Art Collecting: Learn While You Earn* 

“The only time life allows for happiness is the present. Right now. In this very moment.” – Michael Masterson

Investing in museum-quality art will make you richer financially as the years pass, but owning that art will give you a richer experience of life every time you look at it.

Like literature, art can make statements and tell stories. Like music, it can stir up strong emotions. And like dance, it can elevate your notion of beauty.

This is the softer side of art collecting – and this is why I like it so much.

I won’t try to convince you of it now, but I believe that the three best ways to enjoy life are through loving, working, and learning.

To enjoy the people you spend time with, you must love them. Loving them – not being loved by them – is what provides the real pleasure.

To enjoy what you do in life, you must find work that is meaningful to you or you must find meaning in the work you do. Then you must work long and hard at it with purpose.

And to enjoy the things in your life, you must acquire things that are meaningful to you or find meaning in the things you have. Then you must devote your time to learning about them and from them.

It is that last secret to enjoying life that we will be exploring here.

Art can describe things… 

One type of art that I love looking at is what I call, for a lack of a better term, descriptive art. By that I mean images that describe events and situations in vivid detail. I learn from that sort of art by studying the details and trying to put them together to arrive at an understanding of what is actually going on.

For example, I love the work of the early Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. I like the imagery in his murals and triptychs. I particularly like his grotesque depictions of hell, showing the many ways sinners will be tortured for eternity. (To see one of my favorites, do a Google search for Hell 2 by Bosch.)

I love looking at 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century Flemish paintings of everyday life, as well. Van Eyck… Brueghel… Rubens… give me a window into a different time, a world that no longer exists. I like to see what the people are doing, how they are dressed, and the tools they work with. (For a few examples of what I’m talking about, do a Google search for Magdalen Reading by Rogier van der Weyden, The Moneylender and His Wife by Quentin Matsys, and  Hélène Fourment in a Fur Cloak by Pieter Paul Rubens.)

Art can tell a story… 

Do you remember how, when you were very young, you could read a story over and over without any decrease in the pleasure it gave you? That’s how I feel when I look at the work of figurative painters like Andrew Wyeth.

I call this narrative art (again, my term) because it tells a story. And like literary fiction, I don’t like every narrative painting I see. But when I do like one, I am able to get never-ending pleasure from it. Each time I look at it, I slip into a reverie that feels both fresh and nostalgic.

For me, the best narrative art is not explicit in its storytelling. There is a story there, but it is not obvious. Its value for me lies, interestingly, in its lack of detail – the opposite of what pleases me about descriptive art.

When narrative art has too much detail about the story, my pleasure wanes the more I look at it. Thus, though I like Norman Rockwell, I can’t get the lasting pleasure from looking at his work that I get from a painting by Andrew Wyeth.

Art can make a statement… 

For as long as art has existed, it has been used to make social, political, artistic, and even personal statements. I think of this as rhetorical art because its purpose is to persuade. Examples that pop to mind are Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, George Grosz’s Grey Day, Frida Kahlo’s Diego and I, and Ai Weiwei’s Law of the Journey.

Then there are the genres: the nationalist poster art of WWI , the patriotic illustrations of Norman Rockwell and his imitators, WPA art, the Mexican muralists, the Chinese communist posters, the Chinese anticommunist realists, the American graffiti artists, etc.

In terms of medium, style, and expression, they run the gamut. But their purpose was the same: to promote an idea, ideology, or view of the world in a didactic way. Their work was meant to inform and enlighten, not to inspire or please.

And yet, many of them were masterfully done and have entered into the heights of the most sought after art.

I am fascinated by poster art but I don’t collect it. I do invest in the modern Mexican muralists and many WPA artists. The best pieces are out of my range. Those I visit in museums. I do not enjoy them for their messaging. I dislike overt messaging in every realm of art. What I like, usually, is the bold imagery and the colors. Yes, they are making statements. But if you enjoy the art, as I do, you can ignore those statements.

Art can stir up useful feelings… 

In my collection of paintings and sculptures, there are a fair number that move me in ways that I can’t quite understand. Most of them are either abstract or impressionist, not realistic depictions of dramatic events or scenes. But the emotions they provoke are strong and consistent. One painting may stimulate a vague nostalgia. Another painting may prompt a bright feeling of hope or optimism. Yet a third painting may evoke a feeling of dread. I don’t know why.

I do know that I tend to look at these paintings on purpose – not accidentally.  On another day, I might pass by an impressionist view of a silhouette of a black boat in a green lake against a yellow sky, but today I stop to look at it because I know, subconsciously, that I need a dose of the feeling it always gives me.

I might look at a small sculpture that I own by Henry Moore when I need the stimulus to be more serious about my work, or look up a photo of a sculpture by Umberto Boccioni when I need an aesthetic injection of emotional strength.

I’m quite sure that most people that rarely look at art would think that what I’m saying here is absurd or fabricated.  But I’m equally sure that people that look at art regularly know exactly what I mean.

There are drugs that can probably do the same thing. But I prefer art.

Art is accessible… 

As I said in the first installment of this series, you can get the emotional benefits of art without spending a nickel. Art is everywhere. Not just in museums but in restaurants and retail stores and public parks and even in the homes of your friends.

Art is also accessible in terms of education. You don’t need a college degree to benefit from it. The street sweeper in Florence, Italy, has the same capacity as the CEO of Ferrari to enjoy Michelangelo’s David. The laborer cutting grass on the Florida millionaire’s estate has the same capacity as the estate owner to admire the Fernando Botero sculpture sitting in that very garden.

Wealth, in fact, can actually be a hindrance to the enjoyment of art. I know more than a handful of wealthy people who buy art and pretend to enjoy it. They believe it gives them prestige. They fill their homes with “limited editions” from well-known artists, such as Salvador Dali and Marc Chagall. To that same end, they fill their garages with Porsches and Lamborghinis. I sometimes wonder if – aside from showing off their trophy pieces to visitors – they ever even look at them.

Having a college degree (even a graduate degree in art history) might help you talk impressively about art. It might provide you with the vocabulary to describe the technical aspects of a piece or explain its historical context. But it doesn’t give you an advantage when it comes to really seeing art or enjoying it in a personal way.

And you certainly don’t need a college degree to invest in it.

In the next installment of this series, I’ll tell you why my art collection has appreciated as much as it has. It’s the primary reason so many ordinary, amateur art lovers have acquired amazing, multimillion-dollar collections.

For now, I’ll leave you with this:

Five Good Reasons to Invest in Art 

1. If you buy smart, art can bring you very good returns, as proven by several indexes, including the MMAA.
2. It is not hard to understand… especially if you limit your collection to a handful of artists whom you can study in depth.
3. Investing in art – even museum-quality art – is something anyone with a middle-class income can do.
4. As I pointed out in my last essay, art has benefits that you can’t get from a stock portfolio. It is, for example, tangible, portable, and insurable.
5. Most important, if you love art, it can give you ideas, thoughts, and feelings that will enrich your life immeasurably.

* This series of essays gives you an advance look at a new book that I’m working on, based on my experiences over the past 40+ years as a collector and investor in fine art.  

This essay and others are available for syndication.
Contact Us [LINK] for more information. 

Ever since Trump took office, conversation with many friends and most of my family has been a challenge. They feel about him the way some of  my conservative friends and colleagues feel about Hillary Clinton. When feelings are strong, reason declines and facts lose their context. I like a loud argument as much as any Irish American, but I don’t like an intellectual joust that leaves emotional bruises. Those bruises last longer when ideology insinuates itself into argument. Ideology leads to groupthink. Groupthink leads to war. And war is always destructive.

When news of the coronavirus broke, there was every reason to believe we were in a global crisis. Crisis often galvanizes otherwise opposing factions to band together against a common enemy. I hoped, naively, that this would be the case. Alas, it did not happen. The threat of COVID-19 became, almost immediately, an ideological topic.

The reports we were hearing from China and Europe through the World Health Organization (WHO) were positively frightening. But the numbers associated with those stories didn’t make any sense. So I began to write about it and do some research on my own. The more I studied what was being said, the less I believed it. And when the shelter-in-place solution was introduced as the “scientific” protocol for reducing the eventual death rate from COVID-19, I was challenging it in my blog posts and conversations.  

That was not well received by my friends and family members who were getting their information from the mainstream press. They were convinced not only that sheltering-in-place was the right course of action, they believed that the USA had been hobbled by Trump by not putting it into effect sooner. It didn’t seem to matter to them that Trump’s earlier doubts about  it were not his, but the recommendations of the WHO, the CDC, and the White House panel of experts headed by Dr. Fauci.

We do agree on one thing: The Trump administration bungled its response to the threat. But my friends/family think the mistake was in implementing mass quarantines too late. I think the mistake was in implementing them in the first place. 

