Maggie's Farm

I recently had a conversation with a multi-multi-millionaire who recently sold his second business start-up at age 43.

He is a humble guy, good golfer. He told me that he was advised that he was not "college material" - and "I am not", he says. "I am not a scholar, not intellectual, not very smart but I am energetic, and strong on practical and common sense. I learned my math at work because I had to." He became an apprentice (I can't say in what area) and in ten years owned a rapidly-growing company with 130 employees and two warehouses.

He told me his future plans too, but I want to keep it short and confidential.

Anyway, it raised the question for me: What is "college material"? Or is that term obsolete?

Slaying, yet again, the idea that the languages we speak shape the thoughts we think.

I understand that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is out of favor if not largely disproven, but it still makes sense to me in many instances, especially with more abstract concepts.

How magical thinking haunts our everyday language, and fossilised ideas live on in even the most sophisticated science. One quote:

Newton’s wrong guesses are, however, as interesting as his correct ones. A well-known example is his conviction that light is made of particles, not waves. What he had in mind were solid ‘corpuscles’, not the photons of modern physics, but it’s still tempting to see him as having been half right. And in trying to explain the splitting of white light into a spectrum, he came up with the beautiful notion that the width of the coloured bands matches the mathematical proportions of a musical scale. People had traditionally counted no more than five colours in a rainbow, but for his theory to work Newton needed more, so he introduced two ‘semitones’, orange and indigo, and we’ve been counting seven colours in a rainbow ever since. Generations of schoolchildren have learned mnemonics that colour-code light, such as ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’, which have as much to do with physical reality as the signs of the zodiac.

Prof. Mankiw makes the case that inherited money is good for the economy.

Who cares? It's their money to do whatever they want with it. They are free to just burn it if they want to (or is burning money illegal?)  Mankiw is correct, though, about reversion to the mean.

Monkeys Are Better Stockpickers Than You'd Think - Why dart-throwing primates demolish S&P 500 returns and most active fund managers don't even come close.

Actively-managed equity accounts are widely considered a rip-off for the muppets. I am not rich enough to get into hedge funds, but I'd like to be because those smart folks can do far more than I can, hedging currencies, national economies, sovereign debt, etc. while the average Joe like me is stuck with mass market retail products.

I like to have money, and enjoy the concept of making money in markets while busy at my day job. I keep spare cash in a Vanguard bond fund, while my IRA is miscellaneous but mostly Vanguard funds with a focus on proven income-producing equities and some balanced funds plus some good (legal, of course) stock tips, and some cash for the next market crash, locked and loaded. I control my IRA.

I also have substantial debt in the form of a low-interest but fairly large mortgage which I intend to keep as long as I am able to work. As I have calculated it, keeping a mortgage is a net gain for me.

Most people want capital-preservation above all, but if you want risk to make real money in markets, do what monkeys do and use your crystal ball and pick the right stocks instead of indexes indices and buy low, sell high. After all, funds dilute gains. So hire a monkey.

What do y'all do with your spare cash and with your long-term savings?

From last June, but still fresh: Leon Wieseltier’s 2013 commencement address at Brandeis University. One quote:

“For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning—to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality…”

From Richard Dawkins, Cyclops of Science:

The only thing worse than a pugnacious atheist is a pugnacious atheist who has a fetish for scientism. In that light, Dawkins’ bemoaning of childhood fiction actually makes sense. Devoting an inordinate amount of his life’s work to empirics makes any man coarse. Facts are blunt and stark, while imagination can be bright and stirring. The greatest works of art and architecture produced by man weren’t the product of cold calculation. They were inspired by a volition that doesn’t take cues from controlled laboratory experiments.

Here's a good piece on scientism as a superstition.

Good friends have a daughter who will be starting at the University of Alabama this fall. The brilliant (math, physics, dance, violin - not Asian but with 800s.) kid would only apply to southern state colleges. South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama. She wanted a cultural change, a complete change of pace from Yankeeland. Good for her. Each one she applied to offered her a full scholarship to go, but the parents honorably refused any scholarships, feeling that they should go to those in need. (This family was all set to pay for Harvard, so they got a windfall even without the scholarship offer.)

Mom told me that the kid had already lined up her roommates via facebook, that she had already found sponsors for the sororities she wanted, and that she had already gotten her football package online. Mom told me she said something like "Honey, this is supposed to be school. Are you planning on studying anything?" This was not the kid she knew.

"I'll worry about the details when I get there, Mom. I'm gonna be a physics major and a performing arts minor. I know what I'm doing, so don't worry about me."

Tuscaloosa. I enjoy seeing what kids will do. It will change her life, probably for the better.

Change is good, or people get in ruts. Over many years, I think we finally found our right rut. It's about friends, interesting activities, a comfy-enough home to sleep in and in which to hang some pictures, a couple of horses and a barn, and a church home. It takes many years, many adventures and a few failures, to find one's right happy rut for the long haul. Even then, who knows what might come next? For me, I plan to work until I cannot.

From Sultan's The "You Didn't Do That" Society:

Elliot Rodger was not a social problem. He was not a gun culture. He was not a national anything. He was an individual and individuals bear responsibility for their own actions.

The left is expert at removing responsibility from individuals and assigning it to the culture at large. Every murder is a failure of society. And society fails every murderer, they insist. We are all murderers because we own guns or didn't vote for the right politicians who would have allocated more money to mental health treatment, school counseling or midnight basketball.

It's quite a detailed story in The New Yorker about an attempt at top-down education reform by the experts: SCHOOLED - Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.

Yes, they got an education but nobody else did. That was $100 million thrown into the trash.