The Atlantic today

 The Atlantic numbers among the many publications we pay for. Often, that means it's among the many publications I don't read. But sometimes I pick it up and read it. Of late, it often seems like a voice of moderation and sanity in today's often overwrought and cartoonish world of hyperventilating obsequious social justice warriordom. The most recent issue, for instance, contains a reasoned piece about Woodrow Wilson, who despite being a prig and a particularly racist and a guy who made some very bad mistakes around WWI (not pressing for peace in 1916, sending many thousands of US trips to their deaths by not digesting the lessons already learned on its battlefields -- all of this war stuff is entirely news to me in the last couple of hours, by the way) was a real force for good both in enacting progressive reforms and in setting out a vision for America's place in an insitution- and rule-governed world order that we are still striving to achieve, nationalist-isolationsts be damned.

There's also a great piece on playwright Michael R. Jackson, a guy I'd never heard of but am now very intrigued by, and how Jackson seeks to surmount all the reductive focus on race, sexual orientation, blah blah blah and create good and deep work that elicits a variety of human responses in different audience members.

This is all despite being owned by the Emerson Collective, the non-profit arm of the empire of Laurene Powell Jobs (spouse of Steve), which sounds like it is generally an empire of firmly left-leaning money seeking to do trendy things, most of which I agree with, of course. It's good the Atlantic appears to have some editorial and intellectual independence.

The Walking Path (from 2006)

Going through old drafts for posts I found this one. This was at Union Central, a life insurance company in northern Cincinnati where I worked on a project in 2006: 

________________________

Here in the basement my midwestern insurer, I noticed a sign overhead in the tiled hallway leading to the men's room across the hall from the other men's room, which was closed for housekeeping. The sign said "walking path," and pointed down another tiled hallway. Intrepidly, I set out along it. At the end of the tiled hallway, the path entered onto a long carpeted hallway with fetching fluorescent lights. I took this too.

It was lined with boxes of old documents, and occasionally gave way to views of large rooms filled with paper files.

At the end of that hallway, it turned down a short hallway, and then doubled back along the length of the building again, another long box-lined hallway. Towards the end, and old forelorn mainframe cabinet.

Mysteriously, when the hallway ended, there was no sign for the path. Could I have lost the thread? There was a door to the garage, which was actually a loading dock with a few fancy cars (Jags and Caddies), which curiously supplemented my comment the other day that there were no fancy cars in the parking lot, only workaday vehicles. The executives had hidden the fine rides in the bowels of the building.

My walk ended, I found it hard to concentrate on work, dazzled as I was by the glamour of it all.

More thoughts on the Bible

I keep slogging through the Bible. Just got done with Galatians, in which Paul argues that not being circumcised demonstrates superiority in that Christians are following and made whole by the love of and spirit of Christ rather than by fealty to the law. In some sense, we are getting somewhere. In another, who cares?

At a very high level the biggest problem I'm having with the Bible right about now is that, to borrow one of its metaphors, it builds a castle on a little bit too much sand. So much of Jesus's authority seems to derive from magic he performs: multiplying loaves and fishes, raising the dead, healing the sick, etc. Which is all good and well, save for the fact that it's not replicable. Or, rather, that some portion of it (scaled up food production, medicine augmented by hand-washing, antibiotics, pasteurization, etc) has only become replicable thanks to the Enlightenment and scientific method, thousands of years later after a couple of millennia of very slow technological advances while much of the west was waging silly wars in Christ's name. It might perhaps have been better for humanity to have been more focused on abstracting up from Aristotle, assimilating more math from the near East, other technology from China and appreciating the local wisdom and understanding of native peoples around the world as they were encountered, assuming that exploration and colonialism happened in roughly analogous fashion in the absence of a religion that encouraged conquest.

The rabbinical and monastic communities seem to indicate that if you devote your life to studying the holy texts and cross-referencing them, you can get to a good place, ish. But is that the highest and best use of one's time and are those really the best texts to spend all that time reading? Maybe, maybe not. Right now I'm not feeling it. Not sure if I slog on or take a break. 

Subway at a Virginia truck stop

On my ride up to DC last week I was excited to get back to a Subway and get our family's favorite sandwich (rotisserie chicken on whole wheat with pepper jack... I'll spare you all the granular detail). It's a sandwich we Mary, Natalie and I settled on after a lot of trial and error over the years for our jaunts up and down the coast to the Northeast, so we were very sad when Subway briefly axed the rotisserie chicken from its menus during the pandemic.