Living in Fear of the Fear of COVID-19 

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” – Ben Franklin

I want to resume my wrestling, but K is worried that I will catch the virus from a training partner and infect the family.

My brother-in-law is worried about the throngs of (mostly young) people that have descended on Atlantic Avenue and its restaurants since they reopened a week ago. “It’s all bullshit,” he says. “Nobody is keeping social distance or wearing masks. Even some of the servers aren’t wearing masks.”

My fellow members of The Mules, the book club I belong to, want to have our next meeting virtually, as we’ve had the last two.

It’s difficult for me to speak about the virus with any of them because I know they are seriously frightened. But I believe their fear is unsubstantiated by the facts. And it angers me to think that they have been prompted into that level of fear by politicians and media that are using this crisis to further their political objectives.

So when I do speak about it, I find it difficult to restrain my anger. I state my opinions in definitive terms in hopes of shocking my friends/family out of their panic. It is a foolish approach. My sister reminded me of that yesterday, and she was right. So I’m writing this today, another essay on what I’ve learned about the coronavirus and why I believe the fear they are living with is based largely on misinformation.

I want to begin with some facts. But before I do, I implore you to read these facts with an open mind. Keep in mind that they all come from sources that you probably trust: the WHO, the CDC, Dr. Fauci and team, and several dozen studies done by respectable research institutions since the last essay I published on the virus itself.

*Fact One: Based on current death rates, COVID-19 ranks 13^th on the list of the ailments that people, worldwide, die from each day. It is exceeded by cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory diseases, lower respiratory infections, dementia, digestive diseases, neonatal disorders, diarrheal diseases, diabetes, liver diseases, kidney diseases, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDs. It is also exceeded by road injuries and suicide (which is on its way up). The number of people that die from cardiovascular diseases is more than 20 times greater. (This would not have been true had you made the comparison when the death rate was at its peak, but it is true now.)

You may be thinking that you are not interested in comparing COVID-19 to cancer or heart disease, since they are not contagious. In terms of my topic – which is fear – I think that is an illogical position. But put that aside…

* Fact Two: Of contagious diseases, it ranks 7^th, after lower respiratory diseases, neonatal disorders, diarrheal diseases, digestive diseases, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDs.

The fatality rate of COVID-19 is the primary reason that some epidemiologists were so concerned about the disease in the first place. Early reports had it at double digits, then at 6%, and then at 3.4%.

Those were the numbers that spurred the call for mass quarantining. But those numbers were based on case fatality rates.

As I explained in every essay I wrote on the subject, this is an useless and potentially misleading statistic. The case fatality rate does not measure a disease’s actual lethality rate. It measures only how many people died compared to how many people have been diagnosed as positive.

We can only know the actual fatality rate (some call it the infectious fatality rate) when we know how many people have died compared to how many people have been actually infected.

That was impossible to determine in March or even April because test kits were limited and no one was doing randomized tests of people that showed no symptoms.

Those tests have been conducted in the last four weeks. And what they are showing us is that the earlier case fatality rates overestimated the true fatality rates by a factor of 10 to 50.

For example:

* Fact Three: A new randomized study of 3000 people in New York State found that 13.9% of those tested for antibodies were positive. That means 2.7 million New Yorkers have already contracted COVID-19. When this was reported, there were 257,216 cases with 15,302 deaths. That equates to a case fatality rate of 6%.

But as I explained above, the case fatality rate is meaningless until you know the number of people infected, not just the number diagnosed. I suggested in my April 8 essay that it must be at least 10 times higher because symptoms for so many were flu-like and because of the lack of testing available then.

Adjusting for the latest findings, we can see that the actual lethality rate is a bit more than 10 times case the fatality rate, coming in at about 0.5%.

* Fact Four: This same study found that 21.2% of those tested in New York City were diagnosed as positive for COVID-19 antibodies. New York City’s population is 8.4 million. Extrapolating on that, we can assume that about 1.78 million denizens of the Big Apple were already infected with COVID-19 at the time. This means that even in the worst hot spot in the country, the actual fatality rate was 0.6%.

* Fact Five: These findings are similar to those from antibody studies done in Santa Clara, CA; LA county; and Kansas. Dutch, German, and French studies also show a much higher incidence of the virus than case studies would suggest – which means much lower real lethality rates.

My friends and family members that have a different view than I do tell me that the actual death count from COVID-19 is higher than reported. They tell me that there were surely people that died from it in the early days that were not diagnosed. I don’t doubt that. But if you understand the protocols that were put into place in by the CDC in early March, you can deduce that this must be a fraction of the distortion that occurred during the period of time when the death count was in the thousands.

* Fact Six: The CDC’s recommendations for reporting COVID-19 deaths included patients that died with “symptoms” of the disease, even if they didn’t die “of” the disease. In other words, if a patient that died of pancreatic cancer happened to test positive for COVID-19, the cause of death should be noted as COVID-19. (Note: When the state of Colorado did a study of this recently, differentiating those people that died with COVID-19 symptoms from those that died of COVID-19, the COVID death rate dropped by 25%!)

It’s hard to understand why the CDC would have made this recommendation, since it is patently unscientific. Most symptoms of COVID-19 are similar to flu and other respiratory diseases. Even in hot spots, less than half of those with COVID-19 symptoms test positive. Several emergency room and ICU doctors have commented publicly on this anomaly, complaining that they feel pressured to report deaths as due to COVID-19 when there is no certain reason to think it is so.

A fatality rate of 0.5% is considerably higher than the 0.1% or 0.2% fatality rate of influenza. But as I have explained, there is an important difference between COVID-19 and influenza. COVID-19 does most of its killing among populations of older people that have other life-threatening, “comorbidity” issues.

* Fact Seven: A study by the AMA found that 94% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in New York City had serious underlying conditions. 53% had hypertension, 42% were obese, and 32% had diabetes. The median age was 63.

* Fact Eight: In New York, the fatality rate for COVID-19 patients between 18 and 45 is 0.1%. For children, the fatality rate is statistically zero percent.

These numbers correspond to the analysis I did in March. Also, multiple studies have shown that children are not significant “vectors” of COVID-19. That means they don’t spread it very well.

The chances of contracting COVID-19 are much greater in confined spaces than they are in the open air.

* Fact Nine: A Chinese study of 3000 COVID-19 deaths found that all but one of the patients contracted the disease indoors. (The one exception contracted it through contact with someone that had just arrived from Wuhan province.) Yet many state governors, like New York’s Cuomo, were forcing elderly COVID-19 patients into nursing homes – which accounts for the severe contagion and death rates that we saw in those facilities across the globe. (This policy has just recently been reversed, weeks after the results of this study were reported.)

There have been several new studies suggesting that herd immunity for COVID-19 might be much lower than the 60% to 80% that was originally projected. I haven’t had time to locate these studies, so I can’t call this a fact. I know the projections are between 10% and 40%. 10% makes no sense. But 40% could explain why we’ve seen the recent drop in mortality.

There is no disputing the fact that you can reduce the speed at which the virus spreads by social distancing and washing hands. This is the strategy of flattening the curve. But flattening the curve is about slowing the spread of infection – not necessarily decreasing the eventual death count – which is what happened because of measures like social distancing and hand washing, not the lockdown.

* Fact Ten: Studies from Germany and Switzerland found that the flattening of the curve of the contagion happened weeks earlier than originally believed. In every case studied, the peak appears to have been before lockdowns were implemented. What that means is that the lockdowns did not work. They were not the reason the curve flattened. They had, if any, only a negligible impact on the curves in those countries.

* Fact Eleven: According to an analysis by Stanford University, there is no statistical correlation between lockdowns and COVID-19 deaths between those states that locked down early and those states that locked down late.

Those are some of the facts. And all of them come, as I said, from the WHO, the CDC, and reputable university and scientific studies.

So this brings me to the point of disagreement I have with friends and family members that believe the lockdown was and still is necessary, and that the movement towards opening the economy puts them and others in danger of dying.

Spend five minutes thinking about the above facts, and you have to agree that the proper response to the coronavirus threat would have been to isolate the most vulnerable (which we did not do) and not shut down the economy.

In fact, there is an argument to be made that sheltering-in-place has caused and will cause thousands and potentially hundreds of thousands of additional deaths. Deaths from depression, suicide, and domestic violence, as well as the deaths of many people with symptoms of heart attack, stroke, etc. that should have gone to the hospital but didn’t because of the fear of getting infected.

* Fact Twelve: Vaccinations for children have abruptly fallen at an alarming rate since the shutdown. In Michigan, fewer than half of infants 5 months or younger are up to date on their vaccinations, which may allow for outbreaks in diseases like measles.

But I won’t make that argument. It’s more important to make another point.

