Boys Will Be Boys 

I was backing up. I would have fallen over the barbell on the floor behind me had Paulo, my trainer, not stopped me.

I asked him, “As a kid, in Brazil, did you ever play that prank where you keep backing someone up until he falls over another guy who’s on all fours behind him?”

He had. It was common practice.

“In Brazil, too,” I said. “That’s funny.”

He asked, “Did you ever do that thing where you hyperventilate for a few seconds and then one of your friends gives you a bearhug till you pass out?”

“We did that,” I admitted.

“There must be other dumb and dangerous things that all boys do,” I said.

“Like jumping from a bridge when you don’t know how deep the water is below?”

“Exactly.”

“What the hell were we thinking?” we wondered.

My guess: We weren’t thinking at all. We were playing the kind of games that adolescent boys have been playing for hundreds – even thousands – of years. Stupid, semi-dangerous descendants of ancient coming-to-manhood rituals that have been practiced since Homo sapiens became sapient.

Becoming a man originally meant learning how to participate in dangerous things like hunting and warfare. It required not just bravery, but fierce loyalty to the clan – and, thus, to the survival of the species.

Girls must always have had coming-to-womanhood rituals. Note to self: Find out what they were.

 

Loving, Loyalty, and Pragmatism 

I came across this the other day: According to research by Dr. Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist from Stanford University (as well as numerous other studies), women initiate more than 70% of all divorces.

That surprised me. Maybe it shouldn’t have. Does it surprise you?

I did a bit of digging and found other facts about women vs. men in matters of marriage and divorce. For example:

* Did you know that, after the divorce, women move on to other relationships much faster than men? I didn’t.

* And how about this? According to several reports, women are more likely than men to have love partners before the divorce. It not only surprised me, it reminded me of a story I heard about a colleague of mine: By the time she told her husband she was divorcing him, she had already purchased a house for herself and her until-then-secret boyfriend!

* Here’s another thing I discovered: According to one survey, 98.7% of women surveyed a year after being divorced said their lives were “better” or “much better” than they were while married.

I’ve been thinking about why I was surprised by these facts. I suspect it’s because I’ve always assumed that women are naturally more loving and loyal than men, whereas men are naturally more pragmatic than women. I guess I’m going to have to rethink those assumptions.

And here’s something that any young man planning on playing house-husband in an upcoming marriage should know: According to a University of Chicago study, when women earn as much as or more than their husbands, the marriages are 50% more likely to end in divorce.

Continue Reading

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately: 
Does Personal vs. Political Hypocrisy Matter? 

I’ve noticed that there is often a gulf between the political and the personal when it comes to theories about what is right and wrong.

And a parallel difference in what people believe about how governments should solve problems and how they solve these same problems in their own lives.

I’m not exempt.

For example, I am theoretically opposed to everything about Communism, including the massive and authoritarian distribution of wealth. The idea is so obviously idiotic, it seems to me, that I shouldn’t have to provide historical examples to prove how destructive it is.

Yet, in my personal life, it is not infrequent that I find myself giving cash and other sorts of financial assistance to people to help them achieve or acquire something sensible and helpful to them.

In doing this, I recognize the hypocrisy. But I repress my internal critic because I enjoy the experience. And, after all, it’s my own money. I can do what I want with it!

Over decades of giving away money this way (privately and personally as opposed to contributing to charities that I control), I have developed some “rules” I try to follow to mitigate the many forms of damage that giving people “free” money creates:

* I don’t give money to anyone that asks for it. The idea here is that I consider asking for money to be a moral flaw. That’s my rule. I do break it from time to time.

* I attach zero expectations to my gift. The moment it goes from my hand or bank account to the other person, the transaction is finished. And I have no interest in knowing if the recipient did with it what they said they would do. The pleasure is in giving the money. Finding out later that I was bamboozled or the person I had hopes for failed will only bring me unhappiness.

* I do expect a thank-you. And a sincere one. As GG, a Zen master and friend of mine once said, “Gratitude is what nature demands from a gift. Without it, the exchange is unbalanced. That said, I prefer thank-yous that are short and sweet. If they are longwinded or groveling, they are embarrassing.

Interestingly, these rules are pretty much the opposite of the rules my family and I have established for FunLimón, our community development center in Nicaragua.

There, we:

* Give financial assistance only to people who are willing to not just ask for help but ask for it formally and provide justification for what they want.

