Divine Sanction and Reason as grounds for legitimacy

(this is a stub post that has been stuck in draft mode. Experience has shown me that if I don't push it out it will languish for years. Really this is more like an idea for a book I don't have time to write).

With the Enlightenment, in principle reason succeeded divine sanction or mere possession of land and the legitimating grounds of governments in much of the world. As Linda Colley in her good but flawed book on constitutions pointed out, constitutions played a crucial role in disseminating this principle globally.

International law pushes this principle down into more granular territory, and IP protection is the area where this is perhaps best built out. China's attack on the legal grounds for IP protection threatens this principle, just as China has been eroding the practice of IP protection for some time.

Of course China and the rest of the Global South is not entirely wrong to challenge the putative principles-based world order. It was always supremely flawed. From the beginning it was eroded by the West's highly selective and limited understanding of the scope of universality, which generally starts at the extent of the speaker's perceived cohort and has always been limited by the pursuit of profit for specific groups (one vs. many, private vs. public), though the profit motive and the search for competitive advantage has on the other hand facilitated the globalization of production which has helped drag billions of people out of poverty, especially since the rise of Deng Xiaopeng, Manmohan Singh and Lee Kuan Yew.

With the erosion of divine sanction as legitimation, perceived injury has becomes new grounds (Hitler and Weimar, China and the Opium Wars, Putin and Glasnost) for legitimacy. Really this is a regression to Old Testament ways.

Retreat from international and multilateral agreements is lamentable (UN, EU, WTO, NAFTA, Putin and nuclear agreement, TPP). In general the more international agreement and cooperation on a variety of fronts, the better. We should be striving to arrive at something like Star Trek "United Federation of Planets" before an attack from another star system necessitates it.

Note to self: check out Habermas's Legitimation Crisis. 

A Global Life

As we are all beaming our love towards Westchester and brother George, who it sounds like it transitioning into a hospice facility, I have been slogging my way through the autobiography of James Wolfensohn, former head of the World Bank. I have no idea where I got this book, but I'm sure I didn't pay retail for it. In many ways Wolfensohn was like the Forrest Gump of finance, he went everywhere and met and knew everyone, starting as a poor kid of Jewish emigres to Australia who had been close to Rothschilds for a spell back in England but then never quite made money in the new world.

I suspect that many people in power in the global centers thereof actually know just as many people as Wolfensohn does, they just don't go on and on about it in their autobiographies. In all likelihood, the book would be better if he spent less time prattling on about who he knew and more about the intricacies of what he did. Still, he seems like a nice enough guy, except when he's continually repeating mea culpas about how his business activities kept him away from his kids and his wife. Like when he was about to start leading the Kennedy Center but his wife found out she needed chemo for breast cancer. You can guess what he did. Somehow his marriage survived and his kids don't end up hating him, at least as he tells it.

I'm still hoping to learn a little more about development finance since that's the whole reason I read this book. I'm about 3/5ths done. We shall see.

Some progress in the Bible

My book club recently finished Linda Colley's The Gun, the Ship and the Pen, a history of the spread of constitutions. I'm glad it's done. I learned a lot, but it wasn't a great book. The most interesting part was learning about the non-Western world's interest in Japan's Meiji constitution of 1889 and a reminder of how psyched the non-West was when Japan kicked Russia's ass in 1905, because at last the white man had lost one. We forget about how strong this dynamic is. It's part of the backdrop to what we are seeing now in our strategic rivalry with China and with the Global South's failure to line up behind a condemnation of Russia in Ukraine.

It's interesting also to reflect on the relationship of Torah to Mishnah and Talmud as something like a constitution. This analogy came to me when reading the book of Nehemiah earlier this week, in which Ezra, having returned from Babylon and rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple, stands before the people and propounds the law (Torah) while they stand and listen.

It's also very interesting that Ezra focuses for the first thing on two things: observation of the sabbath (including not conducting commerce with non-Jews) and the importance of marrying within the fold -- there had been problem of intermarriage in Babylon and the Jews did a mass divorcing and renunciation of outmarriages on the way out the door. Up until now the biggest transgression the Old Testament had focused on was worshipping at hill-shrines, especially to Baal. Presumably the population had moved past that tendency and were able to focus on more rarefied matters like sabbath observance and keeping the tribe pure. Which counts as progress, I suppose.

Asceticism

Quite interestingly, an old friend from college whom I haven't seen probably since college looked at my LinkedIn post and his first thought was that I looked and seemed ascetic. Aside from the cheeseburger and fries I had for lunch with Whitey and the Peruvian chicken fest I shared with Niklaus and Jonathan last night, he's kinda on to something. Also my home, pretty nice by global standards if not out of control by modern American ones.

