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For high school students about to graduate and head off to college, February is a month filled with acronyms, abbreviations and confusion. There's the FAFSA. EFC. PLUS. SAR.

Understanding and navigating that student aid alphabet can seem like a calculus problem in itself, which is leading some parents to hire private college aid planners to help paint the best financial picture (or worst, as the case may be) possible.

That’s what brought high school junior Caya Williams and her mother Erika Ijames-Wilson to Karen Powell’s office in suburban Atlanta. Powell is a Certified Financial Planner and a senior college planning consultant.

“We’re squarely middle class,” says Ijames-Wilson. She and her husband make a decent living, but have told Caya it’s up to her to pay for college if she wants to go.

And she wants to go.

Her first choice is Spelman College, a private historically black women’s college in Atlanta. A year can approach $40,000.

“Our reality is that estimated family contribution is hers, and that’s a lot to put on an 18-year-old,” says Ijames-Wilson.

That’s why she’s considering paying college planner Karen Powell between $350 and $2,500 to help Caya take advantage of opportunities for scholarships and aid.

So what will they get for that money?

Powell says a comprehensive, six-pronged approach that begins with beefing up academics. Since Caya is already in good shape there, the next move is to scrutinize finances.

“There’s tax strategies and income shifting and asset shifting,” says Powell.

Take income shifting: if a family owns a business where the student works, for instance, Powell recommends raising the teenager’s salary, then sitting aside that money for school. That offers a tax savings, because the student’s tax bracket is lower than the parents’.

Another way to shift income is hit up the college fund ahead of time to buy things the students will need for school. That way there’s less cash in the bank, cash that could count against financial aid eligibility.

But Powell says it’s not about gaming the financial aid system.

“We especially look for ways they will not be disadvantaged by the way their either income or assets are being held,” she says.

Powell is upfront about her fees, which are priced “a la carte” starting at a few hundred dollars.

Other college planners aren’t so transparent.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of the book "The College Solution." She says a lot of planners are really just insurance agents looking to sell you a policy. “And the problem is with these insurance guys, they can tell perspective clients, ‘Oh, well, I got a $15,000 scholarship for this family,’ or ‘$13,000 a year for that family.’ And it sounds all well and good, but the thing is, usually those families would’ve gotten that money anyway.”

That’s not to say there isn’t good advice to be had, even if it comes at a price. Mary Fallon says some parents need help filling out the financial aid form. She’s a spokeswoman for Student Financial Services, Inc., which runs the website FAFSA.com.

“The federal government lets you prepare your own income taxes for free, or you can get help from an income tax preparation service,” Fallon explains. “And the same thing works with the FAFSA.”

Fallon’s group charges between $80 and $300 to help fill out the federal aid form.

With in-state tuition averaging more than $22,000 a year, and private schools almost double that, parents and perspective students are easy prey for unscrupulous college planners.

Consumer advocates say avoid those who use the hard sell to get you to shell out cash for their products. And if you don’t know whether something’s legit, call your local college’s financial aid office.

Its services are free.

We were met at the closing bell this afternoon by yet another record high on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Which might make you feel pretty good about things. But maybe it shouldn’t.

“It’s a rough indicator of the health of the market,” says Kelly School of Business professor Scott Smart, “but there are some problems with the Dow as such an indicator."

For one, the Dow is a very, very small sample. It’s 30 companies. And says Smart, “since it only looks at 30 stocks, there are obviously big portions of the market that the Dow doesn’t monitor or doesn’t capture.” Google isn’t there. Apple isn’t there. (I could keep this game going for a long time.)

Campbell Harvey from Duke has another reason you might want to do a little less Dow-gazing, “it is weighted in a very unusual way.” Unlike other indices, where the weight is the stock price times the number of outstanding shares, or the market cap, with the Dow, says Harvey, “the weight for each stock is essentially the stock price.”

To calculate the Dow, you pretty much need 4th grade math.

David Blitzer from S&P Dow Jones Indices explains, “You take the price of each stock and add up those 30 numbers.” And then you divide them by a divisor that’s right around 0.13. (When they replace a company on the Dow, they change the divisor to keep the Dow stable.)

And then you are done.

