adjust to the confines of the office.
Honghao Deng is CEO and cofounder of Butlr.
Over the years, Ive observed how the approach to housing in the U.S. has shifted. And while affordable housing has faced challenges in how its understood and accurately represented, there is increasing awareness of the need for more accessible, safe, and stable housing options for all. It is time to recalibrate our approach to housingone that not only addresses economic disparities but also fosters community and enhances the quality of life for all residents.
Affordable housing is essential for providing a foundation that allows people to contribute meaningfully to their communities. It is one of the reasons my architecture firm recently acquired a firm that specializes in affordable housing projectsto underscore our belief that affordable housing means access and opportunity, and to galvanize our commitment to building resilient, connected communities.
As a company, we are writing a new chapter for affordable housing by thinking beyond monolithic categories like low-income. We are also recalibrating how we design, build, and allocate housing for our citizens across all income levels.
Rethink the new norm
Housing trends in the U.S. have been dominated for decades by the idea of “more and bigger.” This trend has pushed housing prices ever higher, particularly for single-family homes. In contrast, look back 80 years. Neighborhoods were filled with small, modest homeshouses that were attainable for a much wider range of people. The new norm is out of scale with the financial reality for most Americans today. We need housing for all income levels.
Were currently facing a housing challenge, not just in terms of cost, but also in how we approach scale and accessibility. While housing prices remain high, there is growing recognition of the need to create solutions that ensure more people can find safe and stable homes, particularly in urban centers where demand is strong. The gap between wages and housing costs has highlighted the need for creative approaches to housing that support diverse communities and offer better access to opportunities like jobs, education, and services.
The call for housing has never been more urgent, but its clear that simply building more homes isnt enough. We need to rethink how and where we build, as well as who we build for. Affordable housinghousing thats affordableshould be designed to foster diversity, sustainability, and integration into vibrant communities. This means focusing on smaller homes, multi-family units, and mixed-use developments that can accommodate people from different income levels and contribute to the energy of neighborhoods. Ultimately, we need to shift our thinking about the built environmentnot as a commodity, but as a shared resource that serves the broader public good.
Mitch Smith AIA, LEED AP is the CEO and chairman of MG2, an affiliate of Colliers Engineering & Design.
Every four years, the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) provides a snapshot of how students across the country are performing in math and English. It doesnt tell us about individual students; instead, it gives us information about how well our public schools are preparing students. The 2024 results showed that 28% of 8th graders were proficient in mathematics (on grade level), and 30% were proficient in reading. In both, the average scores and proficiency rates are still below 2019 rates.
One explanation for this dismal reality? Public schools simply arent capable of delivering results for students. But look closely at historical trends in NAEP Reading results from Mississippi. In 1998, only 18% of the states 4th graders were at least proficient in reading, relative to 29% across the nation. By 2024, Mississippi was beating the nation, with 32% of their 4th graders at proficient or advanced proficiency in reading compared to 30% nationally. Why? They will tell you they invested heavily in evidence-based approaches and programs for teaching readingthe science of reading.
Unfortunately our states and districts often dont have a supply of effective, useful and usable products and solutions to choose from. Whats broken is not our schools; its the lack of investment in education research and innovation that develops and delivers better solutions to them. If we care about education, we must invest in education R&D like we do in other sectors vital to our nations well-being.
Lets start by dispelling the myth that we dont know how to help young people learn. In fact, we have decades of science from fields like psychology and neuroscience telling us a lot about how children learn and how learning progresses within fields like math or reading. The science of learning and human development tells us about the many factors that shape a students ability to learn, from their motivation and interests to environmental forces around them.
The real problem
The problem is that we dont have a coherent system for translating basic scientific research in education fields into research and development. We lack a clear system for innovating new solutions and scaling them for sustained outcomes. Education R&D funding in the U.S. has historically been a tiny fraction of R&D funding compared to defense, health, energy, and agriculture sectors.
Those other fields have structures that support and sustain such efforts. For instance, DARPA in the defense industry, or ARPA-E in energy define bold what if? questions and then catalyze funding so that researchers, builders, and industry collaborate toward future-oriented solutions. The Department of Educations Institute for Education Sciences, prior to its effective dismantling by the current administration, historically funded basic research and program evaluation, but as a tiny (less than 1%) portion of the Departments overall budget.
That program evaluation budget goes quickly when spread across the many entities that deliver products and services across 50 states. It results in lots of one-off studies of solutions versus a truly problem-driven approach, focusing and directing resources to finding the solution.
One problem with the solution-centric approach is that the solutions often originate from an education product marketplace thats disconnected from the education research sector. Entrepreneurs and companies launch products, then gather data to see how they perform in classrooms. Imagine if a pharmaceutical company had its product teams (not researchers) develop a new drug, market it to a wide audience, then gathered data from users to see what happened. Thats the norm in education.
We also often fail to scale what works. Take the science of reading: That researchmuch of it federally fundedhas been around for decades. It eventually took a few well-informed state leaders and a podcast to finally bring the science of reading to scale in products, practices, and state-level policies.
What real investment in education R&D looks like
Theres a better way. We can create structures that enable and encourage problem- and research-driven innovation, align policies to desired outcomes, and sustain these efforts through ample and reliable funding.
Its long past time for an ARPA-Ed that builds on all weve learned from DARPA and other advanced research project agencies, adapted for the unique needs of K-12 education. At AERDF we have built such a model to demonstrate how actively managed R&D, done in close collaboration with educators and learners, can lead to breakthrough science and technology to power new solutions. An ARPA-Ed, or its equivalent, can build on this template.
Sustained, well-funded research and development in other fields has shaped how we live today. GPS technology, the internet, and the mRNA vaccine all came out of DARPA projects. Theyve changed the way we navigate, communicate, and protect ourselves from disease. What might similar investment in education R&D do to transform how people learn?