Unless we develop a miracle vaccine in the next few months, there are going to be lots more people dying of COVID-19. We don’t know how many. But based on the facts I’ve listed above, I hope it’s clear that there will be no lowering of the death rate by any continuance of the lockdown.

And speaking of a miracle vaccine, we have seen an historically unprecedented acceleration of efforts, private and public, to find a vaccine. And according to reports on both sides of the argument, we are making progress. At least a half-dozen vaccines have been approved for initial, phase one testing.

But here’s another fact to consider:

* Fact Thirteen: 90% of drugs that are approved for initial, phase one testing fail to make it to phase two.

The logic behind the opinion that many hold – that mass quarantines will minimize future deaths because the spread of the virus will be slowed – is faulty. The opposite is the case.

The only valid purpose for the lockdown that ever made any sense was to flatten the curve and thereby prevent hospitals from being so overwhelmed that they could not properly treat COVID-19 patients. But I’ve not found a single report that verified a death caused by, for example, lack of access to a ventilator.

What the lockdowns did, without question, is slow the race towards herd immunity. That means (again, barring the development and approval of an effective vaccine in the next few months) we will almost certainly have a second and even a third wave of the virus. And when those waves come, they will likely be different – maybe more lethal – strains. Which would mean, for certain, that the lockdown strategy will have resulted in many more deaths.

That is what makes me angry. And that is why I am upset when I hear my friends and family members say that those that favor opening the economy are putting money ahead of lives. It’s simply not true. The facts don’t support it. If we want to reduce the eventual death count, we must allow the virus to spread among the large percentage of the population that has little to no chance of dying from it. We have to reach heard immunity before a new, more lethal strain comes back and infects us. (This, by the way, is what happened with the Spanish Flu of 1918.)

I am angry and I want to blame someone. But I can’t blame my friends and family members who are scared because of the misinformation they’ve relied on.

I blame the mainstream media for not investigating the pandemic with any seriousness. And I blame some newspapers and news programs for pursuing reporting that was evidently meant to scare people.

These reporters and commentators failed very early to do even the simplest arithmetic, which would have made them understand how misleading the early case fatality rates were. Since then, they have ignored the studies that have unearthed the evidence listed above. Why they continue promoting their false narrative is anyone’s guess.

But because they will continue to promote their false narrative, the people that have taken it for truth will likely continue to believe it. They will continue to find ways to blame the Trump administration for the deaths that will follow, ignoring the fact that the mistake it made is clearly the mistake of shutting the economy down.

As I’ll explain in a moment, though, none of that makes any difference. We are already fast into the opening process and that isn’t going to stop.

But before I get into that, a few words on what I think we should have done.

In retrospect, the smarter federal policy would have been to:

1. Allow those that had a near zero chance of dying from the virus (children and people under 28) to lead their normal lives, spreading the virus among their peers at a controlled but relatively free pace, so that we could move towards herd immunity as fast as could be reasonably done.
2. Advise healthy people in their 30s, 40s and 50s (whose chances of dying from COVID-19 are less than 1%) to act like responsible adults capable of making adult decisions.
3. Focus 80% of our resources to quarantine the 20% of our population that is most vulnerable to the disease.

In retrospect, the correct response from the CDC and the president’s task force would have been to recognize, immediately, that the arithmetic that gave us “official” lethality rates of 10% and 6.5% and 3.4% (and the early predictions of millions of US deaths) was obviously wrong.

In retrospect, state and local governments should have kept parks and beaches open so that people could get the exercise and the sun they needed. They should have advised anyone concerned about catching the virus or passing it on to their elders that the likelihood of that happening in the outdoors is tiny compared with the chances of catching it in any sort of “sheltered” place.

In retrospect, we should not have required nursing homes to take back their clients that had been diagnosed with COVID-19. That’s what caused the spike in deaths that we saw. We should have isolated those people and, thus, reduced the huge percentage of deaths that occurred in such facilities.

* Fact Fourteen: 41% of the Americans that have died from COVID-19 were in nursing homes. In Minnesota, the percentage was 81%. In New Hampshire, it was 72%. In Rhode Island, it was 75%. In a dozen other states, it was more than 60%.

The coronavirus is very contagious. And it is lethal to older people that have serious comorbidity issues. But it is not lethal to the rest of the population. To most of those that have been put on unemployment – mostly younger, healthier people – it isn’t a great threat at all. And to those that are vulnerable, shelter-in-place increased their chances of dying from it.

Those are, it seems to me, the facts.

The curve has flattened in most of America, but COVID-19 has not been conquered. Not at all. It will come back and it will continue to kill. In one of my early essays, I predicted that it would kill between 60,000 and 120,000 this year and as many as 600,000 if we don’t reach herd immunity.

The lockdown did not and will not diminish that number. Only herd immunity (either acquired naturally by spreading the infection or with the help of a vaccine) will do that.

In retrospect, it would have been better to if the WHO, the CDC, and the administration had reduced, rather than inflamed the panic that has spread like a virus across our country. It would have been better if they had admitted, early on, that the original arithmetic and modeling were bad and waited for the facts.

I would like to think that anyone that that is fearful now could get a realistic grip of reality by focusing on these facts, but that may not happen. When you have invested so much emotional energy into a fear about the future, it’s difficult to give it up.

I doubt, too, that when this is over, those that have accepted the viability of the lockdown will change their opinions. They will be suspicious of facts that don’t support the narrative they have been sold. And the media and public figures that sold that narrative aren’t likely to admit that they were wrong either.

They make minor adjustments to their stories to accommodate realities that cannot be refuted, but will hold on to the scientific evidence that is more difficult for lay people to understand. They will do this to protect themselves from the shame they must feel when they think about what they have created.

For my part, I’m going to do my best to bite my tongue whenever I hear fearful friends and family members fretting about the opening up of the economy. Biting my tongue is an easy price to pay to avoid saying something that pisses them off.

A tougher issue for me will be how I go about taking advantage of all these openings. For one thing, as I said at the top, I want to resume my wrestling. That would mean rolling around on the floor with young guys who, if they had COVID-19, would likely be asymptomatic. I understand why K has forbidden me from doing that. I believe the actual risk is infinitesimally small, but being wrong is not chance I’m willing to take.

I will have to put off my favorite form of exercise until K’s fear subsides. And I realize that’s not going to happen until the pandemic narrative she has been listening to gives up the ghost of its beliefs about the lockdown and shelter-in-place strategies.

That will happen well before we have an effective vaccine. I can see it happening already. K had her hair done yesterday. My brother-in-law hugged a friend. It is people like this, not the protesters that have been opposing the shutdown, that will bring the American economy back to life.

They will do it not because they believe the shutdown was wrong, but because they are sick and tired of being locked up.

There is only so long that a mentally healthy person can stay locked up in a prison of fear.

This essay and others are available for syndication. 
Contact Us [LINK] for more information. [BOLD/CENTERED]

In Part 1 of “Free Is a Bad Idea,” I wrote about how “free” is generally bad in business – in particular, how free offers tend to work poorly as marketing campaigns and can actually weaken the long-term profitability of a business. Today, I’d like to talk about another area where “free” is generally a bad idea: how well-intentioned charitable projects can be damaged and even doomed by giving away things for free.

Free Is a Bad Idea, Part 2: Free Offers in Charity 

 “Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.” – Albert Camus

I know more about making money than I do about giving it away. But I’ve been inclined toward charitable giving all my life, and have been actively involved in running a charitable foundation for the last 20 years. So while I don’t pretend to be an authority on the subject, I’ve come to several conclusions about what works and what doesn’t.

Among them is this: In charity, as in business, “free” is generally a bad idea.

I am writing a book about the 20 years I’ve spent running and funding a charitable foundation, in which I recount dozens of stories about charitable impulses gone awry. (You may remember reading one of them, here on the blog, about my attempt to help Marcus and Gabriela.)

These stories all have the same plot: I decide to “help” someone by giving them something – usually money – only to find, in the end, that the transaction was good only for me. It made me feel magnanimous. But it hurt the person I intended to help in some substantial way. Not only were the objectives of the giving not met, but the giving usually gave rise to unexpected and disappointing consequences.

For example: I once gifted money to someone I cared about to start a business – no strings attached. Over a period of about two years, I increased the funding until I had put in nearly a quarter-million dollars. When it became apparent that the business model was not working, I discontinued funding it, which meant the business had to be closed. The response from the beneficiary of my generosity was a mix of anger and resentment.

We eventually got past that because we each valued our relationship more than our mutual disappointments. But I was vexed with the memory of it until I woke up one day and realized that I had to accept responsibility for the failure. My mistake, I decided, was that I gave the money with “no strings attached.”

Some time later, in 1998, I set up the foundation I mentioned above to manage my charitable activities. Its primary program was FunLimon – a community center in Nicaragua. It was initially intended to provide the local people with literacy and English classes, but soon grew into a large athletic and educational facility.