That’s the Dow. No complicated formula. No algorithms. No wonder more serious investors prefer the S&P 500 -- which is up, but not yet setting new records.

BONUS AUDIO: Adriene continues the conversation with the S&P’s David Blitzer – more on how they calculate the index. Plus, have you heard any good Dow or NASDAQ jokes lately?

Walk by the dairy section of any grocery store, and you'll notice a half a wall devoted to Greek yogurt, that extra thick and creamy, strained yogurt that has erupted in popularity in recent years. There is Chobani and Fage and Oikos, not to mention house brands like Trader Joe's. And to think that most of these did not exist five years ago.

We have been eating yogurt in the U.S. for a long time and the Greeks have been making yogurt in Greece for a long time. So why did the yogurt suddenly catch on? Why do any trends -- be it food, clothes or music -- catch on?

Jonah Berger is a marketing professor of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and he studies trends. He has wrapped up his research in a new book, "Contagious: Why Things Catch On."

"Greek yogurt," said Berger, "is really a great example of the power of social influence and word of mouth. They did spend some money on advertising, but it was really people trying the product and telling people how fabulous it was."

The reasons people pass on information and, thereby, induce trends, are numerous. For some, it is about keeping up with the Joneses -- people want to appear to be "in the know rather than behind the times," said Berger.

Berger noted that people tend to talk about what is top of mind, like the weather, and that is triggered by their envionment. We are also motivated by emotions. Berger looked at six months of articles on the New York Times most-emailed list and found that it was those pieces that aroused us -- either positively and negatively -- that we forwarded on.

"Positive thing were shared  more than negative ones," said Berger. "But even some negative ones were shared if they were arousing. Things like anxiety or anger -- they make us want to get out of our chair and do something."

This, he said, explains why YouTube videos go viral, and political rants do, too.

Martha Stewart, it turns out, has a sense of humor. She spent the better part of Tuesday in court testifying in a lawsuit that Macy's has filed against her company. At one point on the witness stand, Stewart was asked how she spends her time each day.
Without missing a beat, she said, "I did my time." Five months back in 2004 for conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to insider trading.

The present case is more mundane. Macy's says Stewart violated an exclusivity agreement when she signed a deal to sell products through J.C. Penney. At the heart of the case is this seemingly obvious question: What is a store?

The specific question in the case calls for the King Solomon of retail. Is a store within a store, a separate store? J.C. Penney plans to sell Martha Stewart products in Martha Stewart stores within J.C. Penney department stores. Stewart says that’s allowed under her deal with Macy’s. Macy’s thinks not.

So let’s start with a simple definition, from Nancy Koehn, a retail historian at Harvard.
 
“A store is a marketplace of goods and services and experiences. And that has been proved since Laura Ingalls Wilder’s father Paul was buying calico and lemon drops,” Koehn says.
 
But fast forward 150 years and we’ve gone from "Little House on the Prairie" to the Clinique counter, which, Koehn says, from the business owner’s perspective, is a separate store within a store. Staff behind department store counters are often hired and trained by brands, not the department store.

But Wendy Liebman, CEO of WSL Strategic Retail, says the consumer's take is key.

“Do they think about it as, 'Well actually I’m buying Martha Stewart at J.C. Penney?' Or do they think about it as, "I’m going to Martha Stewart,'” she says.
 
Consider what shoppers have told Liebman's company about Sephora cosmetics -- another brand sold at J.C. Penney.
 
“What’s pretty clear to people who shop the Sephora in J.C. Penney is that they’re actually going to a Sephora store. And most people while they know they’re in J.C. Penney buying it will say, 'Oh no, I’m going to Sephora.'”
 
To answer the question, what is a store, effectively, it may be better to ask consumers than a judge.

The freight railroad company BNSF made a big announcement today. It’s going to do a little experiment and switch from diesel to natural gas to power its locomotives. BNSF happens to be owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett is betting big on natural gas. If this latest natural gas play works, it could mean big profits and big changes for the entire rail industry.

BNSF considered using natural gas in its locomotives back in the '80s, but there is a big difference between then and now. Natural gas is way cheaper than the diesel today.

“Something has to take advantage of that economic arbitrage,” says energy analyst David Bellman. He points out that BNSF is doing exactly that -- taking advantage of the low-cost of natural gas.