But overall I have long been pursuing a quasi-ascetic course. I quite intentionally resist the cultivation of ever more refined standards, particularly refined things that can get real expensive quickly: sushi, coffee, meat, cars, hotels etc. Overall I've found that greater satisfaction and happiness comes from not worrying about how you're going to be able to pay for stuff. The absence of stress. Which can be cultivated through not getting sucked into the trap of needing fancy shit in all categories. I want to pay more only for things where added expense adds value over time: athletic shoes, dental services, insurance brokerage and other professional services etc.

Certainly I don't think I've invented anything or deserve a gold star for this. It's just where I am, and it's where I hope my kids end up because it feels right. My friends tend to end up like this, too, perhaps not surprisingly. I select out extreme gourmands and fancy car enthusiasts, for obvious reasons.

What's going on

I awoke today in a funk. I am emotionally exhausted.

Looking back at my post from Saturday I find I wasn't really clear as to what was going on, though people could read within the lines. Mary got on a plane early Saturday because her brother George's medical crisis had accelerated and he is most likely nearing the end. George has had an amazing run. He broke his neck maybe 43-44 years ago and has survived this long. Not without challenges, he has found ways to enjoy life, and even found love in the form of Susan, who brought with her her daughter Allison, who has in turn brought Justin and their boys Dylan and Haydn into our lives. Pretty remarkable.

We all knew a day would come when he would tick no longer. It could be today, though he could always surprise us. But this event has accelerated pretty rapidly, and getting Mary up there and then communicating with the kids -- Natalie who is sad because she's far away and wished we had been more transparent earlier in the process, Graham who is not showing a lot of emotion publicly but who is in his own way closest to George of all of us save Mary -- it has been pretty draining.

On top of a bit of the continued soap opera of work and other little stuff.

I must say I am super glad to have a three-day weekend to process it all.

Codicil: I took Adam 7-6 today and feel much better having done so. We both played well, but I didn't fold in the tiebreaker, which is very nice. Basically I cared enough about winning to not shoot myself in the foot.

International professional standards

At dinner last night Guy -- who's a PoliSci prof in Texas -- was telling me that he's been teaching courses in Brazil each year. Moreover, he told me that graduate education globally has increasingly been moving towards happening in English everywhere -- including France of all places.

It's kind of a weird thought and a little sad, though it does raise general interoperability amongst scholars and speeds idea exchange -- idea liquidity, as I'm sometimes inclined to call it.

It reminded me of an idea I had had at a dinner last Saturday, namely that there needs to be much more work towards standardization of professional education globally. It is tragic that we have doctors and engineers from places like Afghanistan and Nigeria who come to the US and have to drive cars. I understand perfectly well that we have more resources and technology that allow us to develop human capital at a more rarefied and granular level, but it's hard to believe that a doctor from someplace in the developing world couldn't be fast-tracked towards a Nurse Practitioner or Physician's Assistant designation if there was more work being done to globalize training and accreditation. Sure they'd need training once here, and yes that would take funding.

It seems like there are two main impediments: 

1. the "license raj" (to quote The Economist), in which professions ringfence their ability to charge premium fees by creating barriers to entry 
2. the general anti-globalist mindset which inveighs against global standards.

Both of these are bad in the end. We will never have perfect global accreditation of professionals. But we could move in the direction of some sort of Pareto-like mindset where we try to have all professionals in given fields learn similar basics and then recognize the fact that they have done so.

Daily rebalancing

At our most recent Yale reunion in 2018, which a bit of quick thinking tells me was my 30th, Yale's Chief Investment Officer David Swensen gave a talk. It was very well attended, as you might imagine, because for one it wasn't just the class of '88 that was reuning, but some mix of '83,'93, '98, '03, '68 etc. A lot of people in finance were there, no doubt. And since taking over the endowment in '86 Swensen had pretty much revolutionized institutional asset management. He was like the old EF Hutton commercial: when he talked, people listened.

I was sitting next to a guy from my class and residential college who -- in a hedge fund with his dad -- manages $25-$30 billion. Apparently he has become well known and there was some younger guy from another class who was trying to suck up to him pretty shamelessly. He and I have never been close and he's always been a little arch but as the years have gone on he's seemed nice enough.

