Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Them Goodbye

Below is an email that I sent to the Chicago White Sox this week.

Dear Chicago White Sox Organization:

The Chicago White Sox have been part of my life as long as I can remember.  One of my earliest memories was being on my father’s lap during a fireworks show at old Comiskey.  I had a treasured ball hit by Don Buford when I was a boy.  I also kept a 1967 yearbook and I remember Joel Horlen, Smokey Burgess and Ken Berry.  In high school, I reveled in the South Side Hit Men and that exciting summer of 1977 with Nancy Faust playing “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” after Ritchie Zisk and Oscar Gamble pounded home runs all summer long.  Later, there was the ’83 Winning Ugly team and, of course, the capstone of the glorious 2005 World Series victory.  I have a lifetime of memories around the White Sox.

Just prior to the COVID19 outbreak, a consultant and I were discussing the purchase of a ticket package for client entertainment.  The White Sox looked like an exciting team this year with exciting prospects.

All of this is gone now.  I am writing to tell you that I will not set foot at Guaranteed Rate (or whatever your ballpark is called in the future) again.  I have unfollowed all the MLB and White Sox related sites on social media.  The old yearbook has been pitched.

MLB’s support and alliance with Black Lives Matter makes attending a ballgame distasteful and intolerable.  This Marxist organization is committed to, among other things, “the disruption of the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Night after night, we have seen the violence, looting and havoc wreaked by BLM members in its name.  Their members chant “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” and “What do we want? Dead cops.  When do we want it? Now.”   The founders of Black Lives Matter are “trained Marxists” (their own words) and one of their representatives explicitly told Martha MacCallum that he intended to “burn it all down.”  It is reprehensible that the league intends to support and promote an organization that openly advocates Marxism, the destruction of the family, and violence against law enforcement. 

Most hypocritical of all is one of your star players, Jose Abreu,  who joined the kneelers.  Abreu somehow made his  way out of Communist Cuba to come to the U.S. to play ball.  Had he remained in Cuba,  he’d still be eating rice and beans with his ration of chicken and playing in rickety, run down ballparks.  Instead, he was able to escape and make millions, and he now disgraces the freedom and riches that this great nation offered him.  If Marxism was for him, why did he bother to go through the machinations required to leave his beloved Cuba?

Baseball is truly the American pastime.  I was eagerly looking forward to the start of this shortened season, the Field of Dreams game this summer and a young team that looked like it will be competitive for many years,  and it saddens me that I will miss all that.  But you and the rest of the league have chosen to abandon me as a fan and customer, so I am abandoning you.  I will not be purchasing the ticket package this year….or ever.  I will use my leisure time to pursue other activities, and I will find other ways to entertain clients. 

Best of luck to you and the league.   The COVID19 experience will allow your players get accustomed to playing in empty stadiums.

Teaching Management Skills?

I saw this coming but harbored secret hopes that the Booth School of Business and the Becker Friedman Center at The University of Chicago could resist, but alas their resolve is collapsing.  From what I can gather, only tiny Hillsdale College has been able to stand firm and not kneel before  the BLM forces.

As a prelude, a few years ago, I attended a program at the Becker Friedman Institute, chaired by then director John List to hear economist Casey Mulligan speak.  In his introductory remarks, List spoke about building the pipeline for Chicago, how it is attempting to recruit top notch faculty, and how difficult it is to hold on to talent as other schools constantly attempt to poach Chicago faculty.  I noted then that I heard only words of “academic excellence,” “intellectual rigor,” “creativity” and the like.  List uttered not one word about “diversity” and “inclusiveness.” But that was then and this is now.

Last week, Dean of the Booth School of Business Madhav Rajan sent out a blast email to alumni with the subject line “Strengthening Diversity and Inclusion at Booth” (reprinted below).