But the transition won’t be simple. Locomotives will have to be redesigned, and they will need more fuel storage and new fueling stations. All that infrastructure is going to be expensive. But according to energy expert Amy Jaffe, it’s worth it for Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway.

Even with the cost of converting vehicles, Jaffe says, “You can make money almost overnight.”

Once the conversion is complete, BNSF trains will have to refuel less often than diesel trains, they will be cheaper to run and they will pollute less. Jaffe expects more railroads to make the switch.

That could put the entire railroad industry on a new track. Companies like GE and Caterpillar, which are designing the new liquid natural gas locomotives, would benefit from the conversion. Those benefits could spread to gas suppliers.

“You have some very big players” says Jaffe. “Shell has entered this market, BP is looking at this market, Conoco Phillips.”

Of course, all that demand  for natural gas will make the price go up and reduce some of its advantage over diesel. But most analysts expect natural gas to stay below the cost of diesel for quite a while. And a rise in demand coupled with a little price increse probably wouldn’t bother Warren Buffett, who has invested billions in natural gas.

In the end, he could make out like a train bandit.

"You're doing great."

"Keep up the good work."

"What were you thinking when you did that?"

Giving feedback can be an awkward experience. Those who give it out -- employers, parents, teachers -- can fear the reaction they'll get. Those who get it can feel embarrassed or unmotivated.

But is there a better way to understand the whole idea of feedback? Some new research has insights into its value and shows that many people want to hear about what they're doing wrong.

The research comes from Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, and Stacey R. Finkelstein, an assistant professor of management at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.

“The more a person is committed to a goal, and by that I mean the more someone thinks that they absolutely have to do it, they like doing it, it’s important for them to do it, the more negative compared with positive feedback will be efficient,” says Fishbach.

Their work shows that positive feedback is best used to increase someone's commitment to a goal. But the more a person works toward that goal, they less they value positive feedback. It turns out that they begin to need a sense of where they're falling short.

Kai Ryssdal: Time now for a little Freakonomics Radio. It’s that moment every couple of weeks we talk to Stephen Dubner, the coauthor of the books and the blog of the same name. The hidden side of everything is what he does. Dubner, welcome back.

Stephen J. Dubner: Hey Kai, thanks for having me back. You know last month, you know, we New Yorkers lost a legend, former congressman and mayor, Ed Koch.

Ryssdal: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dubner: Now, Koch was unique is a few ways, including the fact that he actively solicited feedback from the public.

Ed Koch: Serendipitously I said on one occasion, “I’m Ed Koch, I’m your congressman, how am I doing?” People stopped to tell me, and I knew I was on to something.

Dubner: So Kai, this got me to thinking about feedback generally.

Ryssdal: Okay.

Dubner: It strikes me that a lot of people say they want feedback, but I’m not so sure they really do, especially if there’s a chance that it will be negative feedback.

Ryssdal: Yeah, no, who wants to be told they’re doing something wrong? Forget it.

Dubner: That’s probably right. But the fact is if you really want to get better at something, it’s hard to do that without feedback, whether it’s your job, or a sport, or schoolwork. So I wanted to know the latest academic thinking on feedback.

Ryssdal: All right, well give it up. What’d you find?

Dubner: Well let’s start with the fact that there are obviously at least two different kinds of feedback, right: positive and negative. As it turns out, they each produce their own benefits. Positive feedback is really helpful when you’re trying to increase someone’s commitment. So let’s say, you know, someone new to a job or a project. Here’s Stacey Finkelstein, a Columbia management professor who’s been studying feedback.

Stacey Finkelstein: For these people, positive feedback is most motivating. It’s what signals that there’s value to what they’re doing, they like what they’re doing, or that they might achieve their goal at some point.

Dubner: But here’s the thing Kai, once somebody really buys into that goal, positive feedback has diminishing returns. So if you’re looking for actually improvement you’ve got to start going negative. Okay? Here is Heidi Grant Halvorson, she’s a psychologist also at Columbia.

Ryssdal: This seems fraught.