So Swensen's up there in front of the class talking -- already a little frail with the cancer that would eventually kill him -- and he says that by now he has his team rebalancing (i.e. adjusting asset classes -- stocks, bonds, what have you) to their target balance (say, 60% stocks/ 40% bonds) on a daily basis. The guy sitting next to me was astounded. I was marginally less so, because I had read that daily rebalancing (as opposed to annual or quarterly rebalancing), but only if an asset class has broken its allocation band by 20% (so if bonds in the example above have gone to 48% or 32%, they should be sold or bought). So one should be monitoring portfolios daily and adjusting ones portfolio when that happens.

Of course, allocations don't break their bands on a daily basis, indeed it's hard to imagine how Swensen had crafted a rule-based framework guiding trading that could have made sense. It would have been nice to have drilled into that and understood better. In general it doesn't sound in keeping with the atmosphere of Yale's Endowment. After Swensen died, Ted Seides (who was a few years behind me and had worked at the Endowment) interviewed Charlie Ellis, who was on its Board. Ellis said that the remarkable thing about the Endowment is that when you went in it was like being in a monastery: everyone was sitting and reading quietly. There was no hubbub. Daily trading evokes the image of a loud and boisterous trading floor, a time-honored Wall Street tradition which is as it is for good reason: it allows for the rapid interchange of ideas between groups of people focused on different corners of the markets.

In general, it seems pretty clear that any practice of making changes to anything on a daily basis is likely to be counterproductive because the act of changing presumes that one's knowledge of the world and situation has somehow improved dramatically since the day before. That rarely happens. Most fruitful efforts are very long-range in nature and focus and wisdom comes slowly. If we think we've learned something dramatic over a given short period of time, most often we're best off trying to figure out how we are deluding ourselves.

Quite a day

The phone rang at 7 for Mary. It was Susan letting us know that George had had a bad night and wanted Mary and Susan to get up to New York to see him. I booked Mary a 9:35 flight for LaGuardia and got her to RDU in time, but we had to hustle.

Then I attended the memorial service for Gene Sandler, my neighbor down the hill. Great old guy, as was attested at considerable length by his colleagues in UNC's dental school.

Then, of course, there was tennis with Adam, which he carried 7-5, 7-6. All within the context of a gorgeous sunny day.

Digging a bunch of videos from this Nashville series. 

Chatbots and thinking attrition

It has long been a commonplace that we've gotten progressively less good at learning our way around places since we've had Google Maps. Why allocate brain resources to it if Google can handle it for us so well?  What if something similar happens to thinking as ChatGPT and the like get more deeply integrated into the way we seek answers to complex problems?

On the one hand, one of the benefits of Google Maps is that -- freed from the necessity of paying attention to route planning, my mind at least is able to focus more on the book or podcast I'm listening to. Under ideal conditions this means that I'm learning other, potentially more meaningful things. It's conceivable that something similar happens with chatbots. We'll see.

Less is more

In recent weeks I've sat through a couple of presentations -- a friend from Princeton's near 2-hour Zoom on AI and what it means, which included the kitchen sink to be sure, and a presentation from the NC AG's office on frauds targeting elders. Each of them was presented by a lovely and dedicated person and contained reams of usual information, but at the end of each I was completely sapped and really hadn't gained much.

I was reminded of the McKinsey rule that no slide should ever have more than five bullets on it. If you are tempted to have more than that, it means you haven't thought about what you're trying to say. Similarly, there's that old folk saying "I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time."

Probably a similar critique could be leveled at this blog. Rather than continuing to crank out content on an undifferentiated basis, my ideas -- if they exist -- could likely find greater purchase if I distilled them into a book and marketed them effectively. Such is life. For now I don't have time to do that. Maybe later. 

Mr Social

Our car Leon has always been rather reclusive, so much so that Graham's friend Ronen was on record doubting his actual existence. He spend most of his time in the back of the house, initially camping out in the room of Natalie, the first human he let pet him consistently through the day. Once Natalie left, he spent a lot of time with Graham and would increasingly let me come in and pet him if I was very careful to walk softly and not move in a jerky or abrupt way that he might perceive as a threat. Indeed his general aversion to people walking with heavy steps led Mary to speculate that when he was a very small kitten, before he made it to the Goat House Refuge, where we got him, he might have lived under a porch. Honestly I think that is Mary over-extrapolating from a course on southern literature she read back in college, when she was momentarily entranced by Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor and the like.

As time went on Leon appeared more and more often just before bedtime and basically threw himself at Mary as she sat in her chair, forcing her to pet him. So clearly he needed attention.