* Make it clear that when they get or borrow money from FunLimón, they accept the obligations that come with it, including, in some cases, paying it back (with or without interest), paying it back in labor, or “passing it forward” in the future.

* Require recipients of our financial aid to keep us posted on their use of our funds and meet certain requirements as they spend the money.

* Demand a formal thank-you, because we believe that saying thank you is a moral obligation.

So, that’s how I – a diehard free market/ Libertarian thinker – commit hypocrisy.

My left-leaning (and outright Socialist) friends are hypocritical in the opposite way.

They believe deeply in the redistribution of wealth – so long as it is the government or someone else that is paying for it. Ask them to contribute their “fair share” of the cost of whatever redistribution of wealth they are advocating, and they’ll tell you that they pay taxes… and, anyway, they are strapped for cash. “Let the one-percenters pay for it,” they say, looking me up and down.

Here is a funny video clip that demonstrates this.

This clip is about letting illegals stay in their homes. Watch till he asks if they could take in a migrant.

The point is that there is very often a gulf between our political/ social/ economic views on how companies or countries should redistribute wealth and what we do as private citizens with our families, our friends, and even strangers.

I don’t know if there is an “answer” to this contradiction. I justify my hypocrisy (in redistributing my own wealth to needy people) by pointing out that the money I’m giving away is my money. Even Ayn Rand would admit that there is nothing about free-market Capitalism that prohibits private charity.

On the other hand, I can’t think of a good justification for the hypocrisy of the Left. Can you?

Continue Reading

Connecting the Dots:

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately

Irony and the Universe. About 30 years ago, I had a quirky insight into the old “meaning of life” question.

It came to me while I was sitting in a dental office, inhaling gas. Out of nowhere, this thought popped into my half-delirious mind – a voice that said: “Mark, I know how much you want to know it, so I’m going to tell you the secret now… Life is a joke laughing at itself!”

That was it. Nothing more. An explanation of the universe that might have been tucked in a fortune cookie. But, given my state of mind at the time, it felt profound. And true. It felt like a revelation. I was so excited that I had to restrain myself from jumping out of my chair and announcing it to my dentist, his staff, and everyone sitting in the waiting room.

We’ve all had ephemeral illuminations. They come to you. You get excited. But by the following day, your mind has returned to its former, stable perch. And the thought has ballooned into something farcical or shriveled into something embarrassing.

Not in this case. I’ve thought about that “secret” countless times since then. And it still feels true. It is always a helpful way to look at whatever prompted the thought in the first place.

Irony, I’ve come to believe, is a divine gift. It’s nature’s way of helping us understand the infinitely varied and constantly surprising ways that our lives confound us, especially when we think we have everything figured out.

Irony reminds us that we don’t know nearly as much as we want to believe we know, and have much less control over our lives than we would like to have.

Irony takes away certainty, but it gives back, or can give back, something better: self-acceptance.

Why I Don’t Serve on Pro-Bono Committees. Have you ever served on the board of a condo association? Or a charitable foundation?

If you have, you know how terrible it can be.

Six or eight intelligent people sitting around a table, most of whom have been successfully running large businesses or government bureaus or academic departments for decades. It’s a new board. And each member is willing and eager to provide his/her immense wisdom to guide the meeting towards fruitful decisions.

A half-hour later, tensions are rising. Another thirty minutes passes, and they have been unable to agree on agenda item one.

I’ve been a board member of both a college department and a local museum. The former was at first hopeful but ultimately frustrating and wasteful. The latter was a downright horror show. Initially, I explained away my disappointment by telling myself that the committee didn’t have the right mix of people. But eventually, I figured out the real reason committees like these don’t work: They are egalitarian.

Yes. That’s why they fail. It’s because they are decision-making groups where everyone has an equal say.

This realization is part of a much larger theme that I’ve written about (and will continue to write about): the very bad idea that equality is a good that we should strive for.

In the case of do-good boards and committees, when you allow everyone to have an equal say, what you get is endless bickering and mostly bad decisions. The reality is that in order for any group to work effectively, a hierarchy of power is necessary.

In my business life, I’ve always been happy to attend committee meetings so long it was clear that our discussions were going to be guided by some sort of hierarchy, whether formal or informal, stated or assumed.

Having a hierarchy isn’t a guarantee that the meeting will run smoothly and productively. But running a meeting without a hierarchy makes failure – either immediately or eventually – a certainty.

Continue Reading

I saw my cardiologist last week…

It was a routine checkup six months after my surgery to remove blockage from the carotid artery in my neck after my stroke.