In it, Rajan outlines a major push purportedly to improve “diversity and inclusion” at Booth.  Rajan, who hails from India (I’m never sure where Indians fit into Woke culture of whites versus brown and black people) dispatches a missive that could have come from any progressive liberal arts college in the country.  Booth is consistently ranked among the top 5 business schools in the country and is known for its top flight economists, and quantitative rigor, yet Rajan felt compelled to worship the diversity gods in a very pedestrian and ordinary way. 

Here are my responses to Rajan’s missive:

-        Rajan is compelled to invoke George Floyd in his opening paragraph.  While Floyd’s death sparked a great deal of unrest and it appears to have been a case of terrible police brutality, that single incident should not be sufficient to require a wholesale shift of focus of the school.  Among other things, Floyd’s death has not yet been adjudicated, the facts have not been fully heard (Floyd had fentanyl in his system) and there is not a shred of solid evidence to show that his death was racially motivated, or even whether he was killed by the officer. To be clear, Mr. Floyd himself was a very bad man—so bad, in fact, that society determined that he had to be removed from it for five years—a long sentence.  It does not appear that Mr. Floyd hadn’t learned his lesson and was not very repentant as he was still engaged in illegal activity.  So to invoke George Floyd as an impetus for a major initiative at a business school seems misplaced, to say the least.

-        Rajan blindly accepts the term “inclusion.” What does that term mean, exactly?  For its entire history, the Booth School of Business stood for something quite the opposite—it was “exclusive.”   This is a school with Nobel Prize winners on its faculty.   It is an intellectually ELITE school.  It boasted average GMAT scores of 730 or better, which is in the 95^th  percentile.  Additionally, Booth’s emphasis on mathematical ability will skew admissions even further.  The Booth School is, and should be, exclusive, not inclusive.  It screens out applicants that do not have the quantitative aptitude to handle the rigor of its curriculum.  Its faculty is even more elite, and its stated goal has been to attract and retain faculty members that are the equivalent of academic Olympic athletes, regardless of skin color. 

      

       Astonishingly, as part of his “diversity and inclusiveness” push, Rajan proposes to include “unconscious bias training.”  Much has been written about the ineffectiveness of such training in corporate America.  There is no definitive empirical evidence that it does anything much.  The very institution most known for its ability to empirically test hypotheses now proposes to include mandatory training that its own management that has no quantifiable effectiveness.  It's almost as if Rajan had Ta-Nehisi Coates as an advisor.

-        Most importantly, minorities (Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans)  make up 27% of the student body at Chicago Booth.   The latest census shows that such minorities make up 30% of the U.S. population.  Unless I’m missing the point, it looks like the Booth School of Business is awful darn close to reflecting the general population in its student body.  Rajan appears to be investing an awful lot of time and resources into a problem that does not seem to exist.  The numbers don’t break out percentages among minority groups, and if Rajan is focused on African Americans, he needs to say that.  Otherwise, the numbers don’t support his assertion.

Dean Rajan’s email is troubling on a number of fronts.  This is a school that relentlessly challenges its students to identify and solve the right problem and utilize quantitative tools to marshal resources and to measure progress.  Yet, Rajan puts forward scant evidence that the Booth School has fallen flat in its minority representation.  Moreover, if not enough minorities (especially African Americans) have the quantitative skills to perform at Booth, that is not a problem Rajan can solve.  Those skills are acquired much earlier in life.  By the time someone is 21 or older, it’s too late.   That is the job of primary, secondary and universities to tackle, and not a graduate school.   

The leader of one of the top business schools in the country misidentifies a problem, allocates scarce resources to solving it, proposes steps that are known to be ineffective, and doesn’t appropriately measure any of it.  That’s all the elements of poor management.  Rajan missed an opportunity to bring a uniquely Chicago approach and voice to the conversation and instead opted to send a message that could have been written by any other college president or dean.

