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The Wide Reach of the Blame-and-Shame Industry… or, How to Stop Waiting for Deus-ex-Machina Solutions to Unfairness and Inequality, Part 1

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Monday, December 3, 2018

Delray Beach,FL.- One of the first things a copywriter learns about selling diet products is that it is very important to say, at some early point in the sales message, “It’s not your fault.”

This does several good things.

  • It makes the targeted customer feel good to have the burden of responsibility lifted from his shoulders.
  • It relieves, to some degree, the shame of being overweight. (“If it’s not my fault, why should I be ashamed?”)
  • It creates a sympathetic bond between the person delivering the message and the targeted customer.

Now if you know anything about obesity, you know that there is sometimes some truth to the not-your-fault statement. Some causes of obesity are genetic. Not all. But some. And it is perfectly fair to assert that one of the reasons Americans are so fat is because they’ve been given incorrect information about healthy eating since they were children. The widely held (and then dispelled) idea, for example, that eggs are both fattening and also a danger to heart health. So you can imagine that the copywriter with a conscience might want to mention facts like these in his copy to support the much broader claim that obesity is not the fat person’s fault.

Bad eating habits are, of course, the primary cause of obesity. But the intelligent copywriter knows he’s not going to sell any diet pills by pointing that out.

We do the same thing when we are selling wealth-building products. Recognizing that our targeted customer feels angry and/or ashamed because of his lack of financial success, we can offer him some immediate relief by telling him that it is not his fault – even though some part of it probably is.

How I Learned to Avoid Shame by Blaming Myself

Many years ago, when I first began to study advertising, the gurus at the time pretty much agreed that the most effective ads were those that appealed to the prospective customer’s emotions – in particular, to his greed or fear. I launched an argument then that continues today: those hidden emotions, like shame, are much stronger. And that indirectly addressing those emotions is a much better way to gain and keep customers.

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Intimations of Mortality

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Saturday, December 1, 2018

Delray Beach, Florida.- My friend Alec sent this brief note to me this morning:

“A light went out in our bathroom.  I remember that I changed it 14 years ago.  I showed my son how to do it, thinking surely it is the last time that I’ll change it.”

It reminded me of something Gary North, who was in his mid-sixties at the time, wrote about a dozen years ago. It went something like this:

“Just bought a suit. It’s inexpensive but well made, a nondescript charcoal gray that I can wear for almost any occasion. A good investment, considering the likelihood that this may be the last suit I ever buy.”

It stunned – and spooked – me.

Now I’m doing the same thing. All the time.

Should I get a new car? I don’t see why. I have more cars than I need right now. The car I drive is an Audi S5 coupe. I bought it slightly used five years ago. It’s fantastic – reliable and fun.

The other two, a 27-year-old Acura NSX and a 13-year-old BMW 850, are rarely used. Should I sell them? No. They cost almost nothing to maintain. And they will likely hold their value. Someone will figure out what to do with them when I die.

The last suit I bought – for Patrick’s wedding five years ago… was that my last? Yes, I think it was. I have a half-dozen perfectly good suits in my closet. I might wear each of them once a year.

Sometimes these intimations of mortality prompt me to spend more.

“A six-foot tree would be one-quarter the price,” Paul Craft, my palm tree consultant, tells me. “And it will be 30 feet tall in only 15 or 20 years.”

“Only 15 or 20 years?” I say, laughing and shaking my head. “No. Order the biggest one you can find.”

We joke about death, but only to trivialize it, to temporarily diminish the dread.

At my book club meeting last night, we talked about the fear of death. (We were reviewing two books: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant.) About half of the group (four) admitted to that fear. The other half said they didn’t. I said that the only way one can be fearless about one’s death is to deny it. I said something like, “If you really contemplate your own death, the utter extinction of your personal self, you cannot feel anything but terror.”

I did not persuade them.

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Odds Stacked Against You? Stop Bitching and Get to Work!

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November 24, 2018

 

Nicaragua.- NP believes that when parents hit their seventies they should start giving away their assets to their children as fast as they can.

“Making them wait till you die is manipulative,” he says.

I say “I don’t think parents should feel obliged to leave their kids anything. They should expect their kids to be able to take care of themselves.”

NP also believes that older parents should live in assisted living facilities so that they “aren’t a burden to their adult children.”

