A great generalist

I am making my way through to the end of Poor Charlie's Almanack, the collection of the writings/speeches of Charlie Munger. In Talk 11, he returns again to criticism of academic psychology. Sort of. Really he just picks a straw man over which to riff as he muses on what he's learned in his time on earth.

But why, one must wonder, does he keep coming back to psychology as a field, as opposed to, say, investment theory, which is more pertinent to how he's earned his bread in the world? To be sure, he does also spill some ink attacking the latter. I believe he just wants to find a set of specialists to attack so as to promulgate his belief in broad, interdisciplinary generalism, and also because he believes in focusing on fundamental disciplines, and he believes that understanding psychology, or how and why people think and behave as they do, is fundamental. Almost certainly he has said that five times and I've just forgotten it because I don't remember everything I read and hear.

But there's one paradox deep within Munger's thought. He cites Adam Smith's example of the pin factory and the power of specialization, in which twenty people handling different aspects of producing pins in an 18th century British pin factory are able to produce a very large number of pins in a year (hundreds of thousands), whereas the same twenty workers performing all the tasks in producing pins could only produce a few thousand.

The world is like that. It needs both specialists and generalists. In fact, the more fine-grained the articulation of a supply or value chain, the higher the aggregate productivity. That's why cities are such productive economic entities, they allow people to specialize.

Now, in the coronavirus crisis we are learning a lot about the risks of dispersed supply chains and the relative value of efficiency vs. resiliency. It is efficient to have China produce all our N95 masks, but there are risks associated with it, etc. But, by and large, I am glad there are specialists. We need virologists, epidemiologists, etc, to get us through this, and lots more specialists in functions we're not thinking about. We need management consultants who can quickly write training materials and procedures to train people to process SBA loans under the rules in the new stimulus bill.

But we also need the generalists who can pull it together, the Andrew Cuomos, Mandy Cohens, and all those who see a need (fund, produce and otherwise source masks!) to get through this. Also the truckers, UPS drivers, and the people who stock warehouses and harvest food.

So I think sometimes Munger may go overboard attacking specialists. But God is the way that he does it interesting, and ultimately not mean-spirited.

Things to do

You would think that, being more or less stuck at home, one would be able to knock out all the tasks on one's task list. Not at all.

Aside from the books calling out to be read or re-read, and I can see about a hundred just from where I'm sitting right now, there is the constant flow of periodicals into the house (even if we let them age on the picnic table for a day or two to let lingering coronavirus concerns abate).

There are the long-deferred home maintenance tasks, including the black stuff on the metal roof, the grout in Graham's bathroom, hanging pictures in our bedroom, some boxes of stuff that have been pushed into the corners for years. Of course the pollen needs to be swept today -- this will be an evergreen task for a couple of months now that must be attended to weekly if we want to use the porch.

There are years of files to be gone through and purged (including tax stuff -- through which I hope to document the bases of my and Mary's Roth IRAs -- just in case).

Really I need to inflate my soccer balls so I can go outside and juggle -- even though it must be done only on the patio, not out in the park behind my house, since I have led the effort to close the park to free play in keeping with town ordinance. There is of course no public health risk from me juggling a soccer ball -- but how do I as Vice Chair of the Board explain to teenagers passing by what is an acceptable exception to the rules and what is not. Mary, incidentally, after talking about playing badminton for years and playing it once in a decade, now insists that it is the perfect time to play. Right after we closed the park.

But now it is time to go close the windows as the day heats up, to keep the cool air inside.

(came back after 30 minutes cleaning up the kitchen mess Natalie made while prepping an extra-delicious breakfast)

Ultimately, I am reminded, that all of this striving is bound up with the ultimately futile task of trying to control things in an atmosphere and at a time when things are as scary as they have ever been. On the other hand, if they help me get through the day while doing no harm and, perhaps, offering some insight, and they help me sleep through the next night, that's OK too.

No shortage of time?