This was a significant commitment to charitable giving, and it gave me an opportunity to learn that there was still a great deal that I didn’t know about how to help people in a meaningful way.

Soon after we opened FunLimon, for example, I “sponsored” a local baseball team in the town. We bought them uniforms, shoes, and gloves, and paid the fee the team had been paying to participate in the league. The next year, they surprised me by asking for an entirely new set of uniforms, shoes, and gloves. When I suggested that they could use the old ones, they went on strike. (I’m not kidding.)

Another example: At the beginning of the school year, we gave all the school children in the local area a backpack filled with school supplies and a new pair of shoes. Many of them, too, asked for new backpacks and supplies the following year. When we asked why they couldn’t use the old ones, they told us that they wanted new ones.

Yet another example: For several years, we supplied the local schools with meat products to enrich the lunches they provided (which were basically rice and beans). Since we could not imagine any negative consequences to this particular program, we meant to continue it indefinitely. But then we discovered that several of the schools weren’t using the money we gave them to buy meat. They used it instead, they told us, to give the kids graduation parties.

I have better stories than that, but I’m saving them for the book.

Ultimately, I came to understand that giving away money is as challenging as getting it. To avoid the inherent negative consequences, I have to treat my charitable activities with the same seriousness as my business endeavors. That means, besides putting in the time required, taking responsibility for the negative consequences of anything our foundation does, even when those results are contrary to our good intentions.

Doing less damage than good… 

Our motto – “Do Less Harm Than Good” – reflects that principle. And from that, we have developed a mission statement, policy documents, and guidelines that help us evaluate and execute our programs.

One of those guidelines, one of the most important, is to be wary of giving away anything for free.

Our recreational facilities, for example, used to be free to anyone that wanted to use them. Now we charge a small membership fee – a dollar or two a month. Likewise, our educational programs – from English to Spanish literacy to martial arts and our trade school programs – used to be free. But now, they, too, have a small tuition fee.

At first, there was a bit of grumbling about these new fees. A few people even accused us of trying to profit from our non-profit! (Had they bothered to check the public records, they would have seen that the revenue we get from any and all fees and tuitions represents in total less than 20% of our expenses. Another 5% of our revenues come from private donations. And the rest of the annual budget – more than $200,000 a year – is funded by yours truly and family.)

When these objections were first voiced, I was surprised and disappointed. How could anyone complain about paying a dollar or two a month to have a membership in a first-class recreation center? And why would someone that was paying $50 a month for English lessons, given an hour away in the city of Rivas, feel that paying the foundation $5 for native instruction was a rip-off?

The answer is human nature.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there is nothing in the human mind that is more universal than the capacity for entitlement. (But that is a subject for another essay.)

Because of the initial objections, early enrollments in our programs went down marginally after we started imposing fees and tuitions. But within six months, those same programs were back to being fully booked and overbooked.

Perhaps more importantly, class attendance improved. In some cases, dramatically! The demand for English classes, for example, almost doubled (now that they had a chance to realize what a great value they were at $5 a month, compared to $50).

In addition, we noticed that the frequency of tardiness and truancy that we had taken as a norm during the “free” years diminished by about 20%. And the number of students that graduated from the trade school programs increased by more than 30%, from 60% to 90%.

And though we have no numbers to prove this, our instructors and staff personnel believe that all those that take advantage of our programs enjoy themselves more, appreciate what they are being given more, and complain much less. (Complaints are virtually zero.)

We still provide school books and other school materials to local students. But nowadays, they are required to pay for them – usually at a discount of 75% to 90% of what they would cost in a store. And if anyone can’t afford the small amount we charge, we offer no-cash alternatives that cost them their time and labor. In the case of school supplies, for example, they can pay for their yearly requirements (about $50) by spending several hours cleaning or painting the school.

So that is the short story of what I have learned about giving away charity for “free.” It is generally a bad idea. There are exceptions to this rule. I sometimes, for example, will pay for emergency medical expenses, and we have funded an area program for improving wells that was provided freely. But even those, I’m thinking, might be better used and more appreciated if we found a way to “charge” for them.

I expect that you don’t run your own charitable foundation. That your method of supporting charity is to give your money to a public charity whose mission you support. You may do your due diligence by consulting with one of the services that rates public charities based on factors such as what percentage of funds received go directly to the beneficiaries. I would recommend taking one more step and finding out if those charities give away their help for free. Most do. And that has almost certainly created negative consequences that won’t be in those reports.

Think about it.

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After many years of mulling it over, I’ve come to the conclusion that giving away things for free is a bad idea.

I’m sure that statement will sound odd or even idiotic to many people, but give me a chance to make my case.

 I’m going to do it in a series of essays. This is the first one… 

Free Is a Bad Idea, Part 1: Free Offers in Business 

“All marketing is basically about customers and marketing and making money and capitalism and winning and promoting it and having something someone really wants.” – Roger Ailes

If you have been in business for any length of time, you know that giving away free samples – a longstanding strategy to introduce new products – is, at best, a sometimes–good idea.

It works best when the free samples are given to existing customers. The more loyal the customer, the better it works.

This stands to reason. Customers that are happy with a brand are more likely to value free offers from the same brand. They not only tend to trust the intention of the offer, they are predisposed to like the freebies.

But free offers – truly free, not “free with purchase” – to non-customers (i.e., customers) are generally less successful. They are, thus, rare in direct marketing (particularly on the internet).

There are two reasons:

1. The cost of giveaway programs is usually much greater than the cost of direct sales. Therefore, they require a proportionately higher amount of spending from each customer to justify the extra expense.
2. Even when the cost is not great (e.g., giveaway programs for digital products), free-offer promotions (again, truly free) don’t work because the “quality” (average lifetime value in terms of dollars spent) of the customers that they attract is generally much lower than you’d get from conventional offers.

In my early days as a direct marketer, I was a big fan of free offers because they could yield three to five times the response rates I could get from conventional offers. While the historic campaigns (that required payment) might have enjoyed an average response rate of, say, 2%, I was getting 6%, 8%, and sometimes 10%!

I considered myself a marketing genius. And when it became clear that all those additional customers I was bringing in were weak spenders, I refused to give up on my precious free offers. I tried again and again, using every possible tweak I could think of in our backend marketing. But none of it stimulated those freebie-respondents to spend more money with us.

The only thing that did work was de-emphasizing the “free” in the free offer and writing in copy that reminded people that unless they were serious about buying the free sample later, they shouldn’t respond.

That worked reasonably well, but it was basically a soft form of direct selling.

I could no longer deny the truth that kept slapping me in the face: In prospecting for new customers, the lower the price of entry, the greater the number of tire kickers and moochers you attract. If you lower the price to zero, you fill your marketing files with deadbeats that will, in time, destroy your business.

Then the Internet Happened

I learned the lesson above in the mid to late 1980s. After that, I eschewed freebie campaigns and even highly discounted offers.

But in or around 2000, the world of direct marketing changed drastically. Most of my direct-response clients and all of my publishing clients moved from mostly print promotions and products to mostly digital in the space of about five years.

In that first decade of this millennium, free offers became the dominant strategy for acquiring prospective customers. By offering digital books, courses, and periodical publications, my clients were able to sign up millions of people that had an interest in business, entrepreneurship, investing, natural health, and international travel.

The strategy was to bring in prospects with free offers and then send them “free” material that provided both information and sales messages to “convert” them to paid customers.

What we found was that, like the old days, most of these prospects never bought anything. And of those that did become paid customers, their lifetime values were generally lower.

Meanwhile, the old, direct-sales campaigns continued to work, much as they had always worked. But these programs got little to no attention because they were bringing in far fewer names.

What happened is that the cost of acquiring “free names” (prospective customers) via the internet began to climb because of market competition. Yet the value of those free names did not rise accordingly.

Meanwhile, our direct sales were still moving along quite well. Eventually, we realized – at least I did – that it would have been better for us to focus on paid offers. They always were, and always would be, the best strategy for building a sustainable business with the greatest value with the least risk.

I’ve learned several lessons from these deep dives into free-offer marketing, but the most important ones are these:

* Free-offer marketing campaigns attract many moochers. Moochers love free offers. Not just because they like the idea of getting things for free, but also because they pride themselves on getting things for free that others have to pay for.

* Free offers attract not just moochers but perfectly good customers that appreciate a bargain. But when these people respond to free offers, they instantly become less valuable as customers because people, always and everywhere, do not value what they get for free.

You cannot turn a moocher into a quality customer. As I said, I’ve tried it a hundred times in a dozen ways. It just doesn’t work. Plus, they tend to be expensive – at least more expensive than you think. They continue to be your major responders to free offers, clogging up your processing and fulfillment departments. And they tend to complain more (even though what they are getting is free), clogging up your customer service department.

