Welcome to the Christmas/Holidays/Winter Solstice version of the DQYDJ weekender!  The three writers on the web site are Catholic (we’re from Boston, remember?) so this is being sent out on Christmas Eve for us.  Happy Holidays to you and your families, and enjoy this wrap up.

We’ll be back next week with more controversial stuff, but for now we leave you with the cream of the crop for the week!

Time may only move in one direction – but just like a faster than light neutrino, let’s ignore physics for a bit! Inspired by this comment from an anonymous author, we will take you to the years 1976 and 1989 and look at life through the eyes of a recent college graduate.

Why would a rational person purchase insurance yet also play the lottery?

It’s a question that has puzzled Economists (and fake Economists, like 2/3 of the staff at DQYDJ) for a long time. Think about it, a lottery is the exact opposite of insurance. When it comes to insurance, a person purchases coverage to hedge against risks. In a lottery, sums are spent for a long-shot chance at the ‘risk’ of a payoff. People are risk-seeking when it comes to playing the lottery yet risk-averse when it comes to purchasing insurance. What gives?

Check it out – a year from now will be 12/12/12! That’s got to be lucky in a year.

First off, we cracked 200,000 in our Alexa rank. Much thanks goes to the ladies and gents in the Yakezie Network who have been with us on this journey. It would have taken a while without you folks! Here’s to 5 digits!

With all of the recent Place Occupying (although currently off the front pages), the United States has been introduced to a question which will remain in the public consciousness for a long time: “Who are the one percent?”

Wish there was a Congressional Net Worth graph somewhere? There is, on this very page! Using data compiled from one of our favorite sites Open Secrets, we took the average United States Congressional Net Worth (note that disclosure comes as a range, so average will fall between the low and the high point) and used IBM’s Many Eyes to show their net worth to you, our curious readers.

Welcome back friends, readers, and haters to your favorite Personal Finance web site! I hope we pleasantly annoyed you with our balanced take on the unemployment report this week. Nothing was too hard hitting – you know that men are finding themselves unemployed more than women and the 8.6% top-line unemployment rate begs the question, is the unemployment rate an improvement? How much mileage can you get out of a single unemployment report? Plenty, it turns out. We’ll stop now until it strikes our fancy again (or I can get Cameron and Bryan to write something!).

One interesting side effect of recessions since the 1980s has been the demographic breakdown in unemployment rates. Yes – recently, unemployment discriminates against men. While recessions in the 60s and 70s saw female unemployment rates increase faster than male rates, the current recession saw age 20+ male unemployment peak at 10.7% (in October 2009, SA) while the female 20+ rate peaked at 8.3% (in November 2009, SA).

A .4 percentage point drop from 9.0% in October to 8.6% in November? I’ll take it! Maybe there really are green shoots sprouting in the economy? (Look, Bernanke gets a pass if Greenspan gets a pass for being premature on his famous “Irrational Exuberance” call)

There are arguments on both sides of the political aisle about how good the unemployment report actually is… Is the lowered rate really just a function of discouraged workers dropping out of the workforce? Could the news actually be masking even more encouraging signs? I’m not going to let you comment before you stare at the charts I produced for you on various measures of employment.

One more Weekender!

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