The news pounds on each day. Yesterday I saw an article about countries hoarding food, today there is one about hospitals running out of rubber gloves. Then there are offsetting anecdotes of tales of great inventiveness, enterprise and generosity, like people figuring out how to craft makeshift substitutes for medical supplies -- especially masks -- or the Quicken Loan affiliate offering three months free rent to commercial tenants in downtown Detroit. It is a mix of fear and inspiration each day.

On the other hand, with the world ground to a standstill and all of us quasi-stuck in our homes (Chapel Hill's shelter in place order is so full of exceptions it's almost silly), it would seem that we have all the time in the world. Our family is most definitely getting a lot of what Mary has characterized as "quantity time," and sometimes the days seem to pass slowly. We have also been squabbling a little, not surprisingly. We're not all used to being cooped up in the house and the whole thing is definitely scary and therefore stressful. So I've been having to practice staying calm, walking away, coming back, realizing and admitting when I'm wrong, etc.

But there is still always too much to do. Phone calls to answer, board meetings to prep for and actions to take in their wake, magazines and books to read, TV to watch. I am getting a little tired of running, but for the moment it seems like that's the easiest exercise to do. Probably soon it will be time to dust off the bike.

I have also been thinking BIG THOUGHTS about the world, the markets, the economy, society, and on a couple of occasions I have begun to write drafts of emails, blogs, etc. But in so many ways it seems presumptuous and egotistical to try to distill it all into grandiose pearls of wisdom.

Down East

Yesterday I went down to New Bern for my cousin Martin's funeral. He died of pancreatic cancer, after what could be described as a hard life fighting with substance abuse and many of the health challenges that come from it. My mom and I were both surprised at the the extent to which these dificulties were front and center in the minister's telling of his life, but that was the decision of my aunt Faith, his mom.

I had read about partisan divides around the topic of coronavirus and the seriousness of the threat it poses to Americans, and the eastern part of the state is pretty Republican. My relatives are no exception to this trend. So I was very happy to see how seriously they were taking social distancing, and in particular how much they appreciated our adherence to it. With Natalie only having come back from up north 8 days before, I was acutely aware that I was probably the most likely carrier.

On the way down, it was clear I was gonna need to pee when I got there. My mom (riding in her own car) called from the road to tell me there was a rest stop just west of New Bern, and at first I was thinking "that's ridiculous, I'll just go at Faith's house." But then I thought, no, a rest area's not a bad idea, though the last thing I want to do is bring the coronavirus into a public place where lots of people go. So I did the logical thing. I parked at the rest area and walked into the woods until I found a little clearing and took care of business there.

The Greatest Generation

Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation -- which portrays a gallery of veterans of World War II, both military and homefront -- had been sitting on my shelf for some time. Sometime last week I decided it was time to read it to draw strength from the tales of togetherness in a time of unified struggle and privation.

It must be owned that in many ways it's not a great book and he's not a great writer by any standard measure, there's very little craft, it's just a gushing, uncritical and sometimes incredulous love letter to his dad's generation. And yet, I am glad that I own it and glad that I am reading it. Because it is instructive in very important regards. First and foremost, it's a story of people who grew up in the Depression with very little, went off to fight (or stayed home to support) and saw unimaginable human suffering, and then came home and went on with their lives and were appreciative of what they had. Some did big things, many did not so big things. Some of them were workaholics and absentee dads of the sort that gave rise to dysfunctional families. Many of them, it seems, felt they had by their privation earned the right to lord over their households, and Brokaw gently but uncritically hints at that. In some basic sense maybe they in fact had.

Certainly it is a generation that gave a lot and earned a lot of respect. At present, our suffering is trivial compared to theirs -- may we hope that it remains so -- but it is nonetheless reasonable to try to draw strength from them.

Interestingly, I couldn't remember if I had blogged about this book before, so I searched the Grouse for "Brokaw" and came up with this post from February 22, 2009, two weeks before the bottom of our last bear market, when everything seemed as hopeless as it could be. I have often pined -- as I think many have -- for Walter Cronkite, the one voice who for a while almost all Americans could regard as authoritative or at least reasonable. Brokaw might be as close as we could get now. Problem is, he apparently had a sexual harassment accusation. Sigh.