Heidi Grant Halvorson: Look, doling out negative feedback is not fun. It’s embarrassing. We feel terrible. We feel guilty. So we love hearing, ‘hey, maybe I don’t have to give negative feedback.’ ‘Maybe I can just say positive things!’ ‘If I just keep saying positive things, then somehow this person will work to their fullest potential and everything will turn out fine. ’ And that just turns out to not be the case.”

Ryssdal: Well, wait. How do you know that’s not the case?

Dubner: OK, well I’ll tell you about the research that Stacey Finkelstein and co-author, Ayelet Fishbach, at the University of Chicago did. They ran a series of experiments with people in a variety of realms, some novices and some experts. And granted, these are only experiments, but this is the best they could do for now. And they wanted to see how different people handled feedback at different stages of their expertise. And the results argue quite strongly that novices really need the positive feedback, but that experts just start to tune it out. So here’s Fishbach.

Ayelet Fishbach: The more a person is committed to a goal, the more negative compared with positive feedback will be efficient.

Ryssdal: But Dubner, people are fragile, man! You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. I come out of the studio, and someone says, “man that interview stunk!” That hurts my feelings!

Dubner: Well, I guess there are two ways to look at this: you can either look at trying to make people happy or trying to make people better. If you want to make people happy, you know...

Ryssdal: That’s so cold.

Dubner: Well, maybe, look, if you don’t want to get better, that’s your prerogative, right? If you do, then it’s critical feedback that’s going to help get you there. Now, I’m not saying you should eliminate positive feedback or that you should, you know, deliver the negative feedback in a way that makes people weep.

Ryssdal: Well, give me a for instance here, would you?

Dubner: Oh, I’m so glad you ask, Kai. So as you know, I’m a really big fan of Marketplace. I think you do a great job as a host.

Ryssdal: Uh huh, yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah.

Dubner: I would like to look at a couple recent examples of your work. I’ve noticed you are smooth as silk on most domestic matters. But I think you might want to think about practicing your foreign pronunciations a bit more before you get on the air. Here, listen to this one, Kai.

Ryssdal: All right.

Ryssdal: If you want to know where those reactors built like Fumu…Fukushima rather, that Alex mentioned...

Ryssdal: You are so fired! All right, we’re going to turn off your microphone, we’re done.

Dubner: Hang on. There’s another.

Ryssdal: No there’s not.

Ryssdal: The prospect of a quarter of a million new Romanian-Bulgarians. Romanians, rather, and Bulgarians.

Ryssdal: What are “Romanian Bulgarians”?

Dubner: You remember them? And here’s a little something else I think you could maybe improve on, Kai. This is interesting, this is kind of a trademark phrase of yours I’ve found.

Ryssdal: A final thought on the way out that goes like this...This final note on the way out in which Boris Johnson, the mayor of The City of London...This final note as we leave off today, the end of the beginning...

Dubner: You’re sensing a pattern here I gather.

Ryssdal: I hate you.

Ryssdal: This final note on the way out, we did a thing a couple of months ago...

Ryssdal: You know what? This may be your final note pal.

Dubner: Possibly, but before I go let me offer the constructive feedback.

Ryssdal: There’s more?

Dubner: No, here’s the thing, I have nothing against the “final note” or “on the way out,” but together, they’re just redundant. So what about cutting one of them, and just think, Kai. Just think of all the extra time you’ll save over the course of a year, maybe enough time to run an extra couple Freakonomics Radio segments.

Ryssdal: Or five minutes every two weeks that we don’t have to have you on. How about that? Would that be all right?

Dubner: Please no! Please have me back!

Ryssdal: Stephen Duber, Freakonomics.com is his website. We’ll see you.

Dubner: I hope so.

Ryssdal: Maybe, I don’t know.

Now that those automatic spending cuts have kicked in, bureaucrats are taking a close look at their budgets -- finding ways to cut back and save money. 

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has told 238 small airports that, in a couple of months, the agency could close their control towers. That could hinder the military, pilots in training, and yes, the so-called “one percent” with their private jets. 

Last night, the transportation director in Battle Creek, Mich., Larry Bowron, got an e-mail from the FAA, it read: “We regret to inform you that, in order to implement the budget sequestration that went into effect March 1, 2013, the FAA must make some critical decisions about funding.”