________________________________________________________________________

Dear Chicago Booth Community, As you may have seen, the University of Chicago recently announced its plans to address Diversity and Inclusion across the university, in response to recent events including the killing of George Floyd. Chicago Booth welcomes these steps and reaffirms the school’s unwavering commitment to diversity and inclusion, and rejection of racism. Over the past several weeks, I and my senior leadership team have been in conversation with many in our community of students, alumni, faculty, and staff to evaluate and strengthen our work to address racism and create positive change across Chicago Booth. I am thankful to those of you who lifted your voices and demonstrated your deep concern for your school and community. Inspired by the discussions with our full- and part-time MBA community, this week we shared with the students our initial Plan of Action to strengthen diversity and inclusion at Booth. These near- and long-term steps cover a broad range of areas, including student admissions, curriculum, faculty and staff, communications, employer relations, and engagement. The important work articulated in the plan is currently under way, but this is just the first step. We continue to consider ways we can do more and measure our progress going forward. We recognize that diversity and inclusion is a dynamic issue that affects people in different ways, and we understand this will be experienced differently among members of our global community. While we developed this plan with input from our MBA students, these conversations are also taking place across various facets of the school. I would like to express my gratitude to our MBA students, and in particular the students of the African American MBA Association and our student leaders, for sharing their stories, feedback, and ideas to effect meaningful change. Our students’ honesty, passion, and commitment to seeing the school excel have been and will continue to be crucial to our success in making Booth a more diverse and inclusive institution and community. Best wishes, Madhav

Tainted Warrior?

In a chaotic world starved for leadership, I thought we had a solid leader in Jim Mattis.  Indeed, when he resigned as Secretary of Defense in December, 2018 over troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, I, along with many, felt a sense of loss.  The conventional narrative was that Mattis brought respect and a sober timbre to an administration that seemed to be at sea on the world stage.

We were wrong.  Dead wrong.  And let me explain how my views on Mattis did a 180 degree turn.

It turns  out that Mattis had a carefully cultivated public image.  He seemed to be a warrior from another era, almost Patton-like.  In a time when we have mostly fought wars to a stalemate or an inconclusive outcome, his pithy quotes captured our longing for a simpler time:

“I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery.  But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes:  If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.”

“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”

“There are some people who think you have to hate them in order to shoot them.  I don’t think you do. It’s just business.”

How could he not stir up the warrior spirit in you?

So I eagerly signed up to hear him speak last September at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. And as I do with most of these events, I brought my notebook with to take notes in case that I want to blog about it.  I’m glad I did.

Mattis spent a good deal of time in his opening remarks about his leaving the administration his post administration duty.  He simply said that he had left over “policy differences,” which was the appropriate thing to say.  But Mattis went on to outline the set of principles for leaving.  He said he did not want to talk about his personal relationship with Trump.  More importantly, he emphasized his “Duty of Silence” and said that there is a long held tradition in the military about not passing political judgments. He said that the country is dealing with difficult issues, that he had a “duty of quiet” to allow the administration to continue.  He asserted, “It is vital not to give our adversaries the appearance of weakness.”

That was the backdrop of Mattis’s betrayal of President Trump a few weeks ago, when he renounced Trump in a most harshly written statement.  Breaking his “duty of silence,” Mattis considered Trump a “threat to the Constitution.”  As the barbarians were literally at the gates of the White House and threatening to overrun the place, Mattis wrote off the mob, saying “we must not get distracted by a small number of lawbreakers.”  He apparently did not see---or chose not to see--- the people throwing bricks and Molotov Cocktails at police and the hundreds that smashed small businesses and storefronts in cities across the United States.  He did not see the storekeeper murdered by the mob or the security guard killed in Oakland.  Instead, Mattis chose to excoriate his former boss by stating, “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—he does not even pretend to try.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m disinclined to try to unite with folks that would throw bricks at cops, no matter what their beef, or burn and loot the stores of small shopkeepers.

Mattis’s statement doesn’t even sound like it was written by him.  It sounds like it was written by some editor at the Washington Post or the New York Times.

