Unpopular Expression

            A couple months ago, I commented upon the propensity of the human species to fail in staggering fashion as the result of collective opinions which are staggeringly wrong.  I ran through the requisite arguments of evolutionary predisposition towards a herd mentality, then advocated the value of picking one’s own path.  Of course, this argument was placed against the backdrop of the subprime mortgage collapse – the most recent and blatantly obvious example of erroneous “group-think.” I feel compelled to examine the value of deviation from a different perspective, that of the rogue, the non-conformist, the polemic; the one who understands not only how, but when to risk resources and reputation on a bet the other way.

            The fact is, in both economic risk management and general philosophy, meteoric rises are not merely the result of being “right,” but rather, being right when the world is insistent otherwise.  Returning to the dead horse of the subprime collapse, many individuals acquired wealth by betting with the herd – they made their money and moved on to other trading desks or other ventures entirely.  However, the dozen or so who were brazen enough to bet the house that the house of cards would collapse acquired not only fantastic amounts of money, but the prestige and reputation that ultimately sparked the remainder of their careers.

            Of course, they found value in deviation quite literally, as the market tremendously underpriced the contracts which paid out large sums in the event that borrowers were unable to repay their loans.  However, there are other circumstances in which the value in being correct is proportional to the weight of opposing disagreement.  Presuming that Adrian Peterson would be an effective running back in fantasy football this season was “right,” but of course, the world at large shares in that position, and thus, his cost was a 1^st round pick.  The gain associated with a correct assessment of his talents was minimal as his performance was merely commensurate with his draft status.  Alternatively, the fantasy football world, as a whole, did not think highly of Steve Smith – a receiver thought to be past his prime and saddled with a rookie quarterback lacking the ability to run an NFL offense.  Of course, this characterization was incorrect in the extreme, and the late round pick invested yielded enormous returns – a top-five fantasy receiver.  This was possible only because the general perception allowed for the opportunity to disagree vehemently.  Were one to disagree that Adrian Peterson was a fantasy football juggernaut, at most, one could simply not pick him, a bet which would be shared by every team, excepting one, and thus, utterly minimizing the potential returns.  Regardless of the depths of one’s contrarian views, there is simply not an instrument with which to express it.  Beyond the realm of finance and fantasy sports, there are academic, professional, and social decisions in which a deviant thought must be married with a means of expressing that notion and an objective verification sometime thereafter.  Whether Adrian Peterson or Steve Smith underachieve or surpass expectations can be empirically verified at season’s end.  Whether the borrowers begin to default at higher rates or not is modeled in market prices.  The fact that I dislike peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, though undeniably uncommon, lacks an instrument of vehement expression (at most, I can simply choose not to eat them) and a means of assessing the “correctness” of that position, unless of course, kindergarteners who eat PBJ become sterile during adolescence. 

            The secondary issue of course, is the time frame in which one’s contrarian view might bear fruit, and the costs associated with awaiting that moment.  While in finance, synthetic CDO’s facilitated this easily when betting on the failure of the American mortgage market and in fantasy football, low-round draft picks allow such atypical ideology to be suitably expressed, the “real-world” offers fewer such opportunities. 

            Perhaps an admirable professional goal should lie not in simply bucking the trend, but rather, in locating a means to express that opinion.  What is the next unlikely paradigm shift?

Long-STEMmed education

            My generation, collectively, has failed to launch in an epic manner.  We are living with our parents, perennially unemployed or underemployed, submerged beneath the rising tide of student loans without the careers with which to repay them.  Simultaneously, corporations throughout this country, and around the globe display desperate need for engineers, programmers, and analysts capable of processing and comprehending the terabytes of data produced by our technocratic society.  We lament with a despondent sigh, “there are no jobs.”  This statement is inaccurate.  As grossly insensitive as it may sound, we ought to be honest with ourselves, “there are no jobs for us.” 

            We majored in French medieval literature, 19^th century art, music, or dance.  Civilizations are nourished and enhanced by the arts, by the beauty of the creative expression of the human mind.  However, at a state institution with 10,000 in its graduating class, there should be 100 such burgeoning aesthetes…not 1,000+.  The remaining 900 are worldly, cultured, sophisticated, and unable to support themselves.  Some of us, thinking ourselves pragmatic, with an eye towards our future wallets, majored in “business.”  Countless studies of higher education have argued that business majors often do the least work of all undergraduates and display the smallest increases in analytical reasoning and critical thinking skills between enrollment and graduation.  Industry requires managers, decision-makers, and big-picture thinkers, but these individuals show an agility of mind which was almost assuredly honed somewhere beyond the walls of a classroom.  Financial markets require skilled hands directing capital to its most useful locations…but these tasks demand advanced mathematical and analytical reasoning…which, statistically-speaking, most often resides in the minds of engineers, mathematicians, and scientists.