It went on to say that Bowron’s airport could lose its control tower. Battle Creek is home to cereal maker Kellogg's. Bowron says its executives use the airport. Company representatives weren’t available for comment.

No commercial carrier serves the airport, but according to Bowron, it’s busy.

“You can have corporate jets coming in,” he says. “You can have military airplanes coming in. It equates to a very complex operating environment.”

I heard the same thing from Mark Nelson, the air traffic manager at the Sacramento Executive Airport, where Nelson estimates, 270 aircraft take off and land every day. 

“Who is going to make the call on who turns where, and who turns when?”

That would be up to pilots themselves to decide. Even without the towers, planes would still be able to fly in and out. 

But Melissa Rudinger, with the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, says these airports wouldn’t be as safe or efficient.

“There are corporations and businesses that take advantage of operating in and out of these smaller airports," she says.

Larry Bowron says he’d like to tell the FAA about his airport’s importance to Battle Creek, but... He goes back to that e-mail.

“The FAA is unable to consider local community impact that does not affect the national interest.”

The Dow posted another record high this morning. The surge came on the heels of a new report from the payroll processing company ADP, which showed that private employers added 198,000 jobs in February. Tomorrow, the Labor Department releases its February jobs report.

In Venezuela, some are mourning, and some are not, for Hugo Chavez, the country’s polarizing president, who died yesterday. Supporters see him as a champion of the poor. Critics say he ruined the country’s economy. Chavez’s economic legacy is a mix of both.

BNSF, a freight railway, hauls things like grain and oil from North Dakota. Now, ironically, its trains may use natural gas to haul that oil. The reason? Gas is cheap, but how cheap?

BNSF, a freight railway, hauls things like grain and oil from North Dakota. Now, ironically, its trains may use natural gas to haul that oil. The reason? Gas is cheap, but how cheap?

“The natural gas, when converted to a liquid would be substantially cheaper,” says Lou Pugliaresi, president of the Energy Policy Research Foundation. “I would say probably less than half.  But that is not the whole cost.”

What Pugliaresi means is BNSF will have to shell out some cash to retrofit its locomotives to run on gas. It will need natural special tanker cars and fuel depots.

But David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors says it will be worth the investment. He expects natural gas prices to be low for decades. In fact, he says truckers will be tempted to try natural gas -- especially if the railway’s experiment goes well.

“Start with rail,” he says, "add an engine. Change a train. Change a system. The next one looks at you and says, I’m going to do that too.”

Kotok says the trucking business faces more hurdles. For starters, there aren’t natural gas pumps at many truck stops, but Kotok says that will eventually change.  

The Dow posted another record high this morning. The surge came on the heels of a new report from the payroll processing company ADP, which showed that private employers added 198,000 jobs in February. Tomorrow, the Labor Department releases its February jobs report.

David Kelly, chief global strategist with JP Morgan Funds, joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to share his predictions on what's ahead for the Dow and the labor market.

 

 

Remember the MiniDisc? Way better than a cassette. In the 1990s, Sony once hyped its format with ads starring supermodel Claudia Shiffer.

Video of Claudia Schiffer in a bar: Jon Lovitz prank

 

The MiniDisc is a little optical disc in a cartridge the size of a thin pad of Post-it Notes. Sony has announced it is killing off the format this month.

"I think I was actually pretty close to the target, I was about 13 at the time," says Seth Fiegerman, writer for the website Mashable, who bought into the MiniDisc craze as an impressionable youth.  

According to Michael Bierylo, Chair of the Electronics Production and Design Department at the Berklee College of Music, the MiniDisc was engineered to make imperfect copies in an effort to curb music piracy.

But the loss of the format makes life tough for musicians.

"A lot of the things I did in the 90s on a computer, the software that was used to make the production, the companies are no longer in business and modern computers won't run the software," says Bierylo.

Bierylo, who has boxes of old floppy disks from the 90s, says he jokes with his wife that he'd like to mount a exhibit of obsolete formats, like the consumer electronics version of the Island of Misfit Toys.

To hear more about the origin of the MiniDisc, click on the audio player above.

 

Controversial Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died yesterday, leaving the nation – and the world – to reflect on his legacy. Both critics and supporters of Chavez agree that he has changed the role of the poor in Venezuela. But how will Chavez's passing affect the economies of other countries in Latin America?