“I know how annoying it must be when patients come to you with Google-based diagnoses of health problems they are experiencing,” I told Dr. A, my very conservative and otherwise very mainstream cardiologist. “But I’ve been reading lots of reports online that myocarditis is being reported as a common side effect of not just COVID, but also taking several jabs of the COVID vaccine. And since a few weeks after my last – and third – jab, I’ve been experiencing pretty much all the symptoms.”

He smiled. “Such as?”

“Well, persistent fatigue, balance issues, occasional acute chest pain and heartburn, times when I feel that my heart is beating too quickly, and swollen ankles. Am I crazy?”

I smiled widely, assuming he was going to say some version of “yes.” But he surprised me.

“No,” he said. “Myocarditis is one of several documented side effects of the COVID vaccines. It’s not a crazy, unfounded conspiracy theory. It may have begun that way, but there is a wealth of information that has been examined in the past 12 to 18 months. And myocarditis is not the only danger. There are others. In fact, I no longer recommend the vaccines to my patients.”

I raised my eyebrows.“Mark,” he said, “I don’t think you have myocarditis. I think you have the problem of having been in 30-year-old shape since you were 30. And in the last several months, your body has decided to settle down and become a septuagenarian. Nevertheless, I’m ordering a few tests so we can rule out myocarditis. And I’m prescribing a diuretic to get that fluid out of your lower legs.”

But I was barely listening. “Yes!” I was thinking. “It’s not a bogus theory! And I’m not crazy! I can’t wait to tell all my Doubting Thomas friends and colleagues!”

And that’s why I’m telling you!

 

A World Divided: Is a New Dark Age Coming?

During my high school and college years, debates between liberals and conservatives were energetic and passionate. I was a card-carrying Socialist then, yet I never had the nerve to think I was smarter than Bill Buckley. Nor do I remember feeling any antipathy towards my conservative friends and family members, and I didn’t feel any from them.

Today, in the US (and, from what I’ve experienced, in Canada and in Europe, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean), disagreements about so many ordinary things have become political – from what someone thinks of the Joe Rogan podcast, to the car he drives, to his thoughts on business issues like trade barriers and wages.

What’s remarkable about these arguments is that you can tell within the first sentence or two what the person you’re talking to believes about the topic at hand – virtually any topic, including, say, offshore windmills, or whether men can have babies, or whether African Americans deserve reparations.

You not only know in advance his positions on all these topics, but also the arguments he will make and the particular facts he will use to support those arguments. You may also know your own positions on those topics and the facts you would use to support your arguments.

What has happened? Why are our disagreements so similar these days? And why are our opinions so categorical across such a wide range of topics?

My answer is this…

A set of arguments about human dignity, social equality, and political freedom began during the Age of Enlightenment in the latter half of the 18th century. It led to great advances in the sciences, and, coupled with the great experiment of free market capitalism, to the greatest period of wealth advancement in the history of the world. (It also led to the greatest political revolutions in modern history, including the French and American Revolutions.)

In European universities in the middle of the 19th century, it was cross-bred with the Socialist theories of Carl Marx and Friedrich Engels and – perhaps more oddly – with the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud. And it emerged, towards the end of the century, as a set of ideas that were seemingly unrelated but very much connected with those of the Enlightenment (principally, Humanism, individual agency, and individual liberty.) And although no one I’ve ever read wrote about this, it seems pretty clear to me that those two philosophies – Socialism and Freudian psychology – infested the best ideas of Enlightenment thinking and gradually corrupted them, without anyone seeming to notice.

By the second half of the 20th century, the foundational beliefs of Freudianism and Socialism (which included, among other bad ideas, the inevitability of psychological, social, and political oppression and victimization), had morphed again into the advent of Structuralism, Post-structuralism, intersectionality, critical race theory, gender fluidity, and equity theories – which all felt like Humanism, but were, in fact, polar opposites of every good and useful idea that came out of the Enlightenment.

Most importantly, these were not, and are not, alternatives to Enlightenment thinking. They are religious doctrines that are anti-humane, anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-individual liberty that, if not opposed, will lead us towards a new age that may be more destructive to humanity than the nearly 1,000 years of tribal warfare, barbarity, acute poverty, and intellectual and moral regression that we used to call the Dark Ages.

And that is why, in my opinion, disagreements today are so mean-spirited and even hateful.