            The term “STEM” fields has become a buzzword, an acronym referring to “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.”  These are the fields where young adults are finding employment with comparative ease and producing legitimate value to society, not to mention finding themselves able to move out of their parents’ basement.  These fields, I would like to posit, possess a characteristic which distinguishes them from the humanities I so callously disparaged in the previous paragraph.  It is not their higher-minded pursuit of objective, quantitative truth, nor their ability to heal the sick or construct the infrastructure of modern society, nor the problem-solving they teach, which our problem-plagued world demands (though these statements are factual).  It is the fact that their entryways shut long before college.  It is the fact that a depressingly-large majority of students have lost their train ticket to these fields before they ever became aware of the tracks. 

            Malcolm Gladwell, in a manner far more eloquent and engaging than this essay introduces a nation of mastery, of the 10,000+ hours required to reach the pinnacle of one’s field.  For certain fields, using professional athletics as the example, it is worthless to master the techniques at an age where one’s physical prowess has already removed the possibility of elite performance.  To become a professional athlete, the high-level training and instruction must begin in elementary school in many cases.  While one can realistically decide to major in some highly specified, esoteric sect of the humanities universe during the spring of their sophomore year as an undergraduate – and emerge with roughly the same training as anyone else who holds that same degree, STEM fields are a highly distinct animal.  One does not decide to study chemical engineering during their fourth semester in college.  At that stage, without years of training in mathematics through multivariable calculus and linear algebra, courses in chemistry and physics at the college level, and in this society, some perfunctory computer programming skills, that door, metaphorically speaking, is closed.  A quick review of that list reveals that acquiring these skills requires several college-level courses, each of which demands significant high school preparation, much of which contains prerequisites from the advanced track curriculum beginning in junior high.  Playing catch-up, given the rising cost of education, the intellectual gulf between well-prepared and underprepared classmates, and the need to reach financial solvency at a reasonable age, is all but impossible.

            In many humanities-based fields, the top 1% find employment in their chosen area, the remaining group must seek further education or lower-level, unrelated vocations.  In STEM fields, the overwhelming majority of students do utilize their skills professionally.  Despite this obvious advantage, the opportunity to pursue such subjects is often lost before students have even completed their adolescence.   The statistic I have never seen, yet would love to access is the proportion of students who are not placed into the advanced track courses in math and science who ultimately graduate with a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field from a four-year institution. 

            These subjects are intimidating, and too often, students whine that they simply “are not good in math and science.”  Teachers and parents accept this explanation at face value, allowing their students to eschew the foundation of skills which our current economy demands.  I cannot possibly imagine that thirteen year-olds covered in pimples and awash in hormones possess the long-term foresight required to understand the magnitude of their choices.  Teachers and parents have an obligation to their students and our society to keep that door open longer.  It is beyond troubling that a generation cannot find employment because of the skills they did not acquire over the previous two decades of their lives and now, cannot afford to relive those years with the benefit of hindsight. 

            One century ago, or even more recently, the strength of our bodies and the dexterity of our fingers manufactured goods and services – for our time and physical vitality, we were compensated well enough to live comfortably.  Now, goods and services are frequently zeros and ones.   The paradigm of trading time spent in relatively lower-intellectual-demand tasks for pay has vanished.  Why then has our educational system failed to adapt?  Species adapt or perish.  So too do nations.  I fear my generation may have already been failed by a system which failed to deliver the skills required to sustain our society economically.  We, as a nation, had better not fail the next one.

Rights, Wrongs, and Laws

            Numerous heinous acts are morally reprehensible by virtually anyone’s code of ethics.  While society chooses to protect itself from offenders with an array of legislation and punishments, it is rarely the threat of legal retribution which deters the typical citizen from such indecent treatment of our fellow human beings.  Were murder to be legalized tomorrow, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of our species would still abstain from cold-blooded killing, as their consciences would serve as every bit the deterrent of criminal prosecution.  At the opposite extreme, there are countless details within our legal system for which the law and its consequences do guide action – cases in which morality is not our principal decision-making mechanism.  We choose not to park our cars where a sign dictates that we cannot because we would prefer not to pay fines or have our cars towed, not because of some obvious inherent immorality in the act.

