NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Waylon Wong.

I'm Darym Woods.

And I'm Adrienne Ma.

And today, it is, in fact, indicators of the week.

This is, of course, the day of the week where we talk about our favorite numbers from the news.

On today's episode, we're going to be talking about the blind luck of retirement.

We have the Federal Reserve's worst economic research ever, according to the White House.

And perhaps the most important

economic question we've ever asked on this show, what's up with boneless chicken wings?

Straight after the break. It's indicators of the week. Daryon Woods, you are up first.

My indicator is 2.9. As in, you could be 2.9 times richer just because you

started saving and retired on a lucky year. I was born Year of the Rooster. Is that a lucky year?

You could argue. And this was all calculated, not so much on the zodiac, but on stock returns

by Jesus Fernandez Villar Verde.

Jesus is a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the

American Enterprise Institute. And he looked at 80 years of stock market data to make some simulations.

He ran hypothetical people born in different years who all started investing for their retirement at age 22.

And then he calculated how much wealth they would have amassed from the S&P 500 at age 68.

Okay, so someone who starts saving for retirement in, say, 1972, they would have a different outcome from somebody who started in 1980?

Yeah. And we all know that the stock market has good years and bad years, but what was striking

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