I believe adult children should feel honored to take care of their parents as they become less capable of caring for themselves. “Caring for a family member is a privilege,” I say. “And it’s morally correct. These are the people that gave you life and took care of you for umpteen years when you couldn’t care for yourself.”

We were talking about the same topic, but our views are 180 degrees apart. And yet when we talk about other things that matter – work and economics and politics – our views tend to be aligned.

Why is that?

I think I know why because I have known NP since he was a small child. His dad and I were partners for many years.

NP’s parents held family in high regard. And within the family, children came first. When it came to education, public schools were not even considered. And when it came to selecting private schools, they would sacrifice anything to make sure their kids went to the best.

They had the same idea about “things” like cars and clothes and computers and everything else.

My parents came from a culture for which family was important but the role of children within the family was very different. Children were not the focus. They were expected to help out and to respect their elders. And anything they got – which was very little – they got not because they deserved it, but because their parents were being generous.

Today, I have friends that brought up their kids as NP’s parents did. And I have friends that brought them up the way my parents did. (Which was the way K and I brought up our kids.)

I also have a few friends that had an entirely different attitude. They seemed to believe their responsibilities as parents ended at the child’s birth. They abandoned their children when they were very young and never looked back.

What’s going on here?

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Breaking Big: The “Ready-Fire-Aim” Strategy That Took One Company From $8 Million to More Than $1 Billion

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Thursday, November 15, 2018

Chapter 1, Part 1

The 5 Stages of Entrepreneurial Business Growth

Delray Beach, FL.- For the first half of my business career, I spent almost all of my time doing. I was an incessant innovator and that required a lot of practical thinking. But I eschewed the theoretic. My M.O. was experimentation: Begin with a hypothesis about how to make something new or better. Test it to a reliable degree. Then make adjustments.

Since I knew very little about business, I had the advantage of testing theories that were outside the box of recognized business truths. This taught me two things: Traditional practices are usually there for a good reason. And when new ideas work, they can work big.

In the year 2000, I began to write a blog (called Early to Rise) about what I had learned about business. It forced me to think more abstractly about my experience, and gave me an opportunity to step back and see patterns. And after doing that on a daily basis for five or six years, I was able to see patterns in the patterns.

One of the great pleasures of writing those daily essays was knowing that I was refuting some long-held beliefs and introducing (what seemed to me to be) new ideas about how to launch and grow businesses in the digital age.

It was then that I got the urge to host a very special, very high-priced seminar where I could explain my insights to smart and successful entrepreneurs who wanted to grow their businesses.

The goal was not financial. I could have charged little or nothing to attend. But I wanted to attract serious people, entrepreneurs with enough success in business to challenge my ideas if they didn’t make sense.

It was a four-day event and the fee was $10,000. Since this was the first time I would be charging this kind of money for my expertise, I was more than a little worried.

But I told myself that I would be okay. All around me, self- proclaimed business experts were charging $1,000 to $5,000 for seminars and getting plenty of eager people to pay up. I knew many of those experts. And most of them, in my humble opinion, were one-trick ponies – zero-down real estate gurus, direct-marketing pundits, or motivational speakers. Few of them had my depth or breadth of experience. If they could get away with charging as much as $5,000, I reasoned, I should be able to charge $10,000.

So I spoke to MaryEllen Tribby, the woman that was running Early to Riseat the time, and she helped me put it together. Three months later, she had everything set up and 30 tickets sold.

[Marketing Tip:The easiest way to create profits in your business is to sell your best customers a higher-level version of something they have already bought. MaryEllen’s marketers did that by sending out a special invitation to a limited number of Early to Risesubscribers who had already spent $2,000 on a three-day conference with various business writers. My seminar was positioned as more (four days) and better (with me only). And it sold out in a matter of weeks.]

The only thing left was to come up with an agenda that would justify an investment of $10,000 by each attendee. When I reviewed the credentials of the 30 people who had signed up, doubt once again gripped me. What could I do for them that would be worth what they had paid? The saying “Pride comes before the fall” haunted me.

Aside from the fact that all 30 had achieved a great deal in their careers, each had a different sort of business. Some were beginning new businesses. Many were growing modest-sized companies. And some had well-established $10 million to $25 million enterprises.

And if that were not challenging enough, their businesses ranged from professional services to publishing to manufacturing. Even to restaurants!