Change of heart

The day before yesterday, I saw some kids out playing on the swing set out by the lake. The town had closed its parks a few days back, and the Faculty Club had closed in turn. I had read about how coronavirus is easily spread on playground equipment's hard surfaces, so I realized I had to go shut it down. I quickly consulted with the Board chair, then went and took the equipment apart to the extent possible, stored it, posted a notice and then went back to inform the whole Board it was done.

Yesterday I saw a guy out playing frisbee with some rather young kids, so I went out and talked to him and checked his temperature, to see how the impacted population (folx with littluns) would respond. He got it immediately, no need for apologies, then introduced himself (Scott, he had bought Ricky's house down South Lakeshore, the one with the awesome swing going out over the very steep yard).

He immediately started talking about how he hopes that the coronavirus and the lifestyle changes it ushers in will give rise to a new austerity, a broad appreciation for a simpler way of life. In general, I get it. I too think people have gotten a little hard to satisfy.

One really interesting thing, however, is the contrast with one of the themes within Robert Schiller's Narrative Economics, to which I recently listened in the car. I may have written about it. I won't go deep into it -- he predictably argues that the narrative frameworks in people's heads influence their behavior much more deeply than traditional economics allows for. But one specific idea he latches onto is that the election of Trump has validated conspicuous consumption in a way that it previously hadn't been. Which I just found bizarre. Maybe because it's not the social world I live in. But he lives in New Haven, I live in Chapel Hill. I don't think our social milieux differ that notably. Or, I should say. I don't think they differed that much. I do think we are going to start assimilating to the middle pretty quickly.

Anyhoo, back to the coal mine.

The most basic gratitude

As the whole USA freaks out about food and crushes the grocery stores, I confess to feeling a touch food insecure as I survey our pantry. We are not big preppers. Over the past few weeks we have stocked our larder pretty well, and are surely provisioned for a couple of weeks or so, but not much more than that.

So I look anxiously to the future and put my trust in the supply chain. Yesterday evening Senator Floyd McKissick of Durham made an appeal to everyone to stop hoarding, and I had to acknowledge it was a very good and noble thought. Then today President Trump tweeted the same appeal and I thought -- man things really are moving quickly if a sentiment goes from Floyd's lips to Trump's that quickly.

I am being mindful each time I eat now, newly appreciative of each meal and snack, each in turn infused with a special quality of scarcity. I don't know exactly what I'll be eating in 2, 3, 4 weeks. It will likely be different from what we are eating now, perhaps less grand, likely we will be accepting what's in the store and happy for it.

Certainly I take for my inspiration the experience of Weijian Shan's Out of the Gobi (my kids wish I would shut the fuck up about that book, that's for sure). The amount of arduous physical labor he describes doing on the most monotonous and calorie-constrained diet boggled the imagination. Somehow he got through it and flourished.

A new day

Even after yesterday's debacle in the markets -- for the second time in a week, the worst day since 1987 -- I slept better last night than I did the night before. Frankly, I was exhausted.

Yesterday had one absolute victory: Natalie had somehow booked her flight home from Detroit on the wrong Sunday, so I had to book her a new one. For the cost of $80, she is now coming home a day early, on Saturday. One more night and then we see her and get to plug her into her room. One less day circulating in the world, for the time being.

I am going to have to draw on all the lessons learned through almost 30 years in AA and recovery. One day at a time, that's what we are dealing with here. I just need to maintain my discipline: exercise, sleep, hygiene (brush teeth, shave, shower), meditate, read. There are new disciplines to be sure: hand-washing, stand 6 feet apart, etc.

For the time being I will stop going to AA and Al Anon meetings, which means using the telephone more to speak to people in programs on the phone. I called up one guy yesterday -- also a financial advisor -- and he told me he was buying for himself and clients and characterized himself as a perma-bull. I also generally believe in markets as asset allocators, but I don't think they always do the best job of allocating capital for all of society's needs. For example, healthcare surge capacity.

