And Tennessee, Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts…….Traveling little dog.
I’ve now had 2 street addresses where the house number is 123. What are the odds? Considering I’ve had more than 50 addresses over the years—perhaps not as remote as I would have thought.
As expected, Q4 of 2023 is a whirlwind of travel between Ohio, West Virginia, DC, and long drives to Florida and Boston/Worcester. Hyper-driving Nomads. Marti has more state visits on her pawsport than many people I know. We are driving because Marti is just a little too big to fly. And a little too immature. She’s getting there—learning to become a dog. But she’s still a puppy in most respects. She’s darling and sweet and pretty damned independent. Not sure where that comes from.
Marti has done great on our travels. Lots of car time and hotel time. In DC, while I met with some friends/colleagues to sketch out a new charity we are forming, Brittany showed Marti the highlights of DC. They even joined the Palestinians for Peace protest march. So Marti is now a revolutionary.
We had a good visit to see Brittany’s dad in Tampa. We once again had Thanksgiving dinner with their friends Bob & Sonja. They are a cute older couple. Super sweet and very diligent about their hosting duties. The table was set beautifully with name plates and of course amazing food and drinks.
I wound up buying their 2006 BMW 330Ci convertible before leaving. So now I need to figure out how to get that car to Ohio. I was looking for a small, older convertible to tool around in next summer and this was a good price on a good car that has been well cared for. So why not.
We had a nice dinner at the amazing Christiano’s in Clearwater and I drank some tequila with Brit’s dad a couple of nights. In Atlanta we met with Brittany’s chill brother and cousin (Marvin and Deanna). Lovely, smart, fun, super cool folks.
We stopped in Asheville and Savannah on the way down and in Atlanta and Lexington on the way back. Last year we were in this same Lexington Marriott on New Year’s eve and this year on Saturday after T-giving. Same bartender who remembered us. We watched Ohio State lose to Michigan again and I again was glad. I’ve no football loyalties, but don’t like the smugness of Ohio State or their fans. So happy to see them have a bad day once in a while.
It’s early morning now. Brittany and Marti are curled up together in slumber and I’ve already read all the papers and given my best but unsuccessful try at the Sunday NY Times Crossword. So why not write a few lines.
When in Somerset, I’ve been taking Marti to the old family farm for our long walks. There are no cattle in the back fields, so we drive to the orchard and park there by the little pond. She is beginning to know the place, as I did for so many summers and weekends in the 60’s and 70’s.
In other news, a cousin of mine passed away. She was only 52 but has been in a long skirmish with cancer which finally wore her down. We will be back home on Monday for her life celebration. Heidi had a hard life all along the way. For many reasons. She just never got a break. So it’s a sad situation of course.
I’m always disappointed when some prophetic statement I made years ago emerges as relevant, and there is no one around to pat me on the back for my brilliance. In this latest installment of Poor Rob is unappreciated, I note an article in The NY Times of Monday November 6, in which the problem of wealth inequality is discussed in some depth. This articles focuses on how western economists have significantly misread the situation and missed the mark on both the magnitude of the problem, and the cure for the issue. I have a joke and a key observation I have made about economists over the years and both are underscored in the quote from the article I have captured here.
First, I’ve routinely noted how one of the fundamental assumptions of economic models is that people will act in their own self-interest. Yet we have seen year after year, voters, particularly conservatives, routinely vote against their own best interest. Poor republicans, who could benefit from government for food support, education support, job re-training and a host of other safety net offerings, vote instead to reduce government spending on social programs and also to cut taxes on the wealthy. They vote heavily in favor of more and more military spending while urging their representatives to cut funding for all social safety net programs. So this basic assumption may have been true decades ago, but clearly there is a large voting bloc willing to vote against their own self-interest to ‘stick it to the lib-tards’ or simply because they cannot extricate themselves from the gravity of the paradigm thinking they’ve always subscribed to.
