Always Running is Excellent

I just finished reading Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Life in LA by Luis Rodriguez.  It is a memoir that Rodriguez started when he was 16 and is  about his life growing up as a member in one of the most vicious gangs in LA.  It is a window into a life that I am very glad that I never had to experience.  His feelings of neglect, isolation and rejection come tearing off the pages as his life spirals downward and he decides to leave school to join a gang full time.

His battles with drugs, alcohol, inhalants, violence, abusive police, racism, rival gangs and most of all, his family, are constant reminders about the life Rodriguez once lived and eventually escaped.

At first, his decision to join a gang baffled me.  It is evident from the beginning of the book that Rodriguez is smart kid.  It is also clear that he wants to be successful and will work hard to improve his chances at success, but for a long time, he does not.  He falls into gangs, drugs, crime and depression.

Its scary to think how easy it was for someone as brilliant and talented as Rodriguez to succumb to the gang lifestyle, even when he was smarter than most of his peers.  He was talented enough to do well in school, but did not. What does this example say about kids with lower intelligence or talent levels from similarly disadvantaged backgrounds?  If the smartest kid falls into gangs, the outlook must be even more dismal for the other, less talented kids.

Rodriguez’s thesis is that all kids, even smart kids, who feel isolated will try to carve out an existence for themselves.  In many cases in poor communities, the only niche available is gang life.  Rodriguez argues that the solution is creating opportunities and bringing disadvantaged kids in from isolation.  After reading the book, I think that I gained a new perspective on how many people in this country continue to feel on a daily basis.

I would highly recommend reading Always Running.

How Much is Fair to Tip a Tour Guide?

My friend (I can’t use her real name because her company does not like employees to talk about tips) graduated from UW-Madison this past May and decided to take a different path than most graduates.  Instead of setting for a 9-5 desk job, she decided to travel and get jobs wherever she ended up.  I truly admire her decision and hope I am able to do something similar at some point.

She is currently living in London working as a tour guide for free walking tours in central London.  She is paid a small wage per tour, but the bulk of her compensation comes from tips from tourists on her guided tours.

When she first began giving tours, she would wait until the end of the tour and then say “If you had fun, I will graciously accept tips.”  Some people would tip, but many would not and her Pounds per person rate was rather low.

Last week, she changed her pitch at the end of tours to “I work on a tips only basis, so if you had fun, I will graciously accept what you think this tour is worth.”  When she took a tour group past one of the many bus tours of central London, she would say “look at all of those lazy people on the buses.  They paid 30 pounds for their trip and all they do is sit.”

Her tips have increased by over 50%.

Her story is an interesting case of how small changes in messages to create a large change in viewer reaction.  The Nudges Blog talks about these types of issues every day.  She also uses anchoring to get people to think about what her tour is worth.  By letting her tourists know that people who are on the bus tours pay 30 Pounds, she is giving them an idea of what other tours are worth.  She is setting a high anchor for people so that when they are asked to tip, they base their tips on a known commodity.

Although her tips have increased, she is still looking for other nudges that will increase them even more.  See if you can help her out by posting your ideas in the comments.

Iceland’s Meltdown

I’ve written about Michael Lewis’ take on the Wall Street’s meltdown in my post “The Financial Crisis Explained.”  He is one of my favorite commentators and is able to take complex issues and write about them in a way that is comprehensible to the average person.

He recently wrote an article about Iceland’s meteoric rise to prominence in the global world of finance and later its amazing crash when the bubble burst.  His article should be required reading for anyone interested in finance or the global economy.

Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

I wanted to focus on an aspect of the article that I’ve written about in my post entitled “The Business School Way of Life.”  Lewis mentions that most, if not all, of the people who were involved in Iceland’s boom and bust had degrees from prestigious American and British business schools.  They learned the Business School Way of Life in America and brought it home to Iceland.  Everyone caught the fever and it has wrecked a once stable country.  Now, the currency is worthless and debt is 850% of GDP, higher than even the highly debt burdened USA’s 350%.

As an example of a person who fell into the Business School Way of Life is Stephan Alfsson. Lewis spends some time interviewing  Alfsson, a fishing boat captain turned financier, in his article.  Here’s Alfsson’s story:

Lean and hungry-looking, wearing genuine rather than designer stubble, Alfsson still looks more like a trawler captain than a financier. He went to sea at 16, and, in the off-season, to school to study fishing. He was made captain of an Icelandic fishing trawler at the shockingly young age of 23 and was regarded, I learned from other men, as something of a fishing prodigy—which is to say he had a gift for catching his quota of cod and haddock in the least amount of time. And yet, in January 2005, at 30, he up and quit fishing to join the currency-trading department of Landsbanki. He speculated in the financial markets for nearly two years, until the great bloodbath of October 2008, when he was sacked, along with every other Icelander who called himself a “trader.

So why would an expert fisherman, who began training to go to sea at age 16, promptly give up his job to turn to finance?  Why did he think that he could work in banks and be a “trader” when he had no experience and no training?  Similarly, who do students who leave business schools believe that they can accurately project risk?  Lewis tried to get Alfsson to answer:

“You spent seven years learning every little nuance of the fishing trade before you were granted the gift of learning from this great captain?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“And even then you had to sit at the feet of this great master for many months before you felt as if you knew what you were doing?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you think you could become a banker and speculate in financial markets, without a day of training?”

Alfsson does not have an answer and Lewis lets him off the hook, but I think that it was pure greed.  Alfsson and people like him were willing to try to get rich quick.  They saw everyone around them getting rich and decided that they wanted in on the action.  In Alfsson’s case, he saw people younger than him returning from American business schools and starting banks, seemingly making fortunes overnight.  The contrast between the hard work of a fisherman and the paper shuffling that was the Icelandic banking system cannot be any more stark, yet nobody wanted to raise a concern.  As Lewis puts it,

 At the very least, in a place where everyone knows everyone else, or his sister, you might have thought that the moment Stefan Alfsson walked into Landsbanki 10 people would have said, “Stefan, you’re a fisherman!” But they didn’t. To a shocking degree, they still don’t.

We are experiencing this same phenomenon in the US.  Why didn’t anyone try to stop the hedge funds, banks and private equity firms by saying “Hey, you just graduated from college, what do you know about CDOs and assessing risk?”  Why do many people who work in these firms still believe that they can correctly model future risk?  Why do business school students still go into finance without someone asking them questions like this?

The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is A Fraud

That is the title of a report compiled by Harry Markopolos in 2005 about Bernie Madoff’s fraudulent hedge fund.  He lists 30 red flags and ways for the SEC to verify if these red flags were true.  His report seems to have been almost completely ignored for almost four years.  He states that pretty much everyone knew that Madoff was a fraud, but did not want to risk their careers.  It shows the sad state of Wall Street that I talked about in my post about The Business School Way of Life.  Take the easy money, don’t rock the boat, look the other way, cash your check.

I won’t go into more detail, but the report is truly amazing.  Read it here.