I remember back during Katrina and Ivan, it was the heyday of hedge funds, when they were the It thing in asset/wealth management and everybody had to be in one. There was a lot of hullabaloo and back-patting about how hedge funds were able to allocate quickly and somehow move funds to places that were able to get supplies to disaster sites quickly. I was young to that world, I never delved deeply into it. (There is probably record of it somewhere on the blog) We can only hope that some fleet-footed financiers are out there right now trying to figure out how to finance surge capacity. Of course they will be hoping to make money. I tend to think it is more likely Bill Gates than Bill Gross, but one never knows, does one?

Certainly we know there is a lot of fallow retail real estate and there will be fallow labor. We should be looking at what we need to do to convert, for example, empty anchor stores at malls into Covid-19 triage sites. I'm sure somebody is doing it somewhere.

Managing the stress of the moment -- coronavirus and bear market

We are in very stressful days -- we really are. The coronavirus crisis continues to accelerate, and to demonstrate the extent to which many of us in the United States have been in denial of its seriousness. Our leadership at the top has been abysmal -- and exacerbated by Trump's failure to hire, empower and retain seasoned professionals all up and down the government -- but that is not my focus here. We have been slow to test and slow to move into the necessary defensive crouch.

Exhibit A: Natalie is off on a spring break trip to Chicago and Ann Arbor. Neither of them are known "hot spots" at present, but then again we haven't been testing enough so we don't really know where it is. Every day, every evening, brings shocking news of how bad it actually is. I so wish she were at home, even though she is as mature and prudent a young person as one is likely to find. Just three more days, I have to tell myself. I'm not worried about her health, I'm worried about her bringing it back into the house and then Mary or I get sick. And then my mom... but we will keep her physically distant for a while.

And then there are these markets. We've never seen them fall so far, so fast, so much volatility day to day. We are overdue for a bear market, no doubt, and in many ways it is a relief that it is finally here. I have lived through two bear markets, the dot com one and the financial crisis, and I know that we get through them. But they are not fun and we really don't have any of certainty over deep they go or how long they last. Of course, this is the first one when I've been responsible for other people's money.

So I am focusing on self-care throughout the day to manage the stress: meditation, reading, brushing teeth (part of morning discipline), exercise, sit coms, sleep. On the coronavirus-specific front, I am no longer having non-necessary in person meetings, and am looking forward to hunkering into the home.

Diversification

As I read through Munger's Almanack, the most remarkable thing is the broad range of references he cites: scientists, business people, etc. It's great in terms of exposing me to more people I'd like to read. One thing that is interesting is the relative lack of citation of authors of fiction, philosophy and religion, but one can't read everything, or one can't cite everything.

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As we prep for coronavirus disruption and the schools move towards a probable need to experiment with distance learning, I can't help but to think that there is an opportunity for enterprising young students (like Graham or even Natalie) to take a lead in adopting new modalities for distance learning and shared work in their communities. This is an opportunity as much as it is a threat. Kind of.

The Top of the Ticket

Amidst all the hand-wringing and tribulation about who will represent Democrats at the top of the ticket against Trump in 2020, we haven't had enough consensus on one fact: we don't agree. Or, rather, we haven't thought long and hard enough about the implications of lack of agreement. We do not choose one path here, we have to integrate the two. If Bernie gets the nod, he will need to incorporate some moderation into his platform. If Biden gets it, he needs to broaden his vision and step up as a leader.

Moreover, in all of the Democrats' collective loathing of Trump and Trumpism, we have lost sight of a central fact. Whatever illegitimate may have gone into Trump's election, be it Russian interference, Cambridge Analytica, Comey's announcement... the reason 63 million (less than 66 million, for sure) people -- many of them "devout Christians", whatever that means -- voted for a man who would brag of grabbing women by the pussy is that they hate the Democratic elite and don't feel they have benefited from our policies.