On the one hand, I had, by that time, such wide experience in business that I felt confident I could be helpful in some way to each of them individually. But this was a group event. And we had limited time.

I certainly could not dumb down the discussion to the basics of entrepreneurial success. Most of these people were well beyond that. I had to create a program that was both high level and fundamental, with ideas that were universal to all entrepreneurial businesses but also specific enough to satisfy each and every attendee.

I thought about it for several days, but I could not come up with a satisfactory approach. I called in two colleagues – senior writer Charlie Byrne and contributing business management expert Richard Schefren (both superstars in their domains) – and I explained my problem to them.

The specific question I posed was:

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Principles of Wealth #22*

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Tuesday, November 13, 2018

The efficient market hypothesis is bogus. The stock market, its sectors, and its individual stocks are often mispriced. But that doesn’t mean speculating on those errors makes sense.

Speculation is at best an intellectual form of gambling, like playing blackjack rather than roulette or craps. But all forms of speculation are likely to decrease one’s wealth over time. And every experienced speculator, in his heart, knows this to be true.

Selling speculations is not speculating. It is a form of business. And for some, it is a very profitable business.

 The prudent wealth builder that speculates treats his speculations as spending.

Delray Beach, FL.- In an essay published in Investopedia, Tim Parker writes: “Whether speculation has a place in the portfolios of investors is the subject of much debate. Proponents of the efficient market hypothesis believe the market is always fairly priced, making speculation an unreliable and unwise road to profits. Speculators believe that the market overreacts to a host of variables. These variables present an opportunity for capital growth.”

The argument Parker attributes to speculators is correct. The stock market is often inappropriately priced. And sectors within the stock market are badly priced even more often. Not infrequently, market sectors are grossly mispriced. The same is true for individual stocks.

I am always astounded when I think of how quickly and widely accepted the thesis of the efficient marketplace came to be. The logic, simply put, is that the big financial players – including institutional investors, hedge funds, and the like – have, through internet communications and computer technology, access to all of the key financial data they need to value stocks. They even have access to indices of public sentiment. With all that knowledge available and updated in nanoseconds, the price of any stock, any sector, and even the market itself will of necessity reflect the correct pricing.

This doesn’t make sense on several levels. For one thing, it is impossible to measure consumer sentiment or to predict its ebb and flow. More importantly, raw data (such as history of earnings, revenue growth, P/E ratios, etc.) cannot possibly give a reliable view as to the value of a company in the future.

I cannot tell you with any accuracy the true value of the equity of any of the companies I own and control. And I certainly could not predict what the value will be in six months or a year. So how could these data-crunching investment behemoths know?

But forget about the logic. Take a look at any 20-year period of stock market valuations and you will find moments when the market “corrected” itself, sometimes with a fall of 10% or more. What is happening there? There can be only one answer: irrational exuberance. And as I have already pointed out: You cannot measure accurately, let alone predict, the fluctuations of investor sentiment.

But that doesn’t mean that speculating is a reasonable way to accumulate wealth.

(Note: Hedging and arbitrage are not necessarily speculating. If done properly, they are the opposite. We will talk about them another time. This is about speculating and only that.)

What is speculating? John Maynard Keynes said it is acting as if one “knows the future of the market better than the market itself.” I like that definition because it emphasizes the core problem with speculating. It is fundamentally a bet on the future. And betting on the future is betting on something that is largely unknowable. Why bet on future possibilities when you can make good money investing in the known facts, the realities, of the present?

Professional speculators use sophisticated strategies such as swing trading, pairs trading, and hedging along with fundamental analysis of companies/industries and macro analysis of economics/politics to place their bets.

Just think about what I just said. The best speculators are crunching numbers from all these realms and using complex, technical strategies to make their decisions. And it is all done in the hope of getting way-above-average ROIs. It’s a whole lot of work. And at the end of the day, success depends on thousands of uncontrollable and even unknowable details. Where is the reasonableness in that?

John Bogle, bestselling author and founder of the Vanguard Fund, wrote a book called The Clash of Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation. In it, he demonstrated that individual investors almost always lose big when they speculate. He says that speculating is an “unwise” strategy for ordinary people whose goal is to safely accumulate funds for retirement.

“The internet and financial media may encourage speculation,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean you should follow the herd.”