You can attract good buyers with free offers, and those people will “convert” into paid customers. But because of the free offer you sent them, these otherwise good customers will be less good to you. They will underestimate the credibility of your business. They will expect less from you and trust you less, too. And they will definitely give little to no value to whatever it is you gave away for free.

This is not advanced marketing analysis. It’s human nature.

Free is, as so many marketing gurus have said, the most powerful word in selling. That’s still true if all you want to do is attract a large following of people that like getting things for free.

But if you want to build a business, you need to purge yourself of the ego satisfaction of having a huge file of “maybe” customers and focus on building the biggest list you can of real customers, customers that value your products and services and are willing to pay you fairly for them.

In Part 2 of this essay, I will talk about why I don’t like free offers in the realm of charity.

About 20 years ago, I did a little experiment. I wanted to find out if it really is possible to do business from anywhere in the world. So I packed my family off to Rome (one of my favorite cities) for a six-week “working vacation.” I not only learned that, yes, it is possible for me to work in Rome (or just about anywhere else, for that matter), I also learned something that has had a much more profound effect.

In Rome, completely separated from the crazy, stressful routine I was used to back home, I learned how to simplify my life.

If you think simplifying your life will mean making less money, enjoying less success, maybe even being less effective as a businessperson, think again. Simplifying your life is about having more – not less – of the good things. More passion. More meaningful work and relationships. And you can have more of those things by having fewer of the bad things – unsatisfying rituals, self-destructive habits, energy-draining feelings, and so on.

The Simplicity Imperative 

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” – Henry David Thoreau

Today, I’d like to talk about simplifying your work life. I’m going tell you about a few things I’ve discovered that have worked for me. If they work as well for you, you’ll  accomplish more of what matters and eliminate stress-inducing and time-wasting experiences that are commonplace to smart, hardworking people in almost every sort of business.

We live in a time in which information overload is ubiquitous, communication is largely unfiltered, and meaningless busyness keeps many earnest people from achieving their most important goals. In an effort to keep up with the daily storm of inputs, they unwittingly mistake being busy for being productive – even though, in calm moments, they can easily distinguish them. Very commonly, they let the priorities of other people – their bosses, their colleagues, and their employees – take precedence over their own. As a result, they feel swamped… and out of control.

If this sounds familiar, you should know this. You are never going to gain control over your life if you continue to do what you are doing now: trying to catch up with the current backlog so you can start fresh and stay in control after that’s done.

It’s not going to happen. Even if you do catch up, you’ll have, at best, a day’s respite. Then the whole mess will begin anew.

There are probably a hundred personal productivity mistakes I have made in my business career, but most of them can be sorted into three persistently wrong-headed impulses:

* The egoistic desire to be the “man” – i.e., the person that solves the problem and gets things done.

* The self-indulgent enjoyment I get from solving complicated problems with complex solutions.

* The mental resistance I have to reexamining my priorities every day.

These wrong-headed impulses have corrective measures:

* I have to remind myself every day NOT to get involved in 80% of the work problems I encounter.

* I have to ask myself, every time I come up with a “good idea”: Can I make this simpler? Simpler to explain and to understand and to execute?

* I have to spend a half hour every day examining the chores in front of me and prioritizing them so that I can delegate or ignore most of them.

I’m not suggesting that these protocols will double your effective productivity, cut your stress levels in half, and put your career advancement in fast forward. They had that effect on my career, but you’ll have to decide if they make sense for you.

If you are intrigued by what I’ve said so far, you should begin by considering the following two-step plan for improving your business life:

It’s not the ingredients that matter. It’s the cake! 

Whether you’re managing a project, running a company, or handling your day-to-day schedule, you need a firm grasp of the big picture. Yes, that’s what every business management expert says – but I don’t believe more than 10% of those that “know it” do it. I know I didn’t.

Having a “vision” for the business will do nothing for you or the business if it’s a lofty dream about either improving the world or making a zillion dollars. For a vision to work, it must be specific to your industry and to your company. It must be realistic – i.e., achievable. It must be understandable – i.e., clearly articulated. And it must be customer-focused – i.e., it can’t be only about you, your shareholders, and your employees.

Ninety percent of the “visions” I see promoted by CEOs in the business press are obviously BS – pabulum for the public or feel-good messages for shareholders and employees. As a business leader, you are certainly entitled to whatever fantasies you have of the future. But the company vision you should formulate and promote should be, as I said, achievable, understandable, and customer-focused.

Work on that and you will have something to build on. You don’t have to get your vision exactly right out of the gate. You shouldn’t even try. Because as time passes and you learn more about your business and its market, you will adjust and sometimes even radically change parts of it. But having a pretty good vision (that adheres to these three rules) will make your work life so much better. You will find, as I did, that everything moves faster and with fewer restarts and much less stress and toil.

First the Vision. Then the Goals. 

Your business objectives should grow naturally out of your vision.  Use it as a guide to develop your goals. I establish mine at 5 levels:

1. Long-term (5 to 7 years)
2. Annual
3. Monthly
4. Weekly
5. Daily

Since I have explained this system in detail elsewhere, I won’t get into it here. The logic of it is easy to understand: How can you create yearly goals if you don’t know what you want to accomplish in 5 to 7 years? Likewise, how can you create monthly goals without a yearly plan?

I won’t try to convince you, here, why this is such an important practice for personal productivity in your business life. I will acknowledge that it takes a bit of time. A half-hour daily. An hour or two weekly and monthly. And a day or two yearly.

And unless you are already in the habit of doing this (not making to-do lists – that is a completely wasteful practice), the idea of this extra work will not appeal to you. I can say only this about that feeling: I get it. I felt it. But I was wrong. This is the single most effective thing I’ve ever done to accomplish what I’ve accomplished in my business career.

It’s all about time. Yes, you’ve heard that before, too. But it’s true. Time is the most valuable resource we have in life. And it is also very limited. We can give ourselves more of it by working longer hours and more days and by living longer. But that can only get you so far.

The answer is not to spend more time working, but to increase the productivity of every hour that you work.

Some tricks to help you along the way: 

 When composing your daily objectives, ask yourself:

* “Is this something I could not do? Is it something I could delegate? Is it something I don’t need to do at all?”

* “Is there some way I could do this in half the time?”

* “Is this related to one of my long-term objectives, one that will truly improve my career?”

In selecting my priorities each day, I highlight the most important tasks – the ones that that are essential to my long-term business plan. And because I know I can do only a limited number of things each day, I do those tasks first thing in the morning, when I have an abundance of mental energy. Accomplishing them gives me a boost of additional energy that helps me get through all the secondary and tertiary objectives of the day.

If I ever have to choose between two priorities, I ask myself: “Of the two, which one will be more important to me at the end of my life?”

It’s all about economy – doing fewer things overall but making sure that the things you do have the greatest possible importance… to the business, to its customers, and to your career.

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“There are two ways that art is judged as good: connoisseurship and marketing.” – Michael Masterson

Let’s Talk About Art…* 

“Why did you put ‘art’ in the headline?” my inner editor shouts.

“Because that’s the thing I’m writing about,” I timidly reply.

“Nobody cares about art!”

“But they should,” I say.

“Fine. Write whatever you want. But don’t say, ‘Let’s Talk About Art.’ Art is boring. Write a headline that will make people want to read what follows.”

“Okay…” 

Money. Let’s Talk About Money! 

I collect art. I also collect books, beer bottles, and cigar lighters. I enjoy collecting them all. But there is something I get from my art collection that I don’t get from books, bottles, and lighters: I get richer.

I invest in art. I also invest in stocks, bonds, private-placement deals, and precious metals. All of these assets provide me with a sense of financial security. But there is something I get from my art collection that I don’t get from these other investments: pleasure.

Some people think of art collecting as a snooty hobby practiced by wealthy dilettantes. I have the same prejudice. Others think of art collecting as an important form of cultural and historical preservation. I believe that’s true. Most people don’t think about art collecting at all. And as an investor in art, I’m happy about that. The smallish, elitist, and insular nature of the art market makes investing in it easier and less risky for novice or amateur collectors – so long as they understand the basics. (Which is what I’m going to be writing about, once a week, over the coming few months.)

Why Art Is Part of My Long-Term Investment Strategy 

I’ve been collecting art – paintings, drawings, lithographs, and sculptures – for more than 40 years. I buy art for many reasons. I buy it for its beauty, its historical importance, and because it says something about me that’s hard to put into words. But I also buy art as an investment. I buy it as part of an overall strategy for creating wealth.

Art’s beauty gives me a constant stream of emotional income. Its historical importance gives me intellectual returns. Its importance in providing its owners with social status creates a ready and liquid market for it. And the small size of that marketplace makes for stock-market returns with less volatility.

I buy art in many modes.