Stephen Keppel, economics editor for Univision News, joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to discuss Chavez's economic and political legacy abroad.

On Friday, the Labor Department will report its latest monthly jobs report, which will reveal how many jobs were added in February and whether the unemployment rate budged from 7.9 percent.

If you are hitting the job market, the one thing you'll need is a good resume. But how do you get yours to the top of the heap?

Paddy Hirsch, senior producer of personal finance at Marketplace, has these tips:

1. Create two resumes, a search-engine-optimized (SEO) version and a regular version. If you are applying through a search engine, such as Monster or Jobscore, a computer completes a first pass of all applicant resumes before a human ever reads them.

2. Make your SEO resume plain and include keywords. Use bold type sparingly. Format everything to the left side of the page. And make sure everything is spelled correctly. Search algorithms tally up the number of keywords in order to evaluate resumes. The easier you can make it for the computer to find keywords, the better.

3. Old resume rules still apply. After you've gotten past the computer review, your resume will be read by a human. Make sure it is clearly written, typo-free, and emphasizes relevant work experience.

Complaints are rife that the video game industry treats female employees and female players as outsiders or worse. But it wasn't always that way.

Laine Nooney, a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University, has been looking at the contributions of Roberta Williams, who in the early 1980s co-founded one of the early video game companies, Sierra Online.

"[Williams] was actually the designer of the first home computer adventure game with graphics," says Nooney. The game was called Mystery House and was a murder mystery set in an abandoned Victorian house.

As adventure games took off in the early ‘80s, Sierra Online became one of the largest independent producers of home software in the country.

According to Nooney, at the time, developers and players did not see gaming as stictly a "guy's thing."

"[Williams] had a passion project about encouraging families to play together," says Nooney, who notes that Williams railed against the couch-potato stereotype of gamers.

To hear more about Roberta Williams and the early days of video games, click on the audio player above.

Teachers, here's one for your social studies students: According to new research from the Pew Research Center, Twitter is a bad way to predict public opinion. Turns out, just because a lot of people tweet something does not necessarily mean the public at large agrees. Tweets can run more conservative or more liberal than the general public.

But, one conclusion is clear: "Twitter is full of haters," says Slate tech blogger Will Oremus. "Haters" may be a bit strong. But the study shows that negativity rules in social media.

"When [President Obama] nominated John Kerry for Secretary of State, the reaction on Twitter was overwhelmingly negative. Everybody was making fun of Kerry, but the general public, Pew found, was actually rather supportive of the Kerry nomination," Oremus says.

To hear more about the relationship between Twitter and public opinion, click on the audio player above.

Global oil markets are steady this morning after the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Venezuela holds the world's second largest oil reserves.

For more on the economic impact of Chavez's death, Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson speaks with the BBC's Irene Caselli in Caracas.

In Venezuela, some are mourning, and some are not, for Hugo Chavez, the country’s polarizing president, who died yesterday. Supporters see him as a champion of the poor. Critics say he ruined the country’s economy. Chavez’s economic legacy is a mix of both.

If you consider the impact of Hugo Chavez by traditional economic benchmarks, like inflation, he ended on a low note.

Javier Corrales is a political science professor at Amherst College.

“He’s leaving the country in the midst of a serious economic crisis. A very large fiscal deficit. A devaluation was announced that is going to have enormous inflationary effect, as well as productivity declines everywhere,” says Corrales.

The country’s economy is less diversified than when Chavez took control. Venezuela is now almost totally reliant on oil revenues.

But, for a long time, oil profits worked in his favor, allowing Chavez to invest heavily in his populist agenda. Corrales says other Latin American leaders had mounted similar progressive campaigns in the past, but always ran out of money.

“What Chavez was able to do was to sustain that much longer than any other Venezuelan president or Latin American president simply because the oil windfall that Venezuela enjoyed between 2003 and today has been enormous,” says Corrales.

At the same time Chavez depended on the oil industry, he also undermined it. When oil industry administrators went on strike early in Chavez rule, he fired 18,000 industry workers. Oil production levels fell.

