Benjamin Felix

Is there evidence that the financial planning profession actually offers measurable benefits to households?

There's always that selection bias issue to it in the large studies like that, because financial planners are going to be more likely to seek out clients that have better financial situations because they're more profitable to serve.

You talk about this in the paper, but the human financial planner is kind of this like processing machine that thinks about all this stuff sort of subjectively.

And we do it like we will go through a financial planning projection and show like, well, if you do this, this is the outcome.

And if you do that, this is the outcome.

And then we'll kind of get a feel for how the client responds to that.

But you've quantified that, which I think is really cool.

It's intuition gained from professional experience.

You mentioned the tensors.

I learned a bunch of words from your paper that I hadn't really seen in this context before.

So your paper also talks about curved surfaces, cornered spaces, binding constraints, manifolds and corners.

I'm reading this like, what is happening?

Can you talk about what that stuff means?

What is the shape of financial planning and why does that matter to the understanding the overall system?

Like simple two-dimensional calculus, you can fairly easily do an optimization.

But you're talking about doing optimization over a three-dimensional service that is not smooth.

I mean, that's what you're trying to solve.

We've got this kinky three-dimensional space that's all weird and stuff, and then we're trying to solve it with strategies that exist.

And so you can do that optimization at a point in time, but then as we move through time, the available strategies are going to change and that's going to change the optimization process.

In the mathematical model, what domain objective functions are being optimized over?