Indeed. The reason the financial media and the brokerage community promote speculation is because they benefit from the fact that most speculators lose and lose big. And all those losses end up in the pockets of the brokers and the bankers and also the prudent investors that would rather invest their money safely for reasonable gains than gamble for big wins.

* In this series of essays, I’m trying to make a book about wealth building that is based on the discoveries and observations I’ve made over the years: What wealth is, what it’s not, how it can be acquired, and how it is usually lost.

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How Never to Begin a Blog Post, or… The Most Important Secret of Storytelling

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Sunday, November 11, 2018

Delray Beach, Florida.- Should I tell him? Will he listen? Will he feel I’m butting in?

I had just read a company blog post from a colleague. It was an important post. And he was making an important point. I wanted every employee to read it.

But the problem… well…

One of the best ways to begin a blog post (or a speech or an essay) is with a story.

A well-told story will instantly grab the reader’s attention and hold him tight while he discovers (indirectly and without resistance) the idea you want to convey.

This is true only of well-told stories. Badly told stories are perhaps the worst way to begin.

So what is the difference between a well-told and a badly told story?

There are about a dozen. But the first and most important – by far – is that a well-told story begins in the middle.

The above-mentioned blog post began like this:

 I first met David and his wife Jenny in Panama in 2007.

David was from upstate New York but moved to Philadelphia shortly after marrying Jenny over 30 years ago. Other than a business trip to Toronto, he had never been out of the country before.

They were both attending International Living’s “Ultimate Event,” which I was helping run. This was our monster event, gathering all our country experts in one place to help the hundreds of attendees figure out the best places to retire or invest overseas.

We got to chatting over a drink at the welcome cocktail reception, and I soon discovered they were nearing retirement and wanted to know the best country to move to…

 I’m reading it and I’m wondering, “Where is this going?”

If it had been written by someone else, someone I didn’t know, I’d have already put it down. But since it was a colleague and since I knew he wanted to improve his writing skills, I continued reading. And reading. And reading. And wondering when he would get to the point!

Six or seven hundred words later, he wrote:

Knowing your customers is extremely important and seems so obvious….It can help you develop your products and services and craft the right messages to appeal to those customers. It provides a sense of empathy…

Wow! What a long and winding way to get to this idea.

I wrote him this note:

“If you are going to tell a story, begin in the middle, which usually means in the middle of the conflict. (Aristotle called it in medias res.) Give the reader a reason to want to keep reading.

“This is a story meant to illustrate a point you are making about the usefulness of attending live events. So you need to create some conflict around that. You want the reader to know what’s at stake. So he’ll care about it.

“Does this make sense?”

And then I thought I should give him an example of what I meant. I came up with this:

She told me he never attends industry events – especially those where you’re expected to “mingle” with potential customers.

 “I’m running a big business,” she said proudly. “I’ve got deadlines to meet. I’ve got a bottom line worry about. I don’t have time to waste on cocktail parties, making small talk with customers.”

 She seemed very sure of herself and I was her guest so I didn’t want to argue with her. Instead, I put on a sympathetic, non-committal face. 

 When, three years later, her business failed, I was not surprised…

I was hoping he would see how much stronger this is. Not because I’m a better writer. I’m not. But stronger because of the way I started my story.

I didn’t start at the dull beginning with preliminary information the reader might eventually want or need to know. I started with the conflict – in this case, with the protagonist being challenged by a woman making a statement he knows is wrong.

When you begin your story at a scene that represents a core conflict, you accomplish two things:

* You allow your reader to get to the point faster. (In this case, in 90 words rather than 600.) And…

* Even more importantly, you let the reader experience the truth of your idea emotionally before you give him the argument for it rationally.

And did my critique work?

He didn’t respond immediately, so I was a little worried. But the next morning, I received a friendly thank-you. “I’m not going to read Aristotle,” he said. “But, yes, I can see how much stronger it is to begin in medias res.”

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Tribalism and the Mid-term Elections

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Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Delray Beach, Florida.- Milo Yiannopoulos, the social critic and provocateur, gets into trouble with both the far right and the far left for mixing his intelligent insights and critiques of social and political movements with lowbrow humor.

He’s gotten into trouble; for example, by criticizing women celebrities for the way they look.

His vertical range of discourse is one thing I like about him. I like that he’s willing to be vulgar when he believes it can work. But I don’t believe his vulgarity enhances his public image. Nor do I think it’s impressive. When he goes low, I find myself wanting to coach him. Why not take a lesson from Bill Buckley? You can be witty and devastating at the same time if you challenge your higher brain.