My 2nd point, and normally delivered in the form of a joke of sorts has to do with economics as a discipline. I believe economic thought leadership went through an identity crisis in the 60’s and 70’s. Economics in those days was mostly a side show to the hard sciences who took us to the moon and created the technology underpinnings for PC’s and the intranet and all the other technology enhancements that today are pervasive. Economists wanted their discipline to be perceived as a hard science too—they were jealous of their colleagues getting all the attention. So they started adding a lot more complicated financial modeling and statistics to their curriculums to show everyone they could do math too. None of it seemed to actually make economic predictions more accurate, as time after time they have failed to predict recessions or guided recoveries successfully. Of course, if several thousand economists make predictions, there will be a few whose darts hit closer to center than others. But clearly economics is not yet anywhere near a level of accuracy as hard science disciplines. And of course this makes sense because economics deals very largely with the behavior of humans which is nearly impossible to predict with accuracy. Because, as we know, humans are crazy and mercurial.
And, as noted above, many are willing to support counter-productive policies simply out of spite or willful ignorance. Just look at recent polling which shows Donald Trump, with 96 indictments, leading Joe Biden in the presidential election. The rationale Trump supporters are using is so void of any logic or relevance to actual events as to be completely bat shit crazy.
So, the quote below addresses both of my observations, which have been documented in this forum on multiple occasions.
Milanovic, formerly the lead economist in the World Bank’s research department and the author of several book about global inequality, describes how Western economists were in thrall to an unholy combination of extremely simplistic assumptions and extremely complex mathematical models: “It was almost as if they wanted their model world to look as different as possible from the world where people lived.”
This idealized approach was eventually overwhelmed by the unruly reality, with the neoclassical economist cloistered in his ivory tower, contemplating his quaint abstractions, becoming the stuff of caricature. The financial crisis of 2008, Occupy Wall Street, the 2014 publication in English of “Capital in the 21st Century,” the 700-page best seller by the French economist Thomas Piketty: Milanovic shows how inequality went from a subject “hovering in the background” to a pressing issue at “the forefront of people’s consciousness.”
Jennifer Szalai,
Economists Ignored Inequality for Y ears.
Now They Can’t Stop T alking About It
So, there you go. Go Rob! The entire article can be accessed here:
I’ve not been at Black Dog Ridge near as much as I wish. We are in a frantic travel situation now until I finish this project in January. But then we will get back to something resembling normal for this nomad. I think I will have a total of only about 2 weeks at BDR in the last two months of the year, and only 2 or 3 days in all of December.
Marti went on a deer hunt the last time we were there. She managed to chase down a young fawn that was hurt. The deer was not capable of getting away from Marti because of its injury. Long story short, I chased them a few miles, including crossing the river several times. I finally was able to jump on Marti just before her little legs got under her after swimming the river to chase the deer. So the great deerhunter was carried in my arms back to the jeep and finally back home to warm up on the couch in front of the fire. We were both drenched and exhausted by the time I finally collected her.
But the hunt was unsuccessful. The little deer will not last long in this forest with a bad leg however.
At the center of my world now is mostly just work. In spite of visiting family and friends and the holidays, work is very busy as we prepare to deploy the system we’ve been building now for 2 years. I don’t like this anxiety and sense of dread about what might go wrong—it creates a manic urge of analysis and over-thinking and double-checking and re-hashing and visualizing every moment from the time we start shutting down old systems and bringing up the new ones. If we can’t run all the hospitals and medical centers on January 1, then shit starts to really get really real in a hurry. All signs are that we are in a good place, but…..
A good bit of this drive to and from Florida was with Brittany driving and me taking a meeting on my laptop. Camera on with Marti looking over my shoulder as we motored up the highway. In the hotels, I was mostly working while Brittany visited her family and took care of Marti. So remote work is somewhat handy—but it’s still work.
Anyway……I must have some addiction to this environment because I stay in it. And it pays the bills better than the other follies I have pursued over the years. I’ve turned a hand at a lot of vocations, and have few regrets. Intellectual curiosity mixed with a lack of passion for corporate life has pushed me all over the career map. And the literal map I suppose.
Addresses and careers are fluid in my world.
No other news of note.
Humbly submitted.
The Martini Tales 