Square Peg

     
You may be right
I may be crazy
But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for
Turn out the light
Don't try to save me
You may be wrong for all I know
But you may be right      
                       Billy Joel 1980

          A while back, I wrote an article acknowledging that I didn’t feel like I was an expert in anything.  Happily, I can now report that I was wrong.  I’m an expert in one thing: being the minority opinion.

Like an insidious disease, this realization snuck up on me.  When I was young, in my teens and 20s, I was too self-absorbed to really think about what was going on in the rest of the world.  Over time though, slowly, I started to realize that my beliefs were running against the mainstream. You know this from my blogs; on virtually every major (and minor) issue, my thinking is different.  Just to name a few:

Politics - Libertarian vs. Republican or Democrat;
Religion -  modern orthodox Judaism, a minority within a minority;
Diet - low carb vs. balanced;
Finance - don’t get me started.  Austrian vs. Keynesian economics, strong currency being a  positive, deflation being a good thing, etc.
Government - virtually none.

          You get the idea.  The point is not to try and convince people that I’m right, because I don’t care, and as there’s over 7 billion people in the world, it wouldn’t work anyway. Uniformity of opinion is impossible and changes over time.

          No, the point is to give solace and advice to the other sad, sad square pegs in a round world, whose brain doesn’t turn off.  As an expert in being a square peg, I feel uniquely qualified to give advise on this topic.

  The first bit of advice is, you better damn well be right.  If you are going against the consensus, and you’re wrong, you’re not alternative, you’re not edgy, you’re not clever. You’re just an idiot.  Why? Think about what you’re saying.  Many, many smart people have come before you, and together they have come to consensus on a topic.  The heavy lifting has already been done.  You’re confident/arrogant enough to think that the majority is wrong and you’re right.  If you’re going out on a limb like that, you better know what you’re doing.

  Now the solace part.  Life is more exciting on the right side of the bell curve.  Almost by definition successful people are in the minority.  Don’t be intimidated, or depressed, if you think differently.  There are more Camrys sold than 488 Spiders, but that doesn’t mean it’s a better car.  All the people that you truly respect (respect, not necessarily like), whether you’ve met them or not, I’m guessing they think differently than the masses.  Think about it.

  So hang in there.  You may be right.  Maybe eating fatty foods is good for you.  And the US will be in a recession within two years.  And camp’s dangerous.  And Van Morrison is as brilliant as Beethoven.

Or you may be crazy.  Eventually you, and I, will find out.  

  Have a good night everyone.

JR

Stopping Power

He sang a song as on he rode 
His guns hung at his hips
He rode into a cattle town
A smile upon his lips
He stopped and walked into a bar
And laid his money down
But his mother's words echoed again

Don't take your guns to town son 
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town

                                Johnny Cash 1958

          If you’ve read some of my blogs, you know my belief that anyone can quickly figure out the correct answers to the important questions we face in life (health/diet, finance, government, raising children, etc.).  All the information is now at our fingertips, we just have to sift through the non-evidenced based garbage to get the right answer. The problem is ideology, which causes the garbage to be written in the first place, and why so many people have difficulty sifting though it to get to the impartial evidence.

  Which brings me to guns.  One of my primary motivating factors in life is protecting my family from harm.  You would think it would be a simple task to examine the objective evidence to determine if owning a gun helped or hindered.  You would be wrong.  The problem is the articles tend to be hopelessly biased, one way or the other.  Gun ownership is like the ideological bellwether of our time.  Nothing is more of a hot button issue, and nothing produces more opinionated, partial articles.

Even if the writer is trying to write objectively, political correctness and multiple variables make it difficult to get a straight answer.  For example, comparing other countries to America is not so helpful when the demographics are different.  Facebook and the news don’t exactly help either.  Whenever there is a mass killing, I am bombarded by very loud, very visceral reactions on both sides.  Most of the articles posted are designed not to get to the truth, but to arrive at the author’s hoped for conclusion.