            This weaves an odd tapestry of our ethical sense of right and wrong, the structural facts of a civilized and regulated society, and which mechanism truly guides our behavior.  Unfortunately, just as there are acts which are illegal, yet not glaringly disdainful morally there are also acts which are not illegal, yet patently wrong when placed against a backdrop of ethical conduct rather than the laws of our land.  The latter causes rage, disgust, betrayal, and hatred.  It is hardly illegal to fornicate with a secretary while a spouse sits quietly at home, ill with cancer.  It is hardly illegal to disown a homosexual child on their eighteenth birthday.  It is wholly legal for a corporate executive to send thousands of hard-working people living paycheck to paycheck to the unemployment lines while paying themselves multi-million dollar bonuses.  These types of actions boil our blood in a manner that the countless murders and other damnable crimes of the day do not because the perpetrators often slink off unscathed, free to continue their utterly disgraceful behavior without the slightest reprobation.

            These acts are constant, hidden, and virtually unavoidable in a free society.  We are left only to judge, to assign lesser value to those whose actions we despise.  What then when the immoral (but not illegal) act is the work of a human being whose track record of moral behavior spans decades and is thoroughly unassailable?  Into what category shall they fall?  What is their true character?  It is a cliché to state that character is that which we do when we believe that no one is watching and yet, our only knowledge of human beings is, by definition, what they do when we are watching. 

            Resolution of the disparity between our previous perception and the new evidence we believe we have gained challenges our very view of that which we considered certain, the character of someone in which we believe, in whom we have faith.  We question the facts, we question accusers, we question ourselves.  We realize that the best of us are flawed.  We hope that we will not be remembered for the worst decision of our lives.

Chaos Theory

            The notion of a chaotic system is generally introduced through the proverbial construct of a butterfly flapping its wings.  This seemingly trivial act sparks a sequence of unlikely events, each conditionally dependent upon its predecessor, until some massive meteorological event (often a hurricane in the classic story-telling) occurs, being directly attributable to the initial flap of the wing.  While this tale makes for appropriate discussion fodder in some ivory-tower classroom, it is the unlikely sequences of events which direct the lives of human beings that prove truly fascinating.  Voltaire wrote Candide in such a manner, throwing his protagonist through an outrageous series of pleasant and horrific experiences until ultimately, he is left to “cultivate his garden.”  Whether it is the best of all possible worlds or coincidental is unknown and unexplained.  Either way, the character recognizes that if not for the previous events, many of them torturous, he would not be, at present, contentedly tending his garden.  While better than the somewhat contrived butterfly flap spawning a natural disaster, it is still ultimately a work of fiction.

            Non-fiction equivalents carry far more meaning.  The story I wish to share lacks the drama of Voltaire or the physics-driven elegance of the butterfly.  That said, the analysis of cause & effect in our own lives can be jarring nonetheless. 

            During the late winter or early spring of 2005, my junior year in college, I found myself in the process of seeking an internship for the upcoming summer.  At Princeton, this environment is highly competitive and for a young man without a clear professional objective, bewildering and overwhelming.  Generally, the options are numerous, but lacking all diversity in the broader sense.  The choices are, simply, high finance or the handful of notable consulting firms which recruit at ivy-league schools.  When a pharmaceutical market research consulting firm came to campus, I scheduled a very brief campus interview – the type in which a student stumbles out of a messy dorm-room dressed to the nines to arrive in a tiny career office (in which formal dress seems equally out-of-place) to be bombarded with the requisite series of questions to assess disposition, teamwork, and reasoning skills.  The student attempts to appear fascinated by the company’s business operations, articulate, confident, yet humble, and in all other manners the perfect image of an employee.  Truly, these are among the most contrived, bullshit-laden conversations in which I have ever participated…and again, I spent four years on an ivy-league campus. 

            With this firm, something felt different.  Though I was given a certain amount of intellectual prodding, I recall discussing my high school, Science Olympiad exploits with a woman who had participated in similar events less than a decade before me.  A follow-up interview was scheduled, this time at their corporate offices.  My interview was scheduled simultaneously with another young woman from my academic department.  We carpooled, first shoveling my car from 8+ inches of snow (she packed her dress shoes to be donned upon arrival, I was far less savvy).  As formal female attire does not lend itself to shoveling, and of course, there was but one shovel in my trunk, that task fell to me.  No worries I thought, after all, had I had not been carpooling, I would have performed exactly the same tasks.  Upon arriving at the offices, my carpool companion headed for the bathroom to clean herself up and don what were probably fashion-wise heels before riding the elevator to meet our hosts.  Given that her academic acumen certainly matched my own and her current aesthetics were vastly superior (my overcoat, shoes, and pants were covered in all manner of New Jersey snow and slush), I figured this interview was lost. 

            After our respective interviews, we rode home together and debriefed.  She felt insecure regarding some of her quantitative responses while I felt rather confident in myself.  I tempered any sense of success with the knowledge that this young woman was the type who would leave an exam concerned about her having passed, then receive a grade in the upper-echelon of the class.  I, on the other hand, generally predicted my exam performance quite accurately.  Thus, though our grades were probably quite similar, our perceptions thereof immediately following tests were greatly divergent.  Thus, on this day, I still presumed that I would be looking elsewhere for summer employment.  I was incorrect. 