Much of the time these days, the purchase is a calculated decision based on knowledge that I have about a piece and its potential for appreciation. My goal is to buy good pieces at below-market prices and hold them for the long-term. For my core collection, I know just what artists and pieces I need and how much to pay for them. If and when they become available at the right price, I buy in.

At other times, my buying is based on an unexpected opportunity. Someone that knows someone that knows I collect a certain artist contacts me and we work out a deal. This almost never happened when I was a new collector. It wasn’t until people in these little markets knew me (and my partner) that these good deals started floating our way.

And then sometimes I buy art just for fun – because a piece is cheap and I like it and don’t expect it to appreciate it. I think of this as buying toys or souvenirs.

For example, I once bought a great mixed-media piece from an artist that was selling his work on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village. Which is to say my interest in art goes way beyond its utility as an investment or the aesthetic pleasure it brings.

The Multiple Returns of Art Collecting 

As I said above, I enjoy several substantial benefits from my avocation of collecting art, from the enjoyment of learning about it… to the pleasure of seeing it… to the comfort of owning it… to the excitement of buying and selling it… to the pride of developing a collection that is uniquely my own.

But since my inner editor convinced me to focus on art collecting as an investment, I will try to limit this discussion to that.

Is art a good investment?

I recently asked my accountant to estimate how much my collection has appreciated over the years. He looked at the records and told me that my total average annual return has been about 8.5%.

That is not as good as my investments in small businesses and real estate (with returns exceeding 20%) or rental real estate (about 14%), but it’s pretty close to what I’ve gotten with stocks (about 9.5%) and a good deal better than bonds (about 4% to 6%, factoring in taxes).

And, as I’ve said, art offers so many desirable attributes beyond ROI that I’d be happy to take my 8.5%. But as I’ll explain, I have good reason to believe that one day my core art portfolio will equal or better my “collection” of stocks.

Let’s look at the facts:

Art is tangible. 

When you buy a share of stock or a bond, you are not buying a thing. You are buying a promise: the promise that the issuer of the stock or bond will pay you exactly what it is worth at some time in the future.

Stocks and bonds are representations of agreements. They have no intrinsic value. A hundred shares of stock entitles you to be paid 100 times the share price of that stock when you go to sell it. But if the company behind the stock goes out of business, those shares are worth nothing.

The same is true for bonds. The bond buyer lends the bond issuer money in return for the promise to return that money, plus interest. But if the company or institution behind the bond goes bankrupt, the certificate you have in the safe is worth nothing.

Art is different. You are buying an actual thing. You can see it, touch it, and feel it. You can hide it in the attic, put it on the wall, or keep in in a vault. Its value, like stocks and bonds, depends on the market. But the value of art is in the art itself, not in a promise.

Think of it this way: The wealth that I have in stocks and bonds is, I believe, real wealth. But where, exactly, is that wealth located? Certainly it isn’t in some database at some brokerage halfway across the country!

It’s nice to go online and look at your brokerage account when your stocks are doing well. It’s nicer still to see your bottom line get bigger year after year. But what if the unthinkable happens? What if, one day, you check your account and see zero at the bottom line? Or: “Notice. Your account is frozen. Please consult a lawyer.”

This is not something I worry about on a daily basis, but it’s not paranoia. Digital wealth disappears from digital accounts all the time for all sorts of reasons. Most of it can be recaptured through legal and regulatory processes. But not all of it, and not in all cases.

With tangible assets like art, you don’t have to worry about any of that.

Art is safe from theft. 

In the past, stealing investment-grade art was a profitable business. But today, you rarely hear about it… for one good reason. Over the past 20 years, and especially in the last 10, millions of pieces of investment-grade art have been identified, photographed, and registered in online databases, including registries with the specific purpose of protecting art from theft and forgery.

If someone steals one of my Jean Derain portraits, for example, I can register it as stolen in one of these databases – and that notice will appear anytime anyone searches that piece again, either casually or because they are thinking of buying or selling it. The notice instantly becomes available to thousands of brokers, dealers, gallery owners, and auction houses worldwide. This would make it very hard for the thief to sell my piece anywhere except to a pawnbroker at a tiny fraction of its value.

Art is a hedge against inflation. 

Another advantage of art (and most tangible investments) is that its value tends to rise alongside inflation. If you own bonds, for example, and inflation soars to 10% a year, the value of your bonds will likely decrease by that percentage.

That’s not the case with art. Art typically tracks inflation. The $10,000 piece you bought this year will be worth $11,000 next year in a scenario of 10% inflation. We haven’t had much inflation in the USA during the first two decades of the new millennium, but there is every reason to believe inflation will resume and could possibly accelerate into hyperinflation due to all the coronavirus spending by the government.

Art is portable (transportable). 

Portability is a beneficial characteristic of art that most people never consider. But for several reasons, it can be a considerable advantage.

If, for example, you want to move some of your wealth from one residence to another, you can do so privately and discreetly, without having to notify brokers or bankers or leave an electronic trail. Since the value of a piece of art has nothing to do with its size, you can move a lot of value this way. A million-dollar piece of sculpture can be shipped by postal service around the country (or around the world) for just a few hundred dollars.

Art can be tax friendly. 

Gallery owners and brokers of art are subject to the same tax rules as owners and brokers of any kind of business. But private collectors can take advantage of many strategies in place (and okay with the IRS and other taxing agencies) that can reduce the tax burden on buying and selling art. (We’ll discuss this in more detail later on.)

Art is insurable. 

While you can’t insure your returns from art, you can insure it against loss – either by theft or accident, both of which rarely but sometimes happen. Art insurance is easy to buy. (You can do it online.) And the policies are flexible. You can, for example, insure a single piece or an entire collection with a single premium. In some cases, you don’t even have to identify every piece in your collection.

Art insurance policies also cover damage. Years ago, when a housekeeper accidently broke a Picasso ceramic of mine, the company that was covering my collection at the time sent me a check just a week or two after I filed the claim. And the check was for more than I thought the piece was worth!

But here’s the best part… 

These are a few of the benefits and advantages you’ll have as an investor in art, benefits and advantages you won’t get from stock and bond investing.

And that’s not to mention the biggest benefit I’ve received from 40 years of collecting art – the daily joy I get from being surrounded by beautiful, personally meaningful, and historically important objects.

Buying art is a lot of fun – especially when you know that you are making a smart buy and/or adding to a developing collection. And owning art, as I’ve explained, is a good investment with lots of fringe financial and wealth-protection benefits. But I wouldn’t recommend collecting art to anyone that was interested in it only for those reasons.

To get the full experience of art, you have to learn to appreciate it. We’ll talk about that in the next time installment of this series.

* This series of essays gives you an advance look at a new book that I’m working on, based on my experiences over the past 40+ years as a collector and investor in fine art.  

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“We can all – even the poorest of us – increase our wealth daily by doing some small thing to enhance the value of our property, our knowledge, our skills, and our trustworthiness.”

– Michael Masterson

Principles of Wealth #38* 

When most people think of building wealth, they think of building net worth. And although having a high net worth eliminates so many vexing problems, it cannot, by itself, give you a rich life. 

When we think of wealth, we usually think of financial wealth. But they are many other forms of wealth.

One can, for example, be wealthy in education or in skill or in knowledge. One can be wealthy in friendship and good will. One can be wealthy in wisdom or common sense. And most important of all, perhaps, one can be wealthy in good health.

We know these things. We believe them to be true. Or, at least, we believe them. But too many people believe them only in theory or, worse, in moments of solitude and desperation. But if one commits to becoming rich, as I did 45 years ago, it would be wise to give these forms of wealth the consideration they deserve.

I didn’t and I paid the price for it. It wasn’t as high a price as it could have been. In my relentless drive to make money, I could have lost friendships and family and even my health and self-respect. I got close a few times.

What saved me, I think, was being married to K, a woman that cared next to nothing about money. No matter how much money I made, it never impressed her. What did impress her – negatively – was all the time and attention I was giving to my businesses and investments at the expense of her and our children.

I’d also give credit to my parents. They, too, cared little for money. They gave their children three of the most important gifts parents can give: a respect for education and hard work and the obligation to take responsibility for one’s own life.

When you accept those three ideas as fundamental values, they shape the way you value yourself. So when my wife (and later my children) chastised me for neglecting my other treasures, I knew, even if I wouldn’t admit it, that they were right.

It’s a cliché to say that money can’t buy happiness. That became apparent to me during the two years I lived in Chad, one of the poorest countries in the world. With the $50 a week I was making as an assistant prof at the University of Chad, I was able to pay for all our living expenses for about $30. And with the other $20, I paid for the full-time employment of two Africans: a property “guardian/groundskeeper” and a “garçon/housekeeper.”