However much we believe in our core values, we have lost sight of this failure. We have not processed it or thought through ways to bridge the gap, and our blindness is the biggest risk not just to success at the ballot box, but our ability to effect the policy aims we ostensibly espouse: to protect the planet, to broaden economic opportunity for everyone, and to protect the court system from generational capture by conservatives.

"What does that say about me as a person?"

Counterintuitively in today's college-obsessed environment, we have been trying to get Graham to think about college a little bit more. Specifically, where he might want to go and what getting into there that might entail in terms of grades, scores, and level of effort. Our thinking has been that, for our rather brainiacal, quiet boy, getting into a good college will be a good place both to find peers with whom he can have fun and forge good relationships and also go from there into something he will enjoy later in life.

This year he decided to take the super-hard math and it has been a bit of a struggle for him (i.e. he's getting Bs), but he made the decision to take the class because his friends were doing it, and we had to respect the social motivation of the decision. For a kid on the spectrum in particular, wanting to be with friends is a good thing.

So at dinner and also for spring break, we've been trying to nudge him into gear in learning more about a range of colleges, because with some early Bs the path to a Yale has gotten steeper. The other night mom mentioned that Kate's boy went to Earlham and maybe he should look at that, and he got a little defensive. Eventually the conversation wended its way around to "Well, dad went to Yale and Natalie is at Yale and mom went to Michigan then Yale and everybody else went to Duke or Michigan, so what will it say about me as a person if I don't go to a top-ranked school."

I'm glad we have gotten to this point and he has stated his fear, because we need to make sure he knows that it will say nothing about him as a person if he doesn't, but it will reflect poorly on us as people and particularly as parents if we allow him to persist in this thinking. I need to tell him about David, with whom I'm on a board, a most remarkable guy who went to App State. Or Hugh, who started at App State then went to UNC and kicks much ass. Or Matt from my PhD program, who went to Florida State. And how well the Honors college at Athens has treated our family friend Margaret... About how I used to be on the board of the local Yale Club but decided it's a waste of time because I'd rather be in the community and meet random UNC people and people from wherever than prioritize hanging with a bunch of people with sticks up their ass about competing with Harvard.

And that what does say a lot about Graham as a person and (I hope) about us as parents is how polite he is to people and how he tries hard to help the 8th grade Karen student he's tutoring. 

Peak performance

Attended the celebration of life yesterday for Jan Drake, father of Jonathan and Juliet. As with almost all such occasions, it was a wonderful time to sit and listen to people tell great stories about someone they loved. Yesterday was particularly noteworthy -- not just because Jan was a particularly noble guy, and we unquestionably heard stories proving that he was, stories of exceptional devotion and intervention on behalf of people he believed in.

But the most wonderful thing about it all was the length of his professional relationships. Jan had many colleagues in his lab who had worked with him for many decades, people with whom he had watched kids grow up and have kids. That's a very special thing, something few in our generation have.

We do have social networks and phones that can remember thousands of phone numbers, which is nice and helpful. Some small numbers of us are fortunate to be able to live where we grew up and have stayed in contact with friends from very early in life, which is very meaningful. But seeing the same people at the office day in day out for decades, that we don't have.

Jonathan read a letter his dad had written at the age of 56, when he was at "the peak of his career." I did a little quick math and realized that that was dangerously close to my age. So my diseased brain quickly ran to: "Am I at my peak?" Well, I'm not earning the most money I've ever earned, and I honestly don't think I've reached the point where I'm doing this job at the absolute best I can. But fuck it, yesterday was a good day. We had a call with Natalie where she seemed in good spirits (her last call she had been a little down). Graham had a good day at a Quiz Bowl tournament at Duke, went to lunch with friends, and even got himself a ride home. I showed up for my friends, and even had an opportunity to share something with someone there I hadn't seen for a while that surely comforted her.

Admittedly, I did have a little coronavirus freak out at the end of the reception. I was feeling wierd, and wasn't sure if it was my psychosomatic coronavirus or the fact that I had somehow neglected afternoon coffee, and my last addiction was fucking with me. I begged out of the reception, went home and had half a cup of coffee and read my novel. And all was right in the world.