Right around noon I got off of 85 at a truck stop between the VA-NC border and Petersburg. When I walked into the Subway section of it I was surprised by an exceptionally enthusiastic greeting from the woman at the register. No argument there. It being the very tip of noon, there were maybe eight people in front of me, but that's what one gets for stopping right at the statutory hour of the mid-day repast. I stood and waited.

Shortly thereafter a few Black* people came in and the woman behind the counter greeted them with cheer equal to what she had offered me and then asked: "Are y'all off of that bus? How much time did they give you?" The newcomers said something like 15-20 minutes and the woman behind the counter said she was pretty sure she could get them through in time. This was the moment of my fail. I probably should have offered to let them go in front of me right about then. I was slightly pressed for time in that I wanted to get to my hotel in downtown DC before rush hour and then to my co-working space to work on my presentation for the next day. But it's not like I had a bus that might leave if I didn't make it through on time. I'm pretty sure they got them served anyway. They were cranking.

*I draw attention to their race only because the woman at the register was white and country and in all likelihood a Trump voter. The urban intelligentsia's view that that makes them entirely, inherently and reflexively racist is entirely devoid of nuance. Plus we're as racist as fuck in our own way anyhow. We just mask it better with pieties, yard signs and layers of bureaucracy.

A banner day

Yesterday was a super happy day in our home. After running a disciplined process of finding and following up on leads for summer internships, Graham got an offer from the Carolina Population Center up on campus to work this summer. It's perfect. 40 hours, working on site, getting some exposure to using Stata (some software that economists use a lot), for 8 weeks. Which means he gets some real job experience, learns to work with others, is supervised by someone other than me, has some time off before and after the job starts to maybe travel a little but certainly to sleep in some. And for all this they'll even be paying him some money.

It's awesome. I was such an idiot about this kind of thing when I was his age. My stated position at the time was that having a realish job like this would be soul-sucking and... I don't even know what I thought. Really it was just pigheaded stupidity, laser focus on academics because that's all I knew about, and fear of doing something different. Much better than Graham should learn to work in normal office to see that it's OK and that you can learn stuff while doing so.

Go Graham!

The Bond King

When Mary and I were down at Circle City Books in Pittsboro back in January I picked up this book about Bill Gross and PIMCO. It's a typical rise and fall story. I hadn't realized how integral Gross was to the early stages of active bond investing when he got PIMCO going back in the 70s. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because everything I read over time indicates how much the science and practice of finance has progressed over the course of my lifetime, which also indicates how humorous the idea of efficient markets back in the early days of its advancement, back in the 50s and 60s. Back then there was still money lying in the streets for those who worked hard. The problem was that with a growing population, protected sinecures for white men and endless improvement to be had in all facets of commerce, there just wasn't much need to work that hard, for the most part.

Anyway, The Bond King by Mary Childs of NPR's Planet Money is pretty good but no better than that. It could have been trimmed by 100 pages with no great loss. The story of Gross being a continuous dickhead to everyone around him just isn't that interesting.

At the end of the book it was interesting to see that Gross trots out the belated recognition that he's on the autism spectrum as a justification of why was so rude to everyone. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. I know lots of people on the autism spectrum and though sometimes they commit social gaffes (who doesn't? I remember the time the Bordens from Durham were over at our house for Christmas and I got out the nail clippers because somehow I had never registered that it was typically done in private), being autistic is not a social get out of jail free card. Decent autistic people have consciences and moral compasses.

Jah save us from Great Men

Jason Zweig's column in the Journal tells the story of Micro Strategy, whose founder has been buying up Bitcoin for years now, recently going so far as to issue a big chunk of convertible debt to do so. His company is valued at a substantial premium to the value of its underlying software business plus the Bitcoin holdings (even with Bitcoin hovering around an all-time high) because the market imputes to it a "genius premium." What absolute and utter bollocks.

All too often the world lets itself be held in thrall to the exploits of "great men." Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, even Warren Buffett and Barack Obama, everybody wants to line up and worship them. It's sheerest laziness and just a shitty way to be.

If we want to look for a leader right about now, I would suggest MacKenzie Scott.  

Math nerds, autism and institutional racism etc.

A recent op-ed in the Journal (I am embarassed to say I read them sometimes. In the age of Trump some of them are almost moderate) Gerald Baker compares some things the left does today to Nazi Germany. It's not his most convincing argument. He links to this article in Scientific American about racism in the math profession, which he erroneously conflates into the statement that left says math is racist. The rest of his article is less stupid.

The article he links do does draw attention to some worthwhile instances of people trying to raise the representation of people of color and LGBTQ  people in math, which sounds good to me. I'm sure there's some institutional overreach too.