Pascal, the guardian/groundskeeper, lived in a straw cottage next to our small concrete-block home. He had a wife and three kids. He was, as was Pierre, the garçon/housekeeper, diligent and resourceful. And he, his family, and Pierre all seemed to be perfectly happy. They were certainly as happy as or happier than more than 90% of the middle-class people I knew back in the States.

Pascal and Pierre were wealthy in family and friendship. They were wealthy in the skills and the knowledge they needed at work. I never once saw them angry or even anxious or despondent. Their characters seemed to have been forged in a different world.

And now I was part of that world.

I remember sitting on my porch one rainy afternoon, working on a lesson plan and looking now and then at the little garden we had planted weeks earlier. Vegetables and flowers were sprouting. Missy, our Italian greyhound, was barking at a monkey that had taken shelter on the porch. K was inside reading a book. I remember thinking, “One day, you’ll be rich and live in a mansion, but you will never be happier than you are right now.”

Not too long after we returned to the States, I got very busy getting richer, eager to buy my family and me everything I never had growing up. On top of that wish list was a big, fancy house – the very one I had imagined in Africa. I eventually built that house and then, some years later, an even bigger and fancier one. Did they make me happier than I was in that first little cottage? No. I had been right about that. Still, making money was my priority for too many years.

When I turned 50 (19 years ago), I realized how lucky I had been not to lose K and the family through neglect. I had done just enough, through guilt or good judgment, to include in our lives at least some of the important values that I had nearly abandoned. And now it was time for me to step away from the money and start building more wealth in those areas.

I wish I had done that sooner. How could I have forgotten that all wealth compounds over time? Including the kinds that aren’t measured on a balance sheet.

* In this series of essays, I’m trying to make a book about wealth building that is based on the discoveries and observations I’ve made over the years: What wealth is, what it’s not, how it can be acquired, and how it is usually lost. 

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We arrived at the resort after an arduous journey. It was late and we were hungry, so we went straight to the restaurant. GP was sitting at the big table in the middle of the restaurant with about a half-dozen of the waiters and waitresses that report to her. They were eating lobster and drinking wine. Talking and laughing.

We sat down at another table and waited to be served. After a few minutes of being ignored, I cleared my throat to catch GP’s attention. She waved at me, then leaned to the young woman by her side and whispered something. The young woman came over and told us in Spanish, “I’m sorry. The restaurant is closed.”

I was GP’s boss and the GM of the resort. I was there with the principal architect and builder of the entire development. Apparently, that didn’t matter. It was 15 minutes after closing time.

I called GP into my office the next day. “What were you thinking?” I asked. “They’re mis chicas,” she explained. “Mis amigas. We were having so much fun. They really love me!”

Don’t Hire Your Friends… and Don’t Make Friends With Your Employees 

“One of the most important things I’ve learned as an entrepreneur is that the most difficult problems to solve are people problems – and in particular, problems that arise from the personal connections you have with your partners, your colleagues, and your employees.” – Michael Masterson

In 1966, when, at age 16, I started my first “real” business, I hired two of my closest friends to work for me. And it was fine. Between then and 1983, I started and ran a half-dozen other businesses and always hired friends to work for me – with no problems that I can remember.

I began to change my egalitarian view of business relationships in 1983 when, for the first time, I ran a business with more than 100 employees. I hired friends (and even family members) to fill certain job openings. These were hardworking people that for the most part did a very good job. But because of the size of this business, I couldn’t be involved in everything they did. Unlike my earlier businesses, I wasn’t working shoulder-to-shoulder with my worker/friends. I wasn’t able to settle disputes before they began. Nor was I able to resolve personal problems because there were protocols I had to respect.

As a result, I got dragged into some uncomfortable situations. And because I always put my friendships above my loyalty to the business, the outcome was invariably problematic. Feelings were hurt. Productivity was sacrificed. And in two cases (that I’ll never forget), putting friendship first cost me (and my partner) more than a million dollars.

After suffering stubbornly for several years, I made it a rule: I promised my partner – and myself – that I wouldn’t hire friends or family members ever again.

It was a relatively easy rule to follow, and I’ve obeyed it. But I’ve had trouble with the flip side: not allowing myself to befriend employees.

Since I work mostly in publishing and marketing, I have the good fortune to employ lots of very smart and engaging people. Every week, I meet some new employee that has the qualities I seek in a friend: intelligence, good character, and wit. I can’t stop myself from wanting to be friends with these people, even though I know I shouldn’t.

What I do to resist the temptation is tell myself, very consciously, that the desire I have to make friends with them is a sort of mental illness.

I’m serious. I tell myself it’s a morbid combination of narcissism and self-loathing.

And I think, at root, it is. I want to “be there” for these good and interesting people. I want to help them achieve their potential at work. But I also want to help them in every aspect of their lives. In my rational mind, I believe that’s all I want. But in the arrested development of my emotional brain, I want something in return. I want their admiration and everlasting devotion.

It feels to me, as I’m sure it does to you, creepy when I put it that way. And that feeling generally dissuades me.

The Friendship Imperative 

Friendship is a necessary component of a well-lived life.

You can have everything else – wealth, stature, fame, and even power. But if you don’t have friends – true friends – you have a life that is barely worth living.

Yes, friendship matters a great deal. But boss-employee friendships pose problems, all sorts of sticky problems that get stickier as those friendships grow.

Not all of my business partners agree with me on this. Some actually promote work friendships. They say it makes for good company morale and a better work experience for one and all.

Just this morning, I read a loony article in an online business magazine that supported this view. (I will protect the publication and its author out of compassion.)

“Today’s workforce suffers from a lack of work friends,” the writer proclaimed. “Employees need friends to satisfy [their] need for companionship, love, and safety.”

And just in case you didn’t see this coming, he continued with this doozy: “Employees need friendships in dealing with the stress, politics, and hostility that exists in the workplace. They need friends they can turn to when issues arise around sexual harassment, bullying, layoffs, and poor management.”

Really?

I believe it’s impossible to have an opinion like this unless (a) you are an academic specializing in business management, or (b) you’ve never actually employed more than a dozen people.

I am also aware that some CEOs of large businesses promote the idea that “employees matter first” and that if you focus on making your employees happy, everything else will take care of itself and you’ll have lots of happy customers.

This is an equally bad idea. But it’s actually another issue. (We can get to that in another essay.)

A Self-Imposed Dilemma 

I believe in caring about employees.

I believe employers should care about the productivity and potential of their employees and make sure they have the resources to excel at their jobs.

I believe employers should provide their employees with safe and humane working environments.

I believe, too, that employers should care about company morale.

But when business leaders confuse caring about these things with caring about the personal problems or personal happiness of their employees, they put themselves on a slippery, downhill path that eventually involves compromise, favoritism, and all sorts of ancillary problems.

If this philosophy of employer-employee friendship becomes commonplace in the company, the workplace degenerates. The work ethic and, more importantly, the purpose for working become inwardly focused – towards internal relationships and their needs and away from the outwardly focused customer relationships that are the foundation of every healthy business.

Think of it this way: As a business leader, your primary job is not to make your employees happy but to make your customers happy. When you befriend your employees, you are wittingly or unwittingly telling them that customers come second. That is a very damaging and debilitating message.

If you don’t agree with what I’ve said so far, you need to know this: Your employees don’t need your friendship. And if they are smart, they don’t want it. They will see your effort to befriend them for what it is to them – a burden that will one day make their business lives heavier and problematic.

What your employees want from you, and deserve from you, is your support and guidance. They want ideas and mentorship. And the best of them will want you to give them the freedom to work on their own. The fact is, however good it might feel, it is difficult, if not impossible, to provide those things within the boundaries of friendship.

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I make my living by coming up with ideas. It’s a great way to pay the bills. And I’ve been doing it now for so long that the ideas come easily – on walks, in the shower, while reading, etc.  

Many of them seem brilliant all the way up to the moment I write them down. Then things can get complicated.

 Sometimes, while putting my idea into an essay, a related “great idea” pops into my head. Happy about that, I work it in. But often, when researching facts or examples to support my revised thesis… what I’m finding doesn’t exactly fit. Not wanting to abandon the essay, I plunge on.

Normally, I write at a pace of about 15 words a minute. (Ten for the first draft. Five for the second.) But when this sort of thing happens, it can take me three or four times that long. I used to think that was a good thing. I was wrong.

 In fact, as I’ll explain in a moment, working harder on a great idea is usually a sign that it is incomplete, fragmentary, or even specious.

How to Know If Your Great Idea Actually Sucks 

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein

You’ve got a brilliant idea. It’s the E=MC squared of whatever you’ve been pondering lately. You rush to memorialize it, to write it down. As you write, your one excellent idea leads to another. And then to a contrary insight – which you include, since it’s relevant. It gets complicated. But you persist. Hours later, you’ve completed a 3000-word essay or memo or proposal. You are exhausted. You save it.