In turning towards these new “progressive” social ideas and movements, we are turning away from all of the great ideas of the Enlightenment – e.g., that all men deserve equal respect and dignity and an equal chance to participate and succeed in society – and replacing them with deeply irrational and largely unscientific ideas that are much closer to religious than rational thinking.

The powerful among us are no longer committed to researching, discovering, and publicizing the universal truths that bind us together as a single species. Instead, we have returned to believing in “revealed truths” that cannot be questioned and must be accepted with the full commitment that medieval kings and priests assigned to their religious doctrines.

And so, despite our fetish for fact-checking the statements of our opponents, we no longer care about facts at all. Nor logic. Nor science. We believe only in proselytizing the ignorant and extinguishing the infidels.

Continue Reading

Dear Reader,

A reminder: Starting with this issue, I’ll be publishing this blog once a week, rather than twice. I’m hoping this will allow me to finish a few of the 16 (no lie) books I am almost done writing. Plus, I hope to find a bit of extra time to cover a few more topics, particularly those you seem to like. As you can see, this particular issue is almost twice as long as a “regular” issue. But, hey – just read what piques your interest!

Mark Ford

 

 

Another Great Thanksgiving Celebration in Nicaragua!

After two great weeks enjoying the rugged beauty of the Pacific coastline of Nicaragua, K and I are back in Delray Beach, getting reacquainted with the mesmerizing flatness of the Atlantic coastline.

The grandkids dancing on the beach at Rancho Santana 

For six or seven years now, we’ve wrangled our kids and grandkids down to Rancho Santana to participate in the nearly non-stop fun and games the resort puts on for its guests from mid-November through the new year. And every time I’m there, I have the same thoughts:

* Nicaragua is an extraordinarily beautiful country, with just about every natural ecosystem a nature-lover could want. Mountains, valleys, cliffs and hills, natural springs, streams, and rivers, dozens of gorgeous lakes (including Lake Nicaragua, one of the largest in the Americas), endless acres of farmland, cattle country, and world-class fishing and surfing along the country’s entire western coast.

* The people of Nicaragua are exceptional in many of the best ways a culture of people can be exceptional. I’ve visited more than 80 countries in my time and spent a fair amount of time in more than a dozen. I’ve learned that every country – and especially those with largely native populations – has its own set of personality traits that distinguish its people. I find Nicaraguans exceptional in their fundamental goodness. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s a combination of being ethical and hard-working, welcoming and good natured, optimistic, family-oriented, conservative, and humble. And they like to laugh.

* Notwithstanding the occasional need for a small ($5 to $25) donation to local law enforcement to deal with ill-defined traffic violations, the experience of going about one’s business in Nicaragua is surprisingly free and unencumbered. The government is tough on non-profit entities because they are sensitive to anti-Sandinista ideas and propaganda. But if you are living in Nicaragua to develop businesses and create wealth for the local population, you run into very little of the senseless opposition you sometimes find in the States.

Rancho Santana is really and truly one of the best resort communities in the world. It has become much more than I expected or even hoped it would become. I’m proud to have been a part of its history.

If you’d like to know more about Rancho Santana – maybe check it out for a possible visit – click here.

Florida vs. Every Other State

K and I moved to South Florida in 1982 to take advantage of a job offer I had in the up-and-coming retirement paradise of Boca Raton. But as native New Yorkers, we came down reluctantly. K wasn’t happy about leaving everything comfortable and familiar and no longer being surrounded by family on Long Island. And I saw Florida as a vast cultural and social wasteland, half expecting to be chewing tobacco with rednecks, hunting alligators for food, and taking our kids to places like Monkey Jungle on weekends.

Our fears did not materialize.

Florida, we gradually discovered, was a great place to make intelligent and interesting friends, provide our children with an excellent education, and enjoy the state’s climate and abundant natural sources year-round.

It also turned out to be a land of abundant entrepreneurial and career opportunities, with mostly sensible and bearable state government regulations and an economy that was booming and has kept growing for the last 30 years.

Still, the old prejudices lingered in my subconscious. And when people from LA, NYC – or Paris or London, for that matter – would ask me, in a condescending way, “What is it like to actually live in Florida?” I felt defensive. So, I began to take mental notes on the things about Florida that are good and even unique, comparing and contrasting its benefits and virtues to those of other states.

I haven’t written much about Florida here on the blog. I have, though, no doubt mentioned some of the most obvious things worth boasting about, including the fact that we have coastlines on both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico… we have lots of sunshine… and we are threatened only by hurricanes, rather than a combination of earthquakes, landslides, forest fires, tropical storms, snowstorms, and massive pollution. Just to mention the geographic advantages.