But it got me to thinking about the older math nerds who are creating the bad conditions in the first place. First off, I'll bet a bunch of them are autistic and therefore don't have a good understanding of how others perceive their behavior. And I will tell you for certain that a lot of them were picked on brutally when they were younger and have a big fucking chip on their shoulder. They have carved out their little corner of the universe and will protect it at all cost from anybody, or at least anybody they didn't know from grad school. They weren't good at football or basketball and didn't have a bunch of friends in high school but they had math, and the ones who made it to tenure at the university have fought hard for that tenure.

Now, most of the math people I knew and the ones I grew up with aren't like that exactly. Most of them are pretty chill and enlightened people. But every so often I will see an edge to one of them, a certain "don't fuck with me I know what I'm worth." And the very most accomplished math people never expanded their social circles enough to meet someone like me. I'm sure there are some rough psyches in there, people still fighting the battles of their childhood and, to the best of their knowledge, winning consistently.

Another Spring Break come and gone

Took Graham back up to his dorm last night after dinner, marking the end of spring break. Quite typically, Graham came home, slept late, watched TV and movies with us, had dinner with family, and applied himself a little to the process of looking for a summer job. He couldn't be bothered to look for an apartment since he and his future roommate already have one which they judge good enough, even though I figure he'd likely be happier a little closer to downtown. Not a priority for Graham. He interacted with his girlfriend briefly when she brought some homemade Chinese deserts by the park behind our house.

As always, it was unfailingly pleasant to have him around. He's a fine young man. He even stepped in and remembered to do his normal chores with minimal prompting. I am sometimes a little mystified by the lack of diversity of the things that drive him. He continues to work hard to learn. He was reading Chinua Achebe's memoir over break and then some book for a class. He loves Quiz Bowl and his friends and teammates. Really he loves his communities -- including the chess and robotics communities.

I by contrast at his age was a hot mess of ambition, lust, feelings of insufficiency, desire for status and glory. I wanted to do everything and beat everyone at everything while seeming nonchalant and casual about it. As a result I was killing myself and bouncing off of walls. I've only gotten a little better, honestly. I have reduced the number of ways in which I gradually kill myself, which has slowed the process. By sheerest good fortune I've perhaps done a better job at this than many, but nobody's really counting. 

There is much to be said for Graham's approach. We are happy to have him so close.

American Fiction

Continuing on with our family movie week, we watched American Fiction over the weekend. If you haven't read the plot summary, a black author and literature professor (Thelonius, but he goes by Monk) gets in trouble at his university for traumatizing his fragile students by writing the n-word on the blackboard and is rusticated back to Boston for a spell. Since his high-brow books aren't having commercial success, and he sees another very well-educated Black woman author selling tons of books by publishing bullshit tales of blacks on the street full of Black patois ("I axed him fo some chicken" and so on), he gets drunk and writes a parodic novel from the point of view of a streetwise felon. Hilarious hijinks ensue.

The backdrop to all of this, which takes up most of the screen time, is conflict within his high-achieving family, from whom. His sister gets sick and dies while she and Monk are out for drinks, which was a bit far-fetched but one has to move the plot along. His recently out of the closet gay brother, a plastic surgeon out in LA, comes home from the funeral. Their mother has Alzheimer's coming on. Monk's always been the emotionally removed one, which causes problems in a new promising relationship with the charming neighbor across the street.

In short, real family shit of the sort one sees too little of in movies these days. Unironic and earnest, though punctuated with laughs for sure. Altogether the movie was like a throwback to the 70s and 80s before blockbusters and franchises came to unrelentingly dominate the screen, when Norman Lear permeated the zeitgeist and Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People won awards. Very refreshing.

Plus the fact that white people are almost entirely marginalized and treated as stereotypically earnest idiots. There was a lot of truth in there, it must be owned.

Doctor Zhivago

From our running list of potential shows and programs to watch, Graham selected Doctor Zhivago, which I had put on there some time ago after he had shown an interest in the Zhang Limou-Gong Li series of historical Chinese movies from the 90s. I think he had seen Farewell My Concubine. Really the old David Lean epics are their own thing.

Of course it lost a lot by being viewed on the small screen, and is a little overwrought by contemporary standards, but it nevertheless remains a worthy classic, and I'm glad Graham chose it for some spring break viewing. More than anything, the unironic forthrightness and earnestness of the characters -- the absence of snark -- takes one back. We've come a long way from that and it's good both to be reminded that it was once an ideal and for kids to be exposed to it.