  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/james-mattis-denounces-trump-protests-militarization/612640/

But this is not the only lapse in judgment by Mattis.  He himself admitted that he did not persuade the right people of his plan to close on Osama bin Laden and that led to his escape at Tora Bora (with terrible consequences for which we are still paying).  As a commander in Iraq, he made a terrible judgment in ordering the bombing of a “safe house” that turned out to be a wedding party, killing 42 innocents.  Mattis was also on the board of directors of the notorious Theranos, the company run by Elizabeth Holmes and her lover, Sonny Balwani.  Not only was Mattis on the board while Holmes and Balwani were perpetuating the fraud described in John Carryrou’s book, Bad Blood, Mattis actively pushed to have the fraudulent equipment adopted by the military.  Like former Secretary of State George Shultz, Mattis was star struck by the charismatic Holmes.  While the board of directors has not been named as a defendant, Mattis apparently did not take a very skeptical posture as a board member and as a representative of the military with respect to Holmes and her company.

I am loathe to criticize someone that has spent a career serving the country.  But his last scalding of President Trump caused me to re-evaluate my views of Mattis and when I added up the string of awful lapses in judgment, I conclude that his PR has outrun his performance, especially when I realized that his self proclaimed "duty of silence" had a rather short expiration date.

Enviro-Hysteria

My blog sometimes writes itself.  I have begun the practice of posting responses to email correspondence that I receive from friends and family in which I take an opposing position.  I take care not to identify the recipient of my correspondence since in this day and age of doxxing or otherwise outing, I do not wish to cause damage to someone else's livelihood or reputation but at the same time, I will not hesitate to respond with an appropriate counterargument.  In this case, the recipient had sent me some arguments on climate change and the suggestion that I read a book in which the author proposes that the solution is to radically reduce human consumption and, presumably, with a similar reduction in economic activity (after I had forwarded a presentation by Lars Peter Hansen on climate modeling).  Below is my response:

Dear ______:

Happy 4^th  of July,  if in fact you are celebrating.  I no longer take saying that for granted since it appears that a significant part of our nation is quite unhappy over the nation’s founding. 

But as to Lars Peter Hansen, it is certainly the case that he is not as effervescent as, say, the patron goddess of the climate change religion, Greta Thunberg.   To be sure, he does not present with as much flair and drama.  But he did win a Nobel Prize in economics, with his work centered around risk and modeling.

Which brings me to the point of the proposal, which, without reading the entire book, suggests that the solution to climate change (if, in fact, it has anything to do with human activity) lies in radically reducing human consumption, and, logically, economic activity.

An analysis of climate change actually consists of three independent parts, which must be viewed independently and together in order to formulate a sensible approach.   The issue I have, without reading the book (and I will at some future time) is that it jumps right to a proposed solution, which is likely the very worst possible solution to climate change.

But before I explain why, let me tell you why I have a high level of skepticism over the whole issue. The environmental hysterics have a perfect track record.  They have been consistently wrong for over 50 years.  Not just wrong once.  And not just a little bit wrong.  Spectacularly wrong.  The Godfather of Environmental Whiffs is Paul Ehrlich.  I still have the book for which I prepared a book report in 7^th grade. In Population Resources Environment, Ehrlich proposed Nazi-like restrictions on population growth because of the fallacious “carrying capacity” of the earth.  He predicted that if nothing was done, we would face mass starvation on the planet, among other horribles, by the mid 1980’s.  None of that occurred.  By 2016 in fact, abject poverty had been reduced from about 40% of the world population at the time Ehrlich made his claims, to about 10%.   Rather than an overpopulation, many countries are now facing a population swoon.  China, Russia, Japan, and much of Europe are not reproducing at replacement rate and are having terrible demographic issues as a result.   Poland and Hungary are engaged in various incentives so that women will have more babies.  Had the world’s nations followed Ehrlich’s prescription, it would even be in more desperate demographic shape.  Worse, Ehrlich’s proposals relied on enforcement mechanisms that the Third Reich would have been proud of.