But there are other good reasons why Florida is a great state to live and work in.

Such as…

Florida Has a Citizen-Friendly Income Tax Policy 

New York and California have the highest state tax rates on the three most important ways that ordinary citizens earn money and gain wealth: capital gains, dividends, and business income. Combined, those taxes can reach more than 13% (on top of federal taxes) for residents of Manhattan. But in Florida, state taxes are zero. Nada.

Whenever I say this to my NYC or LA friends, they respond by claiming that Florida’s property taxes are higher. But I have paid property taxes in NYC and LA. And I know that after you sort through the details and compare apples to apples, the amount of dollars in property taxes you will pay in Florida is about the same (in some cases less) as you’d pay there.

You’d think that, without its own income tax, a state as large and as populous as Florida would have terrible roads, badly working utilities, non-functioning public services, and a complete lack of social support for the poor. None of that is true. On those counts, and just about any others you’d care to research, you’ll find that Florida does very well compared to the rest of the states.

Florida’s citizen-friendly tax policies are substantial and build up over time. Since we moved to Florida in 1982, for example, I’ve “saved” tens of millions of dollars in income taxes alone, compared to what I would have paid in California or New York.

Florida Has a Business-Friendly Government 

Ken Griffin, CEO of the multibillion-dollar hedge fund Citadel, moved his company’s offices from Chicago to Miami last year. After doing business in Florida for 12 months, he publicly predicted that Florida – Miami, in particular – could replace NYC as the world’s new financial mecca. Why? Because, he said, “Miami represents the future of America… with a political environment that encourages growth.” In moving his headquarters to Florida, Griffin is following in the footsteps of Wall Street icons including Carl Icahn and Paul Singer, and Jeff Bezos, who left Seattle and relocated to Miami.

Those are just three of the billionaires that have relocated to Florida recently, bringing with them tens of billions of dollars’ worth of additional business and business income to Florida’s economy. And if I were to include the centi-millionaires and deca-millionaires, the list would be very long indeed.

Florida Has a Reasonable Cost of Living 

California and New York are both near the top of the Statista Cost of Living Index for US states, with a rating of 138 for California and 135 for New York. Florida is not among the cheapest states to live in, but with a rating of 102, it is a bargain compared to them. For, say, an $80,000 a year lifestyle that you could enjoy in Florida, you’d have to pay over $110,000 in New York or California.

Economics as a theory can be complicated and subject to endless debate. But real-life economics, the kind that we all experience every time we pay a bill, is easy to understand and quite powerful in terms of motivating human behavior. It is, in fact, among the reasons why the population of New York has decreased by 2 million while the population of Florida has increased by about the same amount.

As Stephen Moore pointed out in a recent issue of Taki’s Magazine, “These Americans on the move have taken their money and businesses with them. IRS tax return data tells us that some $50 billion have matriculated out of New York in 2020 and 2021. Meanwhile, Florida has gained that much net income. The skylines in Miami and even Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale are showing more towering high rises every week. South Floridians are referring to Miami as Wall Street South.”

All of the above seems pretty clear to me. The question I keep asking myself: How much longer can LA and NYC, two of the cities I still feel connected to and wish the best for, continue with policies that are making them unattractive for businesses and ordinary tax-paying citizens?

What are your thoughts on this?

Continue Reading

Reminder: A Change Is Coming 

As I said on Tuesday, I’ve decided to start publishing this blog once a week instead of twice. So, starting next week, you can expect to receive one somewhat longer issue that will include more of the investment advice and commentary on the economy that my readers have been asking for.

Question: Would you rather receive it on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday?

 

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately

A Lesson I Learned Long Ago About Personal Relationships. How long have you been hoping that your friend would stop with that annoying habit he or she has had as long as you can remember? Or that your spouse would improve himself or herself in some way that would be more appealing to you and also better for him or her? How many times have you made a subtle suggestion, or a tactical criticism, or a simple plea for him or her to do something about whatever it is that’s bothering you? And how many of those efforts by you were successful?

We know the answer. Never or very rarely. And that’s because by the time Homo sapiens arrive at adulthood, 95+% of their instincts, emotional intelligence, reactions, behaviors, and habits are deeply etched into their brains.