Personally, I was surprised to see just how well the three potential suitors (Komarovsky-Zhivago-Antipov/Strelnikov) and their treatment of Lara, the Julie Christie lead character, fits into the schematics of my dissertation. I can't recall if I thought about it at the time and rejected it or (more likely) was just too lazy to read the book.

Speaking of, I really need to read more Russian. Maybe a Chekhov story. But now it's time to grind out a little Japanese on DuoLingo before getting to work.

Acceleration in the wrong direction

First thing this morning I got a text from a dearly beloved client letting me know that her cancer has been accelerating and that it will kill her soon. Meanwhile, a medical specialist let me know that we'd be doing kidney ultrasounds on me annuallyish for the rest of my life to keep an eye on some "cysts" in there that are a normal side effect of a medication I took for a while to manage a medical condition. Also, per the colonoscopy guy (whatever you call him) I am on the "3 to 5 year plan" for colonoscopies due to some "polyps" they encountered down there. My internal medicine person interprets that as the 3-year plan, and I work for her.

All this medical shit is piling up over here.

Meanwhile, I went to an ENT yesterday due to some head stuffed uppedness (not to get too technical) I've been experiencing since skiing in Colorado. She had no magical fix but my comforted me that the OTC stuff I've used cleared out all the wax and that since my symptoms have 90-95% abated, nothing is too wrong in there. On the way out a guy about my age or maybe a little older had accompanied his mom, who had a cochlear implant, to the doctor. He told her he'd have to take her back for another check up in a month or so. She was fine with that, then she looked at me and said "before I got this thing I hadn't heard out of this ear for a long time!" She was psyched. It was a beautiful and sunny day. I need to stay on that bandwidth, lest I descend ever further into Andy Rooneydom.

On housing as an investment

Clients often daydream about buying second properties as investments. It seems so logical. For primary residences, we hold them a long time and they seem to rise in value really quickly.

But there are lots of problems with this line of thinking. First off, we overestimate the rate at which they compound. Mary's family bought its house in Larchmont in 1974 for $87k and sold it in 2020 for right at $2,000,000. It seems like a fabulous return. But annualized, it's a 7.2% nominal (not inflation-adjusted) return. Meanwhile the S&P 500, over the same period, returned 11.3%. (though that's a pretax return, taxes on the dividends and capital gains/distributions aren't factored in)

Moreover, there are ongoing expenses like maintenance, taxes (very significant ones for the Berridges) and insurance which capital markets investments don't have. Then again, people who choose capital markets as investments but rent instead of owning have analogous expenses, so maybe that side of things is a wash. Except.... people owning homes in high tax jurisdictions will continue paying the high taxes (for which they get fewer services once their kids graduate from high school) due to inertia, emotional attachment to their homes and neighbors, and high transaction costs).

There is one very important function to that inertia, though, that helps homes serve as stores and accumulators of value. It is often said that not timing the market but time in the market is the most important determinant of returns. If you can hold on to something, for example an S&P 500 index fund, for a long time, it will compound for you. All the emotional things and high transaction costs that keep people in homes for a long time allow compounding to take place.

There's lots more to this argument. I apologize, by the way, for two financialish posts in a row. I know that's a little aberrant. I'll get back to the good old stuff soon enough.

Also, I drifted away from the question of second homes as invesments, which is really a different thing. I'd come back to that sometime in the future but probably you could give a fuck. and rightly so.

On ESG or wokeness in capitalism

In recent years the Republicans have been pushing back hard against ESG (environmental, social and governance) in investing and corporate governance, branding it "wokeness" in capitalism. They have had some success. At the very highest level I have interpreted the turn towards ESG in corporate governance as a reflection of the monied portion of the electorate getting annoyed and frustrated at the inability of our legislatures to work together to compromise. Additionally, I think the educated have been frustrated with the way that demographic trends (the tendency of productive economies to cluster ever more tightly in and around a few cities) have intersected with constitutional provisions (the electoral college) and sheer Republican craftiness/genius in capturing state legislatures and then gerrymandering the fuck out of everything.

So if the affluent haven't been able to get the government to do what they want it to, we've turned to other means (ESG and shareholder proposals) to push corporations to effect broader policy aims that we'd like to see come to pass. One of the big problems here is that people who work in the private sector on balance do so to earn money and thereby advance their own private economic motives. So using ESG to effect public goods is pushing these people and institutions in a direction not native to them.