Ehrlich was the first enviro-flop, but certainly not the last.  Enviro-hysteria is nothing, if not consistent. The hole in the ozone layer was supposed to go global and we were all going to fry like bacon, remember?  The hole magically healed with the elimination of fluorocarbons.  Then there was the hysteria over acid rain.  Acid rain was going to denude all trees and other foliage in North America by the mid 1990’s and poison all the lakes and rivers.  As I write this, and look out my window, all the trees have bright green leaves and I just got back from Bass Pro Shop where people were stocking up on fishing gear, so we apparently still have some fish in our lakes and streams.   Then, there was “peak oil.”   “Peak Oil” has apparently been supplanted by “Systemic Racism” as the apparition issue de jure.  Because oil is a finite commodity, and we already had found the easy-to-get-to stuff, our economies would have to adjust to a scarce and expensive commodity.  Again, none of that came to pass.  No one talks about “peak oil” anymore.  We are literally drowning in the stuff.  Technological advances such as horizontal drilling and fracking made yet another enviro-scare not come true.

The environmental movement boasts a forecasting track record so poor that economists and weather forecasters look like soothsayers in comparison.

But we only have to look at our current catastrophe to see how “science” and policy based on “models” interact, especially when “experts” and international bodies are involved, as is the case with climate change.  We were initially told by W.H.O. that COVID19 could not be transmitted human-to-human.  The W.H.O. then told us that China self reported the virus and that turned out to be false.  Then, relying on models predicting 2 million deaths, we shut an entire economy down.  The initial models turned out to be off not by 5 or 10% but by 1000% or more.  Worse, we have terrible and extremely unreliable data, as deaths by other causes are lumped into the data.  Initially, we were told that the death rate might be as high as 2%.  It’s really probably around .3%, and much less among those younger than 65. And if you throw out the deaths that were CAUSED by putting infected people into nursing homes, it may be even less.  We were told that it could survive on surfaces for 9 days and be able to be transmitted that way.  Then we were told that transmission from a surface was rare.  Dr. Fauci first said masks were largely symbolic.  Now, he wants us to wear them in public at all times.  Most recently, Dr. Fauci said that we should not “balance lives against the economy” which tells you that he doesn’t understand risk assessment at all.  We do that in all things, like driving cars.  And we MUST do that with COVID19. The “deaths” of despair,” i.e. suicide, drug overdoses, alcohol related deaths, deaths due to social discord, are piling up and our children are being prevented from receiving an education while the “experts” are advising us to “play it safe.”

COVID19 provides insight into risk assessment and risk balancing of science and policy, and we see how awful, misguided, and unnecessarily damaging to peoples’ lives when poorly understood science is met with bureaucratic policy blunders.

After the disastrous management of COVID19—the inaccurate and misleading measurement, widely incorrect model predictions, and catastrophic policy response, does any thinking person really believe that all of these aspects (and you need ALL of them to work properly) will do any better in reducing global temperatures by a degree or two in 100 years, especially given the track record of the environmental hysterics so far?  The COVID19 modeling was as if the team lined up for a field goal and kicked it into the stands at midfield.  What faith do you have that the climate change crew will do any better?

Finally, it is fine if people want to voluntarily reduce their consumption of certain goods.  They are free to do so now.  But any government mandate or coercion that would require that involves the kind of tyrannical government that I will resist with every fiber of my body until my last breath.

Lars Peter Hansen may not be the most exciting person to listen to, but he is skilled at inducing a little epistemic humility before we are condemned to living in one room shacks with our allotment of rice and beans that the environmentalists would like to place us in.  It is the opposite strategy, a vibrant, free and innovative economy that is most likely to lead to less environmentally impactful energy technologies.