That means you will have less than a 5% chance of ever being able to “help” a friend or spouse “improve” themself in any meaningful way. In other words, spending time, energy, and effort on trying to change anyone in your life is 95+% futile.

When I came to this conclusion, I realized that I had a choice. I could continue to try to encourage change in the people in my life and deal with the eventual disappointment years later when they did not change. Or I could accept the idea that they would not change and learn to accept them – even love them – for who they are.

There are all sorts of rational objections one could make against this approach. I know. I spent years making them. But to no avail. I ended up angry and resentful and eventually losing those personal relationships I had once valued.

Turns Out, This Is True in Business Relationships. Recently, at a business meeting, my partners and I were discussing the strengths and weaknesses of a number of our leading executives. We were talking about the various strengths and weaknesses these people bring to their jobs, and how much better they could be if they could learn to stop doing this or start doing that.

I was participating in the conversation willingly and happily when I suddenly realized that we’d been having basically the same conversation about these same execs at least a half-dozen times over the previous three or four years.

I challenged my partners with a thought experiment. “Assume, for a moment,” I said, “that no matter how much we urge them, inform them, or incentivize them, none of them will be able to change. Imagine that we had a crystal ball… that we looked five years into the future and saw that none of them had made a single substantial change. If that were the case… what would we be talking about today?”

The next ten minutes of our discussion were more rewarding than the dozens of hours we had spent devising strategies to evoke changes in these people that were never going to come.

Exceptions Don’t Prove the Rule. We can, to a significant degree, help our children terminate unwanted behaviors and develop desirable ones. Nature designed Homo sapiens to be mentally and emotionally malleable when they are young. So, although it may not seem possible, studies have shown that up to about 15 or 16 years of age, teenagers can make those positive behavioral changes. But by the time people reach adulthood, their habits and tendencies are too deeply engrained.

There are some exceptions. There are always some exceptions. But if you want to solve a problem, and especially a big, complicated problem, it makes zero sense to continue with or even double-down on a “solution” that has been failing for the majority of those involved for many years.

And yet, that is exactly what we do. We create programs – local, regional, and federal programs – that promise to solve a problem but never do. In fact, they often make matters worse! But instead of acknowledging and accepting the failure of the “solutions,” we conclude that the way to fix the failure is to spend more money on the programs. To do more of them or do them “harder.”

I’m talking about a very wide range of social “problems” here – from the failure of our educational institutions to educate, to the failure of our addiction programs to reduce drug and alcohol addiction, to our failure to reform criminals in the penal justice system.

Continue Reading

A Change Is Coming 

I’ve decided to publish this blog once a week rather than twice. The original idea was to lighten the load for me and J, my editor. And I hope to do that. But knowing the way I work, I suspect my once-weekly issues will end up being about twice the size of my twice-weekly issues.

So, what do I intend to accomplish by making this change?

I’ve received a good deal of feedback from my readers, and I now have a better idea of what they like and don’t like. Most of what they like are the pieces that are more useful than newsy. So, starting next week, that’s what I’ll be focusing on. You can expect to receive a somewhat longer issue that will include not only the kind of bits and pieces and recommendations that I’ve been sharing with you all along, but also regular comments on the economy and investment advice.

 

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately 

I don’t like the word charity. It implies a certain condescension. I don’t like referring to Fun Limón, the community center we established in Nicaragua, as a “family charity.” It sounds elitist and self-aggrandizing. I prefer to think of it as a Not-For-Profit Public Project or NFPPP (an acronym I made up that will never catch on because it would be too hard for people to remember). I believe the charitable impulse is not an a priori good. Quite the contrary, unless one works very hard to safeguard against it, it is difficult to act charitably without creating negative side effects, such as feelings of dependency and entitlement. Charity is not a divine impulse. It is a deeply human survival instinct that promotes not only the survival of one’s particular DNA, but of the species as a whole.

Because charity is so potentially dangerous in terms of creating collateral damage… I never felt comfortable giving dollars to organizations I knew next to nothing about for the benefit of feeling like I was being good and virtuous, when what I was really being was careless and self-indulgent. So, when I decided to start my own charity to help people in need, I took the responsibility seriously. My family foundation has three NFPPPs, all of them run with the same attention that we give to our businesses. Our motto: “Do less harm than good.”