            When I received an offer and my classmate did not, I was stunned that she had not been selected, but delighted at my own good fortune.  When I arrived for the job in June, the woman with whom I had interviewed months before pulled me aside to inform me that she would be my manager during the summer.  I was thrilled.  Having heard countless horror stories of arrogant, dictatorial, and petty-minded bosses, a positive experience seemed pre-ordained.  While our first few weeks together were characterized by the growing pains of my personal immaturity and my first taste of the corporate experience, generally, I was enjoying my work, my colleagues, and with the exception of my apartment’s defective air conditioning, my summer.

            As the 4^th week drew to a close, the tone of my summer would shift rapidly, and as a result so too would the course of my life.  Of course, the impacts from my perspective were pithy in scope compared to my erstwhile manager.  She was an athletic, healthy-looking woman in her late-twenties at the time, and from my perspective, a paragon of fitness.  This notwithstanding, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and took a leave from her position to begin treatment.  Despite what I can only imagine has been a period of pain on an emotional and physical level, she still managed to take the time to buy me lunch during my senior year, and even wrote on my behalf to the graduate school where I now study - kind and selfless in a truly impressive manner.

            Our paths diverged.  Her departure led to a lost intern and a lost summer.  I suppose the responsibility for this is shared between the managers forced to assume the burden of an ill-prepared intern for whom they never planned filling the role of the experienced consultant they hoped their project would receive in his place and the intern who, at that time, was neither the programmer, nor the person, nor the professional the job required.  I never received an offer of future employment, which led to applications to graduate school, which brought me from Champaign to a hedge-fund start-up, and back to the Midwest to work towards a Ph.D.  This journey has brought me joy, knowledge, perspective, wisdom, and love.  I was left to consider the alternative, had I remained as a consulting intern under the tutelage of the manager with whom I had worked more successfully.  Perhaps an offer would have been forthcoming, and being a child from a risk-averse, pay your bills first and worry about happiness second family, it is likely I would have accepted it.  While I doubt that such a decision would have left me dateless, depressed, or destitute in the long run, I also sincerely doubt I would have found my place in this world as easily.  I am neither religious, nor fatalistic by nature, and yet, I do feel as though this tremendously tragic event, a young woman’s cancer diagnosis, has changed by life dramatically, and ironically, for the better.

            I find myself acutely aware of the self-centered nature of this essay.  There is an inherent narcissism in recounting the effects one person’s nightmare as they relate to my highly untainted life experience.  I have, after all, been blessed (to date) with a healthy, relatively easy life.  I feel guilt that one person’s life’s misfortune has likely played a tremendously beneficial role in my own.  However, much as we cannot dictate whether or not the butterfly flaps its wings, Candide could not dictate the excruciating scenarios of his life, I obviously had no hand in whatever sparked the growth of malignant cells in my manager’s body.  I am left to feel fortunate, but also curious.  This woman, as best I can tell, has no knowledge of the course of my life, and certainly no awareness of the role her disease has played in it.  Perhaps, some choice I have made, some aspect of my life, some seemingly trivial detail has shaped the life of someone else.  Most likely, I will never know.

Jewish Foods, As Requested

So,
  Last friday night, over dinner, the song, "my favorite things," from the Sound of Music was discussed.  The ravenous dinner guests, all jewish, and all well-versed in the myriad dishes of our Eastern-European ancestry sparked my love of parody that had lay dormant for some time. 

This process taught me two lessons.  Firstly, one must shake of linguistic rust as one would need to reclaim athletic skills after an extended period of atrophy.  Secondly, locating appropriate rhymes for the odd, phlegm-filled sounds of these items was daunting in a way that mirroring Gilbert & Sullivan lyrics certainly was not.

Thus, here it is:

Babkas and Bagels, Bialys and Knishes,

Blitzes, Chopped Liver and luscious, smoked fishes,

Horseradish, brisket, the heartburn it brings…

These are a few of my favorite things!

Challah and Latkes and Kreplach and Kishke,

Kugel and Schnitzel and Kasha Varnishkes…

Macaroons, Mandelbrodt, food fit for kings,

These are a few of my favorite things!

Corned beef, Pastrami, and Roast beef and Strudel,

Schamaltz and Kneydls with Farfel and Noodles.

Sundays at delis and Christmas at Ming’s

These are a few of my favorite things!

When my nose runs, when jokes fail, when my rhymes are dull…

I just grab a plate of my favorite things…

I’m awkward, but then, I’m full!