The aim is not to control where schools spend their money or what happens in classrooms. A strong education innovation system ensures that communities have a wide range of already-proven options to select, making the best choices for their students.
This is really about what our young people need in order to thrive. Every child deserves an opportunity to pursue their educational and career goals. Lets make the necessary investments because when we succeed at educating every child, we create a prepared workforce, our next generation of leaders, and stronger communities.
Its time to act
Education is essential infrastructure for our economy and our communities. Lets approach it that way. This is not the time to dismantle and defund NSF and the Department of Education. And this isnt just a call for more federal funding. Philanthropy and the private sector also must think differently if we are to catalyze capital systematically in the way fields like energy and health have done. Lastly, we need policies at the state and local level that hold the market accountable for the solutions delivered.
For the future we dream of, we need an education system that worksand that means investing like we mean it.
Auditi Chakravarty is CEO of The Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF).
One easy way to ensure an unflattering nickname has staying power is to act defensive about it. Apparently, the same goes for unflattering acronyms.
After multiple news outlets reported on Wednesday morning that Wall Street has embraced a new acronym for approaching the topic of tariffsTACO, or Trump Always Chickens Outa reporter asked the president about it during an afternoon press conference.
Trump responded apoplectically, scolding the reporter for her nasty question, and admonishing her, Dont ever say what you said.
So, naturally, within minutes, the internet was awash with AI-generated images and other memes linking Trump with tacos.
Reporter: Wall Street analysts have a new term called the TACO trade.. Saying Trump always chickens out on tariffs Trump: I kick out?Reporter: Chicken out.— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2025-05-28T17:13:22.578Z
It all started on May 2, when Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong coined the phrase in the publications Unhedged newsletter.
Regular readers will not be surprised by Unhedgeds view that the recent rally has a lot to do with markets realizing that the US administration does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain, Armstrong wrote, as stocks began recovering just over a month after the U.S.s ostensible Liberation Day. This is the Taco theory: Trump Always Chickens Out.
Even someone with only a cursory understanding of international trade would have probably noticed the pattern by this past weekend, when Trump backtracked on a recently announced 50% tariff threat against the EU.
The Streisand effect, with a dash of hot sauce
Giving this pattern a name so easy to remember, and so devastatingly diminishing, may have predetermined its ubiquity. Although the term had flourished on Wall Street in the weeks since Armstrong first coined it, TACO only broke containment when enough reporters had finally written about it that one pushed Trump to actually respond.
Now that hes done so, and revealed in the process that the phrase has apparently hit a nerve, its social medias turn to respond.
Taco Don memes are flourishing on X, mostly in the form of AI-generated images. Some of them depict Trump utterly ensconced in tacos or taco-related items.
TACO =Trump Always Chickens Out. (No volume, no one needs to hear his voice lol).— Poor Nihilist Me (@poornihilistme.bsky.social) 2025-05-28T17:55:52.857Z
Others still manage to depict Trump as both taco and chicken.
TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out— Morgan J Freeman (@mjfree.bsky.social) 2025-05-28T21:17:08.862Z
Anyone abandoning the AI route and instead searching manually for chicken-adjacent images involving Trump will strike gold in at least one spot.When Trump hosted Saturday Night Live in 2004, he performed in a sketch called Donald Trumps House of Wings, during which the cast dances around him in chicken costumessomething that has not escaped notice on X.
Another image from Trumps past has come back to haunt him even more, though, since the TACO acronym emerged.
In 2016, then-candidate Trump celebrated Cinco de Mayo by tweeting an image of himself grinning over a Trump Tower Grill taco bowl, fork in hand. That image is now making the rounds again on X and Bluesky in its new context. Even sitting U.S. Senator Tina Smith posted the image on her Bluesky account.
— Tina Smith (@smith.senate.gov) 2025-05-28T18:09:03.262Z
What happens from here might feel familiar. When the internet exploded with weird JD Vance memes earlier this year, fans of the vice resident attempted to reclaim the narrative by tweeting similar memes to support Vance. Indeed, at least one X user is already trying to repurpose the new TACO acronym to mean Trump Always Crushes Opposition.
Whether that version of the phrase will actually gain any traction remains to be seen. In the meantime, meme-lovers, Trump critics, and those who enjoy looking at tacos are eating well.
The International Labor Organization (ILO), an agency of the United Nations, has downgraded its global employment forecast for 2025, saying “the global economy is growing at a slower pace than we had anticipated.”
In its latest edition of its World Employment and Social Outlook Trends report, the ILO forecast 7 million less jobs would be created in 2025 globally, for a total of 53 million jobs, down from 60 millionbased on economic growth projections from the International Monetary Funds (IMF) April 2025 World Economic Outlook.
The numbers translate into slower overall employment growth across the globe in 2025, down to 1.5% from 1.7%; and lower expected GDP growth of 2.8%, down from previous forecasts of 3.2%.
“Our report now tells us that if geopolitical tensions and trade disruptions continue, and if we do not address fundamental questions that are reshaping the world of work, then they will most certainly have negative ripple effects on labor markets worldwide,” ILO Director-General Gilbert F. Houngbo said in a statement.
The report found the United States was a driving factor in worldwide employment growth, with 84 million jobs across 71 countries “directly or indirectly tied to U.S. consumer demand, now increasingly at risk of disruption due to elevated trade tensions.” Of those 84 million jobs, 56 million are located in the Asia-Pacific region. However, Canada and Mexico have the highest share of jobs (17.1%) that are exposed to trade disruption.
The report does make some recommendations: Houngbo said countries and employers can make a difference “by strengthening social protection, investing in skills development, promoting social dialogue, and building inclusive labor markets to ensure that technological change benefits all.”