Now that we are empty nesters, he has reached the conclusion that if I am going to be one of the only two humans around the house consistently, I will have to do as a source of affection and petting. In recent months, he has even taken to coming and sitting next to me on the couch in the living room or on occasion, the couch in the rec room. Today for maybe the first time ever he came and sat next to me on the couch in the morning, while I was reading the Bible. Perhaps it is my seeming embrace of the Word of God which has opened his little feline heart. In any case, it's all good. He is exceptionally soft.

Update from the slopes

Yesterday was a very long day. Headed out at a little after 7 for Appalachian Ski Mountain, near Boone, to refamiliarize my legs with what it was like to be on skis in advance of my trip to Steamboat Springs in a couple of weeks with Yale friends. About three hours out, then "four hours" of skiing -- including a lesson as well as a hearty lunch and lots of standing in line -- then three hours back. Then we went to a dinner party.

As I was getting my rented boots there at the lodge the guy says to me "it's just like riding a bike" after I had mentioned that I hadn't skied in 30 years plus. As the lesson got started, once we finally got on our skis, my initial impression is that the guy was right. I could still snowplow and turn just fine on the really gentle slopes there are the bottom and the baby hill for absolute beginners.

However, I should have extended his metaphor a little further. It was just like a riding a bike -- for someone who had only ever ridden a bike twice before, and many moons ago under an entirely different bodily regime. So when I went up on the bigger green hill with a feeling of "I got this." I came down, gathered some speed, feeling good, but then I started snowplowing to slow myself down and could totally feel in my knees and hips, especially the hips. The old body didn't have the muscle power to slow myself down properly. So I did the only rational thing and flung myself on the snow, which did slow me down.

A guy at the dinner party back in Chapel Hill said that part of the problem was the shitty quality of the snow and that things would be better out in Colorado. I'm sure that's it. 

Queasy Tidings of Spring

Looking at the weather for the next 10 days, it's impossible not to think here in NC of the onset of Spring, even though we're really only halfway through the season technically. We know it's coming early here in the South, that's normal. Spring is lovely, I should be excited about it being easier to live more of our lives outside, etc.

But I'm not. I am filled with a little bit of dread instead. Partially this feeling surely comes from global warming and the anxieties it drives, particularly as we can see that mankind is not doing a good enough job changing our behavior to slow its path.

But it's also just about aging, I'm pretty sure. The early onset of Spring serves to confirm the general acceleration of time that comes with aging. The globe seems to rush ever more heedlessly around the sun, without the slightest thought of how I feel about it, which is just so very inconsiderate. 

Raw truth

I hadn't really been keeping up with the story of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria even as the death toll has mounted up over recent days. Then I looked closely this morning at the picture on the front page of the Journal. It showed a guy sitting in a folding chair holding the hand of his daughter. The rest of her was buried beneath the rubble of their home and she wasn't breathing or waiting for help to arrive. I started reading the article. In the first couple of paragraphs was an exchange that read like a parable. "I buried my children yesterday." "Oh, you were able to find yours?" It was too much. I had to stop reading to refocus and get ready for the day.

As the story of this calamity is written, who knows whether we'll learn something like we did in 2008 when the collapse of a school in Sichuan killing thousands was attributed to lax construction practices as contractors took shortcuts to cut costs and grease the palms of officials. Or even with the Florida condo collapse a couple of years ago, where we can see that cost aversion by a Board of tenants was a major contributor to the collapse. Maybe this earthquake was just too big and would have killed a bunch of people no matter how well the buildings were constructed.

But I'm almost certain that better governance could have saved lives here somehow. Some of these people are the victims of Erdogan, Assad and the place their respective countries occupy in the latest Great Game of diplomacy. Hard-working and earnest technocrats operating in concert via international organizations coordinating with local polities are mankind's best hope for managing down tragic deaths and improving the human condition in aggregate.

The Plot

To be frank, I wasn't all that well-disposed towards enjoying Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot, although the book's premise (author steals a surefire and novel plot from another author and is then hounded by an anonymous troll about his theft) sounded fun and it was reputed to be clever. Fact is, Korelitz was generally pretty rude and dismissive towards our family when we lived in Princeton back in the oughts and had good friends in common. Probably I didn't strike her as cultured enough, given that I was hustling and trying to figure out how to earn a living and my literary chops were very much decaying at an almost palpable pace. Her husband Paul was always pleasant enough.

But then I picked up a used copy of it at the new branch of Golden Fig Books at Carr Mill, an excellent addition to the local crop of bookeries. And I read it. Really quickly. The buzz is correct, it is fun and engrossing, though by the end it proceeds rather tautologically if still in a fresh groove. Nonetheless, I had some good laughs even in the very last pages.

Read it. Let me know if you'd like to borrow my copy.