I’m thinking that charities are not only like businesses in many ways, they’re also like financial investments.Stocks, for example, can be roughly divided into two kinds: growth stocks and income stocks. One buys growth stocks for future appreciation and income stocks for near or current cash flow. The one is generally about the future. The other about the now. If you consider NFPPPs from that perspective, there are projects that provide immediate benefits to the  “investors” (the people providing the funding) – e.g., the pleasure they get from seeing how their efforts have changed recipients’ lives. And there are projects that take years or even decades to accomplish, with benefits that may arrive only after the death of the “investors” – e.g., the endowment of museums, scholarships, and major cultural programs.

Continue Reading

A Question – Believe It or Not – That Haunted Me for Years! 

Years ago, when I was actively writing short stories, I sent a dozen of them to the brother of a friend for a critique. He (the brother) was an award-winning Canadian author of novels and short stories.

Since a few of my earlier stories had received positive comments from published fiction writers who were kind enough to review them at writing conferences, I was hoping for positive feedback, since the ones I sent him (the brother) were more mature. And he was positive about some of them. But he criticized others as “anecdotes” rather than “stories.” I should have asked him what he meant by that. Instead, I spent years trying to figure it out on my own.

All those with literary ambitions believe they have at least one novel inside them waiting to be put into print and stun the world. The great majority of such people never write their stories. And of those that do, I’d wager that 90 percent of them are written as anecdotes.

What’s the difference between a “genuine” work of fiction and an anecdote?

I figured it out, finally, just recently by reading a “story” sent to me by a family member. It was a first-person account of interesting aspects of his life, strung together in a sophisticated way with a strong sense of style and abundant literary diction. It was the sort of thing you would expect to read in The New Yorker.

But I could see that it was an anecdote. It was an anecdote because it was written the way anecdotes are told – about an incident in the person’s life that he/she found relevant and memorable.

Let me try to rephrase that as a formal definition: Anecdotes are first-person, autobiographical accounts formulated and recited to document some significant-to-that person incident or incidents in his/her life. However well-written and however literary the style, the distinguishing feature of anecdotes is that they are essentially memories, embellished by pride and shame and the desire to document and validate the teller’s existence.

I published my “stories” that were the closest to actual stories in my book Dreaming of Tigers. I saved the anecdotes – dozens of them – to be reworked when I figured out how to do it. So now, I’m going to go revisit the best of them.

My initial strategy will be to revise them from the first to the third person. I’m hoping that will force me to rethink the characters and the plot from the reader’s point of view. Then I’ll read them again with these questions in mind:

* This may be interesting to me. But will it be interesting to the reader?

* This is meaningful to me. But how can I make it meaningful to the reader?

Continue Reading

Connecting the Dots:

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately 

Why Fixing Matches Is Good for Boxing: Years ago, a friend of mine who was a boxing promoter explained to me why boxing has a history of fixed fights. “When you have a good-looking, charismatic fighter that’s won three or four fights in a row, the fans get interested,” he said. “If he keeps winning, the gate gets big. And fast. It can go from $10,000 to $100,000 to $1 million to $10 million to $100 million. When that happens, everybody wins. The promoter, the venue operator, the boxer, the trainer, the manager – even the kids selling popcorn and hotdogs. And the fighter who takes a dive? He gets paid, too. And if the fight is good, there’s a chance for a rematch. So, you don’t need a big conspiracy to make boxing work that way. Everyone does what’s best for himself.”

How Big Fixes Work in Business: That was an eye-opener for me. I realized that the same phenomenon could occur in business. When, in any industry, the financial incentives are positive from the top to the bottom, you don’t need a big conspiracy to make a big fix happen. Big Pharma is a perfect example. There are dozens of medications and procedures recommended routinely by not just doctors but medical associations that have zero proof that they work. In fact, there are many that have been proven to be useless. So why are they still on the market? Moreover, why are they still being recommended? The answer is that whenever you have a medication or procedure that doesn’t actually kill patients, everyone up and down the chain makes money – from the companies that make the pharmaceuticals, to the associations that are supported by the drug companies, to the lobbyists that promote Big Pharma, to the legal and accounting firms that represent these questionable drugs and procedures, to the hospitals that employ the procedures, to the universities and institutions that do the studies, to the salespeople that persuade the doctors to recommend them, to the drugstores that sell them. The only people that don’t usually make money, oddly, are the doctors that prescribe them. They prescribe them because, most of the time, they believe they actually work, especially when they are recommended by such trustworthy organizations as the American Heart Association. The thinking, up and down the line, seems to be: “So long as it isn’t killing anybody, what’s the harm?” I’ve got much more on this. But I submit the thesis to you for your review.