I feel the same way about smart people who are rabid sports fans. I can appreciate the range of their experience and can accept their addiction, but I can’t say that I see it as a positive. I see it rather as a forgivable flaw.

Here’s what I want to say. (And this will offend probably 70% of the people that read this.) Being a sports fan is not something to feel proud of. It is an indulgence in one of the lowest aspects of emotional intelligence. It is an indulgence in tribalism and mindless bigotry. It is, like pornography, something best done in the privacy of one’s home.

The tribal mentality is one that rejects reason. It is groupthink that defines goodness by the team. It is the sort of thinking that supports the worst instincts of human social behavior. It is what evolution is meant to deselect. It is the lowest use of one’s brain.

Now I know whereof I speak. For a period of several years, I was a rabid fan of the Miami Heat. During that frenzied time there was nothing the Heat could do that I would think of criticizing. Every bucket they scored was a nod from God himself. Every foul they made was justified.

And every game they won gave me the sort of thrill I had experienced only through drugs. Every game they lost put me in a long state of despair.

I was mindless, fanatical, and irrationally attached to a billion-dollar franchise that cared nothing about me except for my lifetime value to them in dollars.

I have the fortune to be acquainted with many, many highly intelligent people. Among them, I would include most of the members of my family and most of my best friends. A minority of them, like me, is uncomfortable with tribal allegiance. But the rest of them root mindlessly for their teams without giving their behavior a second thought.

If this tribal mentality were confined to sports, it would be one sort of problem. But I find that the same mental illness affects them when it comes to politics. They have a team – Democrats or Republicans or one of the totally ineffectual splinter groups – and they support them unthinkingly to the bitter end.

This was glaringly evident during the mid-term elections. I talked to several of them, all very bright, and they told me that they voted strictly along party lines. They didn’t think they had to bother to actually understand their candidate’s platform. If he was wearing the right colors, that was enough for them.

I wake up every morning to a culture that is more divided than it has ever been in my living memory, with the possible exception of the late 1960s, during the Vietnam War. And what I think about it is this: Tribalism is scary. I had imagined we would be done with this sort of groupthink mentality. But that hasn’t happened. And one day, if things continue as they are, I will have to abandon the better parts of my brain and choose a side.

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White Male Privilege: Where Do You Stand on the Social Justice Scale?

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Thursday, November 1, 2018

New York City.- “That’s because you are a privileged white male,” she said.

She was explaining why my perspective on… I don’t remember what… was wrong. Not just wrong, but invalid.

White Male Privilege. A catchy phrase, to be sure. But what, exactly, does it mean? The more I thought about it, the less logical it seemed. So I looked it up.

Most of the sources define it as “institutional” or “social” advantages available to white men that are not available to women and people of color. Like Jim Crow laws in the South… apartheid policies in South Africa… and some Muslim and Jewish religious traditions.

But in contemporary Western societies? In the USA today?

I could find no laws, regulations, or policies that favor white men. I could find plenty that gives preference to women and/or minorities. But none for white men.

But this belief in white male privilege isn’t going to go away. There’s a lot of emotional force behind it. I’m guessing it has something to do with two ideas, incubated for decades in academia, that are now spreading like wildfire:

  • Entitlement– As a living being, I am entitled to everything the world has to offer. I don’t have to earn it. If others have it, I should have it too.
  • Dependency– I am not responsible for my own wellbeing. Someone or something has that responsibility.

If you buy into these ideas, it makes perfect sense to say that if there are inequalities in the world they are inherently wrong and necessarily the fault (and the responsibility) of whatever group or person is at the top.

This, of course, is not just idiotic. It’s dangerously destructive. We all know this in our bones, even if some of us don’t know it in our heads.

My friends that believe in white male privilege wouldn’t allow their adult children to act on the basis of such beliefs. They tell them, “Hey, the world isn’t fair. And although I might not have been the perfect parent in your estimation, it’s up to you to solve your own problems.”

This sort of hypocrisy is lost to proponents of white male privilege. And you can forget about pointing out the irony that, by definition, the phrase “white male privilege” is both sexist and racist.

But perhaps this will work. It’s a very simple test. And it is not in itself a refutation of the concept of white male privilege. Quite the contrary, it begins with the assumption that there is such a thing.