So my usual strategy of dumping my ideology and seeing where the evidence takes me doesn’t really work here.  At least not yet.  If I were to stick with my ideology the answer would be easy.  Of course I would own a gun.  I hate just about all government, and owning a gun is the quintessential symbol opposing government overreach and tyranny.  My whole libertarian political philosophy is of freedom, and guns are also a symbol of that.  And guns are just damn cool.

But none of that protects my family.  So at the end of the day I had to make a call based on the best sifting of the objective evidence that I could do, even if I don’t feel as firm in my conclusion as I normally do.

My call was to get a gun.

As best as I could gather, the deterrent affect of showing or using a gun outweighs the tiny risk of your family getting shot, either by accident or the perpetrator.  I find, Your Honor, that the media in study after study is shown to be overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, and under reports the times where the perpetrator is deterred.  I further find, Judge, that people greatly overestimate the risk of certain dangers (like children getting shot from a gun in the house) while underestimating the risk of other dangers (like children swimming).

So there it is.  I got one.  Okay, maybe more than one.  I don’t want to go down, but if I do go down I’d rather be on my feet than my knees.  With hopefully everyone else safe.

Have a good night everyone.

JR

Diversity Delusion

Welcome to the working week
Oh, I know it don't thrill you, I hope it don't kill you
Welcome to the working week
You gotta do it till you're through, so you better get to it

                        Elvis Costello 1977

          Like many bad ideas, the concept of diversity sprang from good intentions.  In this case, to combat discrimination.  Besides the usual reasons why discrimination is a bad idea, from an economic perspective it will never work.  It reduces the pool of capable workers, so it will always reduce efficiency.

So at first diversity just meant don’t discriminate, which was good.  But then it morphed into the idea that every group or organization should have representatives from different skin colors, genders, ethnic backgrounds, and religions.  It took on a life of its own.  It became the ultimate American value.  Within a few years every business, politician, religious leader, and speaker couldn't go five sentences without telling us how great diversity is.  “Diversity is our greatest strength”.  “We strive to have a diverse workforce”.  “We want our company to look like America.”

          There’s just one problem with this.  It’s not true.  It’s nonsense.  There is no evidence that diversity makes any group or company stronger either economically or otherwise.  I've yet to see an impartial study showing that businesses or countries are more productive or wealthier the more diverse they are.  There are two reasons for this.

First, just as discrimination reduces the pool of available talent, diversity reduces it.  Let’s use an example from my favorite small business: me.  I have 8 employees, six are black and six are women.  I chose everyone based on their ability to help me with my favorite business activity: making money.  Let’s say there was either legal or societal pressure to change the demographics of my workforce.  Could I do it? Yes.  Would I be less productive? Yes, and drastically so.  I would basically be saying that the people I thought were the most productive would be replaced by individuals that I did not think possessed as good a skills as the first group.  Almost by definition I would be less profitable. The odds that group 2 would have the same demographics as group 1 are between slim and none.

Second, all the factors that go into today’s diversity have no bearing on whether someone is a good employee.  I look for 3 main characteristics when hiring; brains, talent, and the ability to get along with coworkers.  How exactly does someone’s skin color affect any of these three? Or religion? Or sex? When you put people into business positions where anything except brains, talent, and personality are primary, the results are predictable.

I know some big companies have long-winded statements where they extol how they strive to be a wonderfully diverse place to work.  Since I’m a small fish I don’t have anything like that.  But if I did it would go something like this:

“Thank you for applying to my firm.  If you have a vagina, congratulations, but it will not help or hinder you in working for me.  I don’t care about your sexual orientation; trust me, we won’t be sleeping together.  Your skin color is irrelevant, because I haven’t yet figured out a way to convert the color of your skin to green in my pocket.  I don’t care about your background or how you got to me, I just want to know that you can do the job today.  Your religion is also irrelevant, unless you can convince whatever God you pray to to bless me with prosperity.  In short, are you smart, do you work hard, do you get along with people? Yes, yes, and yes?  Fantastic! This could be the start of something wonderful...”.

Have a good night everyone.

JR