Another big problem is that all these ESG proposals compelling corporations to report on this or that metric create mini-bureaucracies inside the companies. And if the ESG aims sought are non-standardized, they are bespoke mini-bureaucracies. It is not unlike the effect of the Trump administration preference for bi-lateral treaties (US-Thailand, US-Malaysia, US-Vietnam, US-Mexico etc) instead of multilateral ones (TPP, NAFTA). These create more regimes for corporations to comply with and therefore inherently raise compliance costs, which are passed on to consumers.

Then again, effecting social change through the actions of multiple on multiple stakeholders (ESG campaigners vs. corporations) has an inherently bottom up feel to it. We know that ultimately change is very hard to force top down. It can be led top down by great leaders at moments of clarity and consensus, but it cannot be forced. Bottom up bends the needle more sustainably and meaningfully over time. 

The pushback from the right is all part of the great contest of ideas and is ultimately fruitful.

Respecting Trump voters

And so, we have the election nobody wanted. Biden vs. Trump, again. Ever the master of messaging and reading the public, we must give him that,* Trump has been able to cast the "lawfare" strategy waged against him as another instance of his victimization, which justifies his return to the White House. Never shy of going all the way over the top and back down again, he even likens himself to Navalny.

My gut says that the resonance of Trump's victimization inheres in the way his electorate feels like he represents them precisely because they have been disrespected and maligned. I'm sure this point has been made a million times in op-eds I've ignored, so forgive me for repeating it. One way to defang it, therefore, is to go out of our way to respect his voters, however crazy their Trump regalia look, however wacky the things they say may be. The video outtakes I continue to see from late-night TV shows about how stupid Trump voters are may keep ratings up and help networks and local affiliates sell ads, but they aren't helping our cause. Instead of focusing on how stupid the other side is we have to focus on just respecting them where they are and showing them we're not ourselves godless pedophile demons.

*Though reading Bob Woodward's Fear, about Trump in the White House, makes clear to me how much the insight is Steve Bannon's rather than Trump's.

Belated Barbenheimer

The weekend before last Mary and I finally caught up with the rest of the world and watched Barbie followed by Oppenheimer. I came out preferring Barbie, though each of them could have easily been cut by 20-30 minutes and nobody would have left feeling ripped off. In fact, the theater owners would have made more money. It is a sad fact that directors these days feel like a topic has been ennobled, when in fact all they are doing is pissing me off.

Barbie was in the end fun and clever with some great deets. Oppenheimer fairly ground the classic theme of genius/madness/autism into a very fine pulp. Then stomped on it a couple of times for good measure. Matt Damon was good, as always.

Mary and I would do ourselves some good socially if we went and watched these things at the same time as everyone else. Then we could participate in discussions at parties and whatnot. But we are an ornery pair and prefer to wait until they can be rented cheaply on a streaming platform which can pay me some money if it wants me to name it.

On writing for more people

On LinkedIn recently I saw a guy from my co-working space posting about how he had written for an impressive number of days in a row on the platform and how his content had been seen by 10s of millions of people and he has over a hundred thousand followers. All of which has helped him raise his income.

He is, not surprisingly, a sales coach.

I confess I am a little intrigued by all of this, but transitioning to that kind of mode would be a huge shift for me. It's hard to tell if I am just bedazzled by all the numbers, as yall know I am a sucker for numbers.

Meanwhile, I am pretty much worn out now from a weekend of being with people. My sister came to town and stayed with us for the weekend, while Mary's brother Rob also arrived in town and will be residing in the house just across the lake parking lot from us. Which is lovely, but also potentially hugely disruptive to my well-established rhythm.

Getting ready

Hanging out on the couch in my study preparing for the arrival of two siblings: Leslie is coming to stay with us for a couple of days before going to mom's for a week, while Rob is also arriving with the plan of staying for a month on a trial basis in an apartment across the LFA parking lot from us, in John and Barbara's house, also incidentally the former home of a high school girlfriend, also name Mary. I'm looking forward to seeing both of them.

But I'd be lying if I said that my anticipation of Rob's arrival wasn't mixed with some apprehension. He's gonna be living awful close. Mary and I spend a couple of decades raising our delightful children, who are now mostly launched into the world and thriving (though obviously we're happy to have Graham here at UNC). But we are also happy to be on to enjoying the empty nester phase of life and not having default socialization at any time. So we're gonna have to figure out how to establish some norms and boundaries.

Thankfully Rob eats earlier than us and also goes to bed earlier and also really likes his own space, so this should all work out fine. And I have this couch here to retreat to at any time if he and Mary are riffing out on something some evening when I need to be on my own. Let's just hope the need doesn't become too acute to often.