And it is very simple. Just two steps. Here they are:

Step One. Put white men at the top of the privilege scale.

Step Two. Fill in the rest.

(Note: For simplicity sake, we are going to take the very white male perspective that there are two genders and four racial groups. Feel free to make your list longer.)

For my first attempt, I’m going to assume that gender trumps race, but that race still counts. With that as a guiding principle, the privilege scale might look like this:

* White Men

* Asian Men

* Hispanic Men

* Black Men

* Asian Women

* White Women

* Hispanic Women

* Black Women

But hold on. That would indicate that all white women are less privileged than all black men. With even a very successful white businesswomen being less privileged than an unemployed black man.

Hmmm. That doesn’t work.

Let’s try giving priority to race, with white at the top and then Asian and Hispanic and black. Like this:

* White Men

* White Women

* Asian Men

* Asian Women

* Hispanic Men

* Hispanic Women

* Black Women

* Black Men

But that puts white women nearly at the top of the scale. We can’t have that! It would mean that they can no longer be considered to be oppressed. They would be the oppressors.

I’m sure there is a way to do this that would work. It wouldn’t be the same for everyone –  but you could do it your way, and I could do it my way, and Uncle Ted could do it his way. But what good would it do the social justice movement if everyone had their own idea of privilege?

It would be tantamount to suggesting that, yes, we live in a world that is unfair and also unequal and that we can’t agree on a scale of gender-race privilege. And if that is true, what then? We’d have to get to work on improving our individual situations. On getting more of everything we want by working against the obstacles, whether they are racism or misogyny or our personal limitations. Limitations like each individual’s health and intelligence and ability to acquire financially valuable skills and willingness to work as hard as it takes to be a success.

But then we would have to give up the happy notion that we can do it by blaming white men.

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What Happens When We Die?*

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Everything in the universe exists in a continuous state of fluctuation, from extremely contracted to extremely expansive. Planets. Rocks. Galaxies. Humans too – our bodies and our minds.

I once heard a fascinating lecture by a neurobiologist who had suffered a stroke that left her temporarily unable to process visual and aural information rationally. She said it was like being on LSD. She talked about looking at her hand and not being able to distinguish between the fingers and the space between them. She said the experience helped her understand that the material world was an energy field where there are no rigid distinctions between observed phenomenon, between flesh and air, for example. She also said that it was not scary. It was, in fact, the opposite of scary. She said she felt an amazing calmness and openness as if her body were melting into the universe.

I remember thinking that this was an example of consciousness expanding beyond the normal bounds of experience. And that although her sensations could be dismissed as hallucinatory, they could also be seen as truer in some way than the “normal” experience of the world. After all, from an atomic (sub-atomic) perspective, the human body is not separate from its environment but connected to it, both in terms of proximity and composition. In other words, our bodies and the invisible space around us are essentially electronic impulses.

It could be argued that her experience was one in which the essential condition of existence was finally visible because her awareness of existential information was highlighted, while the screening process that rationalizes sensory input was diminished.

Of course, I could not help but relate it to the idea we are discussing here, the fundamental nature of everything as fluctuations between contraction/tightness and expansion/relaxation.

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Am I a Hypocrite?, How About You?

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During the Kavanaugh spectacle, the line of thinking I was espousing elicited two very different comments. My left-leaning interlocutors called me a privileged and misogynistic white male, while my right-leaning friends called me a “bleeding heart.”

This range of reaction makes me feel good because I take it as evidence that I have an independent mind.

But when I’m being honest with myself, I admit that my motivation is the pleasure of stirring up trouble. My self-appointed job in life is to be an intellectual rabble-rouser,

someone who likes to challenge half-baked ideas and opinions, whatever perspective they come from.

Take identity politics.

I disagree strongly with identity politics. (The argument I usually make is that it is unsupported and nonsensical ideology whose foundation is racist.) I’m opposed to programs that target groups by social identities – programs, for example, that attempt to equalize outcomes by creating quotas and giving preferential treatment to women or minorities or the like. I don’t believe these programs work in theory. And based on everything I’ve seen or heard about them, I don’t believe they work in practice.

Yet in my private life – and by that I include my personal life – I’m always trying to create gender and ethnic diversity by giving my own time and money to women and minorities individually.

So am I a hypocrite?

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