From the shelf · 102 money books
Does Pound Foolish hold up?
Pound Foolish (Olen) is one of the 102 money books on The Money Shelf. It comes from the shelf’s earlier bookshop lists and the books that make specific claims. The shelf links it to 2 of the 22 claims that the book tests against official records from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Each verdict below comes from that test.
Claim 2 · The book argues against this claimSmall spending: cut the daily coffee
Weak diagnosisThe arithmetic of small purchases is correct, and a daily 5 is between 2.3 and 5.2 per cent of the average spending in the three sources, while housing and transport take between 31.7 and 50.4 per cent, far larger shares than the coffee in all three sources.
Read the full test →Claim 11 · The book makes this claimHousing costs: fixed costs decide what a household can save
Holds with conditionsHousing is the largest category of spending in each of the three sources, with transport second in the US and UK sources and third (after food) in the Australian one, and in the UK data housing (net), fuel and power takes a larger share of spending for poorer households, so fixed costs set the room a household has to save. “Decide” is a causal word and the statistics describe shares, so the claim holds as a description of where the money goes, and the change over a generation that The Two-Income Trap describes lies outside these single-year figures.
Read the full test →One book holds the whole shelf: 22 claims from 102 popular money books, every figure dated, every source named, and the arithmetic worked through for three countries.
Get The Money ShelfAll 22 claimsMore books from the shelf