The Difference Between Waging a War and a Family Feud: As I have said, and as the leaders of Hamas understood when they invaded Israel, the pressure for Israel to pause the war and return to negotiations for a “two-party solution” has mounted as the Palestinian body count grew. The greater the disparity between dead Palestinians and dead Jews, the stronger and larger will be the condemnation of Israel. This idea of “parity” is emotionally comprehensible, but intellectually specious. Parity makes sense and eventually works in a family feud. But it is not – and never has been – a metric for “regulating” war. War is terrible because its purpose is – and must be – defeating the enemy. And however history views it, war is justified – and always has been justified – by the claimed virtue of its cause. The US didn’t justify its role in WWI and WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the war against Iraq by how “proportionate” the body count was. (In WWII, for example, about half a million Americans were killed compared to about eight million Germans. And of those eight million, a quarter to a third of them were civilians.) I’m not defending the killing of thousands of Palestinians by Israeli bombing. I’m pointing out that the argument about proportionality makes sense only if you see this as something other than a war. We have to ask ourselves: Is it a war? And if it isn’t, what is it? An ancient family feud? An urban, police action? What do you think?

The Mentor Question: I’m having a discussion with an old friend, spurred by the piece I wrote Nov. 4 about people in my life that had a positive impact on my career. He pointed out that half the people on my list acted as mentors to me. He said that of the many people influenced him, none were mentors. He, like me, had a successful business career. But he managed to have it without the help of a mentor. Why? Was it because of the different industries we were in? Do some industries, such as writing and publishing, benefit more than others from mentor-mentee relationships? Or were our differing paths due to our individual personalities? We are both hyper-resistant to being told what to do. Nor do we like answering questions. I have a few inchoate ideas I’m tossing around. What do you think? Have mentors played a helpful role in your career?

Continue Reading

Putting My Editor’s Hat Back On…

I have spent a fair amount of time in my publishing career training, coaching, and editing new and developing writers. It’s an aspect of my work-life I very much enjoy because it is an intimate and earnest form of teaching. And it has pragmatic benefits, as well. If I do a good job, the writer becomes a stronger writer. As a stronger writer, he wins a larger and more loyal base of readers. As his readership grows, so do the revenues of our business. And that gives our readers a better product, our company larger revenues, and the person I’m coaching a more successful and lucrative career.

Philosophically, what I’m doing provides all three of life’s sustaining pleasures: I’m working productively on something I feel is important. He’s learning something that he thinks is important. And both of us are sharing important knowledge.

In less self-elevating terms, I like it because I’m confident I can do it well and because what I’m doing is appreciated by the person I’m coaching.

That’s all good and true for coaching new and developing writers. But what about a writer who has serious writing credentials? What about coaching a writer that, from an objective perspective, has all (or more) of the professional chops that I have? It can be intimidating!

I’m doing that now. I’ve been working with a very accomplished writer of newspaper and magazine essays and several bestselling books. He’s got more writing medals on his chest than I could claim, but he’s new to the sort of writing we do at Agora: newsletters.

Newsletter writing differs from other kinds in the two ways contained in the word “newsletter.” It is meant to convey some useful insight on economic and investment developments (news). And it is meant to do so in an informal and almost intimate manner (letter).

This particular writer is an expert in his subject matter: investing. In terms of knowledge of that field, he’s way ahead of me. He’s also very good at structuring an argument, telling a story, writing with personality, etc.

So, you would think that there is practically nothing I can teach him. Nothing I can do to help him advance in his new job as a newsletter writer. I wondered about that when I agreed to coach him. And yet, the relationship seems to be working. I’m quite confident that I’m making his writing better!

The icing on the cake is that we are both enjoying the process. As it turns out, as good a writer as he is, he recognizes the value in what I’m teaching him – the nuances that make newsletter writing unique and uniquely valuable to newsletter readers. And that fact makes my job so much easier. He “gets” my comments immediately and puts them into practice as well as (and sometimes better than) I could hope for.

Part of me fears that, in another month or so, I’ll have nothing left to give him. But I know that’s not true. I know, from this experience and from others, that a good writer – even a great writer – will almost always write better with a good editor.

Think about it. Almost every great writer I can think of had editors that greatly improved their work. And not just in the beginning. Throughout their careers. A few examples:

* Max Perkins and Thomas Wolfe

* Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot

* Max Brod and Franz Kafka

* Michael Pietsch and David Foster Wallace

Continue Reading