“Large numbers of its revenues were going, rather than to reinvestment in the industry, were going directly to fund social programs,” says Alejandro Velasco, assistant professor of Latin American Studies at New York University. “The criticism is that an oil company shouldn’t have as its major focus social missions. It should have as its major focus the production of oil.”

But from the perspective of the poor, Chavez was seen almost like a god. He focused the country’s oil wealth on improving the lives of the dispossessed.

“It’s meant a tremendous amount both in economic assistance. But more significantly, I would say, it’s meant more in terms of how people imagine their roles in society. No longer cast aside. No longer marginalized,” says Velasco.

The poor have been empowered, both economically and politically.

“It’s really undeniable. And even the opposition has had to come to terms with, that no longer can you sort of take for granted the voices of those who were economically marginalized. Now they have formed sort of an integral part of peoples' political calculus,” says Velasco.

But by starving the private sector, Chavez may have also worked against the interests of the unemployed in Venezuela.

“Chavez has hurt the poor by making sure that the private sector in Venezuela underperforms. The job growth, the investments that you see in the private sector are very weak. They’re not generating job growth,” says Corrales.

Corrales says that reforming the country’s oil industry would not only help the economy, but would also help the poor in the long run.

The inside of a Harley-Davidson factory looks a lot like what you’d expect -- workers in jeans, black T-shirts and bandanas. 

But there's no soundtrack in the background. At least, not anymore.

Citing safety concerns, the company announced that music would no longer be allowed on the assembly line -- no tunes piped-in through speakers and no portable radios at its manufacturing plants. 

“We love the fact that Harley-Davidson is associated with cool things like music," says Harley spokesperson Maripat Blankenheim.  "However, when it comes to our plants, safety is a priority. Music is not.”

The idea, she says, is to eliminate distractions and improve performance.

“These are folks working on a line, they work in teams, so it’s really important to be able to hear what’s going on in the work around you,” Blankenheim says.

There are federal rules for how loud a workplace can be, but no specific rules about music in factories. So individual companies have to decide whether it’s safe, and how music impacts the bottom line.

At the Milwaukee company Helios Solar Works, employees make solar panels while listening to Internet radio. Line worker Josh Drane says it helps him get through what can be a pretty monotonous day.

“We tend to perk up when we hear one of our songs played. But beyond that it’s just nice to have ambient background music instead of just the very mechanical sounds of the line operating,” Drane says.

Managers at the Helios Solar Works plant believe music makes employees more productive. And there’s plenty of research to support that idea. Teresa Lesiuk is a music therapy professor at the University of Miami. She surveyed information technology professionals and found they overwhelmingly reported positive effects of music in the workplace.

“It was calming to them or it provided some excitement when they were needing it. For some others, it was more nostalgia to the music, and somehow that was helpful to them in their work,” Lesiuk says.

But Lesiuk does say that for some factory jobs, like driving a forklift, music would certainly be a distraction.  And even a danger.

The stock market is rising like a balloon, and that has a certain levitating impact on investors. Who's most susceptible to news that the Dow is peaking? Richard Peterson with the stock data firm MarketPsych says it's the people on the sidelines.   "Those people who pulled out money in the financial crisis are going to feel a real pang of need to get back in," he says.   But if you invest heavily in the stock market right now, he says you risk overpaying. It's better to put in a little at a time, because prices tend to go down immediately after a spike.   "So if you feel the urge and you want to scratch the itch, so to speak, it's better to wait a week to a month before you start putting money back into the markets," Peterson says.   Chris Thornberg with Beacon Economic says the Dow's increase is not a false rise. The market is in an overall recovery, so investors can feel good about getting back in, if they do it calmly and slowly.   "Keeping what I would have to say is a difficult but nevertheless necessary confidence that in the long run things will get back to where they should be," he says.   Meaning, they must maintain the confidence not to sell off a lot of stock if...make that when...the market dips back down.  

This final n...on the way o... damn you, Dubner.

Okay, I'll think of something new. But anyway in the interests of equal time, this note today from the Speaker of the House John Boehner.

"While I'm disappointed the White House has chosen to comply with sequestration by cutting public tours," Boehner says, "I'm pleased to assure you that public tours of the United States Capitol will continue."

As well, I'm sure will the sequestration tit-for-tat.