The Queen City

Rolled down here this afternoon for a professional conference, the first in many years, at least where it's a professional conference for me. I've been to professional conferences for economic development people, agtech people, tissue reconstruction people, etc, looking for business in the years leading up to COVID. Never quite got much business, but learned an awful lot.

In any case, here I am in Charlotte. Looking around for a place to eat I discovered there is an Early Girl Eatery here. The family and I had eaten at the original one in Asheville many years ago and had a lovely meal. Turns out it was founded by the brother of Butch from Crooks back in the day and painted by Marvin. But of course it was.

I hustled down there because it was slated to close at 8. I got there at 7:10 and the place was oddly almost empty. "We're out of almost everything, we've been totally slammed" said one of the guys working there. I was tired and didn't really feel like looking around, and from Google Maps it didn't look like there was a lot around there (it was either wrong or I wasn't looking carefully). "Well, what do you have?" The guy disappeared into the kitchen and came out saying "we're out of everything on the lunch/dinner menu, but we do have some breakfast stuff." I didn't really feel like looking around, so I ended up with a pork, potatoes and eggs bowl.

It ended up being quite good and the biscuits with honey butter he brought out were quite delicious. The contrast between it and the place Mary and I ate last Friday at Mattamuskeet couldn't have been starker. Last week the room was entirely white and the place was incredibly noisy, and they never bussed the other end of our table. Here it was empty (at least when I got there), everybody was black and the service was impeccable. The guy went out of the way to take care of me, despite being at the end of a long shift, and was incredibly friendly. I was kind of thinking of maybe getting a seltzer to go but decided not to ask because he had run back and forth to the kitchen several times on my behalf. Then he just offered me a seltzer to go. I tipped the hell out of him. 

Institutional self-preservation

I was just at my Al Anon meeting, one which I've been going to for probably a decade now. I shared about how I've been reading a lot of non 12-Step program stuff as part of my program and mentioned that the program readings had gotten a little stale for me over time. AA meetings are generally well geared towards this kind of thing, Al Anon is a little more fragile, perhaps because it operates at a smaller scale. Other members gently stepped up to talk about how alive the program is in their lives.

All institutions seek to preserve themselves. This can be problematic. It's broadly recognized, for example, that US healthcare spending is a little excessive at 18% of GDP, far above the OECD average of 9.5%. Since COVID mortality was far highest amongst those with chronic diseases (diabetes, heart disease, etc) and treatment of those with chronic diseases makes up a disproportionate of US healthcare spend, you'd think that COVID should over time bring down US healthcare costs. But that's not what we're seeing. Fundamentally that's because healthcare institutions seek to preserve themselves. They are big enterprises and they want to retain payroll and grow earnings.

Pretty much all industries are the same. Finance should be the same way. If we believe it is not essential but exists to facilitate other activities, it should seek to shrink. But all the individual businesses within it seek to grow. Even Vanguard, which has been amongst all institutions perhaps the purest of heart. Ironically, in some sense Vanguard's laser focus on lower costs have caused it to not focus on developing a broader range of services and improve its platforms, so that it actually has constrained its ability to serve people better, forcing them to go to other vendors to get things they need, thereby increasing the footprint of finance on their lives.

Life is complex. On with the day.

Grinding on

Against my better judgment, I just signed up to go to a conference in Charlotte on Sunday afternoon. Part of it happens Sunday evening, mostly it happens Monday. It has been a long time since I went to a professional conference. Good ones are good for me, they offer a bolus of knowledge and an opportunity to talk with peers. This one has the virtue of being in Charlotte so I don't have to get on a plane.

Of course, it does rob me of some of my precious weekend, and I'll have to drive back Monday evening mostly in the dark. Such is life.

Today I'll try to work a little less. Thus far I'm getting off to a decent start.

The President as employee

The Journal yesterday ran a story saying the Biden had submitted to a search of his Delaware beach house by the Department of Justice in search of classified documents. Good. He definitely fucked up in handling them more than once, this is a reasonable thing to do and definitely drives home the point the Presidents are in some regards employees like any other. They work for us.

Yes they are special too because the Presidency is a unique job and it takes a unique set of characteristics to earn the right to the seat and then to occupy it. Therefore listening to ex-Presidents speak is pretty incredible. I heard Bill Clinton talk at a conference in 2010 or so and his blend of intelligence and perspective were remarkable.

But while they are in office they are employees and subject to controls. We should remember that. Presidents should remember that and be less aggressive with Executive Orders. Legislators should remember that and figure out how to compromise and get things done. The electorate should remember that legislators need to compromise and therefore not demand perfect ideological conformity from them.