You wake up eager to fine-tune your brilliant idea and send it off to your boss, your colleagues, or your publisher.

So you grab a cup of coffee and begin with enthusiasm. But as you move along, you notice small problems and contradictions. You push on. Hours later, you stop again. “It’s ready to go,” you tell yourself. “I’ll just take one more look tomorrow.”

The next morning, you give it a final read. And when you do, you find more problems and contradictions. You can’t believe how this once-brilliant idea had mutated into a verbal mess. You send it off anyway.

It lands with a thud.

You don’t want to get lost in this depressing, self-flagellating maze. And you don’t have to. There is an easy, one-step way to make sure your brilliant idea is truly brilliant: After you’ve written the first draft, check the FK score.

The FK is a measurement of readability – how easy or difficult it is to understand what’s being said. A higher score means greater difficulty. And, unfortunately, some people believe that greater difficulty means “smarter” or “more technical” or “more profound.”

It means none of those things. What it means is that your brilliant idea is not brilliant. It may have the patina of brilliance. But it’s not brilliant unless it scores 7.5 or below.

Those that haven’t used or aren’t familiar with the FK may doubt my thesis. But those that have successfully brought a first draft that was rated 11.5 down to 7.5 or below understand what I’m saying.

When I’m writing passionately about some new idea, I feel like I’m onto something big and important. I feel that my life has purpose, and this essay is going to prove it. But if I check the FK and it is above 7.5, I know immediately and for sure that my brilliant idea sucks.

It sucks because my idea, however amazing I felt it was, is not brilliant at all. It may very well have a kernel of brilliance. But as expressed, it’s complicated and confounding. It’s a burden to read. It doesn’t inspire. It doesn’t enlighten.

In the Poetics, Aristotle argued that the most important element in a play is not diction or character or even action. It is plot. That usually surprises people. It seems like plot should be the easiest part of writing any work of fiction. But if you’ve ever tried to write a play or a short story or a novel, you know that plot ain’t easy. That’s why writers that can write good plots are so rare. And that’s why they make a lot of money.

Aristotle didn’t say anything about nonfiction – which, of course, includes business memos/proposals and essays. But if he had, I’d bet he would have said that the most important element of nonfiction is the idea behind it… followed closely by how clearly the idea is expressed.

In other words, there is a direct relationship between the quality of the idea and the complexity of its expression. That relationship is an inverse one.

And that’s where the FK comes in.

The best ideas, as Einstein repeatedly reminded us, are simple. Simple ideas are better than complex ideas for two reasons: They are easier to understand and appreciate. And – and this is the wonderful irony that Einstein, among many great thinkers, pointed out – they are also, usually, more profound.

I have found this to be true for the dozens of books and thousands of essays that I’ve written. I’ve also found it to be true of the ideas I have introduced to my business clients over the years.

And that is why whenever one of my “great ideas” gets a high FK score (above 7.5), I don’t send or publish it. I think it through again to see if there might be a simpler way to explain it that is also true. If I can’t find that simpler expression, I conclude that my “great idea” only felt great.

(Note to clever readers: You don’t have to run this essay through your readability program. I just did it for you. It has an FK of 6.2.)

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Every day, more people are walking the sidewalk alongside the beach across the street from my house. A month ago, someone would pass by every three or four minutes. A week ago, it was a steady trickle. Now, it’s a light but continuous stream.

The rules haven’t changed. The shelter-in-place mandate is still active. But as each day passes, more and more of my little city’s self- imprisoned population have decided to ignore the extremes of social distancing and get back out into the sunshine and fresh air.

I’ve not been interviewing them, so I can’t say why. But from the way they walk and even greet one another, I’m thinking they just don’t believe we are in the midst of a plague. Some no doubt think we’ve passed the peak and the threat of the virus is no longer serious. Others, like yours truly,  probably never thought it was that serious to begin with. Still others, probably don’t think at all.

But their numbers are increasing, and I don’t think it will stop. For whatever reason, we haven’t seen the body counts the media teased us with in January and February. Most of us haven’t seen any dead bodies at all.

As of today, I’ve finished my two-month-long exploration into the virus and the shutdown and its economic repercussions. I’m looking forward to resuming my morning walks and thinking about other things.

The Corona Economy, Part V

What Will America Look Like in 2021? 

“Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is [here] for the first time since the Great Depression. I don’t care whose fault it is. It’s the truth.” – John Mellencamp

As I said on Wednesday, US fiscal history is a history of borrowing money to fight wars.

During the country’s first eight decades of existence, our wars were relatively small and inexpensive. That was chiefly because the Treasury’s income was small then – restricted to what it could get from sales taxes and import duties.

To finance the Civil War, which cost $2.7 billion ($42 billion in today’s dollars), Lincoln introduced the income tax – which made increasing debt and fighting expensive future wars that much easier.

WWII cost us more than 10 times as much as the Civil War ($323 billion or $5.8 trillion in today’s money). It also gave birth to the wealth- and life-destroying machine that Eisenhower warned us against: the military-industrial complex.

The atomic bomb deprived that machine of the ability to produce carnage on a global scale, so it fed on proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq).

Then, in 1964, President Johnson launched the first of a succession of social and ideological battles – the wars on poverty, drugs, and terrorism.

And now we have the War on COVID-19.

Like the spectral enemies we fought before it, COVID-19 is a formidable killer of human beings. And like the wars against poverty, drugs, and terrorism, the cost of the War on COVID-19 is immense and will be ongoing. What irks me is that most of the perfectly intelligent people I speak with have no idea how expensive it will be. The fact is, it will likely eclipse the cost of all previous wars.

Let’s add up the damage so far:

* $10 trillion in lost production (GDP) – that can never be recovered

* $4 trillion to $6 trillion in “bailout” distributions – that will produce no sustained benefit to anyone

* $5 trillion in stock losses – that may take years to recoup

* And some trillions more in pork barrel legislation that will likely follow in the next few years

With that kind of damage on the country’s P&L statement, it’s inevitable that  the Treasury’s balance sheet will soon be in the red by more than $30 trillion. That would be 150% of our GDP – the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in our nation’s history. (Higher even than the previous WWII record of 119% in 1946.)

You might be wondering: How is it possible for an economy to get into that much debt without collapsing? How is it possible for the US to escape the fate that felled the Romans, the Germans, the Chinese and – most recently – the Venezuelans?

In those cases, the mechanism for economic collapse was hyperinflation. Gradually at first, and then accelerating as the national debt mounted, the world’s faith in the solvency of each of these countries eroded.

That is what many of my historically attuned colleagues believe is going to happen again here in the US. And to be fair to their viewpoint, all the markings are there.

So how is inflation an answer to excessive debt?

It’s because inflation reduces the onus of debt by making each owed dollar less valuable. At an inflation rate of 10% a year, each trillion dollars of debt is effectively reduced by $100 billion. At an inflation rate of 50%, the debt would effectively shrink to next to nothing in just a few years.

And if you think an inflation rate of 50% is unlikely, you need to spend 15 minutes researching inflation in the countries mentioned above. There have been plenty of times in the past when over-indebted economies saw annual inflation rates of 50%, 100%, and even 200%. In Germany, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela, inflation rose to 1000% and even more!

An inflation-diminished dollar would be good news for the Treasury’s balance sheet, but it would be terrible news for the rest of the country. It would mean the purchasing power of every dollar earned would decrease by that amount. At 50%, the loaf of bread that costs $2 today would cost $10 in 2021, $50 in 2022, and so on.

Likewise, the cost of tools and raw materials and energy typically rises and falls alongside inflation. And those costs make it more expensive for businesses to produce the goods and services they provide. But they can’t increase their fees at the same rate and, thus, take a beating, with many of them going out of business permanently.

I don’t think we have an immediate threat of hyperinflation. In fact, what we’ve been seeing so far is deflation (a reduction in prices) of oil and gasoline and most commodities and equities, and most bonds. But deflation cannot cure the debt disease, which is why it’s normally short-lived (and followed by inflation).

The Great Recession of 2008 was caused, as all recessions are, by debt and speculation. Banks, brokerages, and insurance companies had leveraged up with sub-prime real estate debt and were on the verge of bankruptcy when the Fed, under Ben Bernanke, descended from the skies and attempted to save the economy with quantitative easing (flooding the bond markets with fake dollars).

That effort, from 2009 to 2014, saved most of America’s largest financial institutions (that irresponsibly created the debt), but it did not save the economy.

The economy entered into a period in which many middle- and working-class Americans lost their homes and got considerably poorer. At the same time the Wall Street was getting richer – much ricer – and awarding multimillion-dollar bonuses to its brokers. When all was said and done, the US economy had experienced the largest transfer of wealth in its history – with $10 trillion passing from Main Street to Wall Street.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the 2009 bailout was a bad idea. But the corona bailout could be worse.

The big difference is this: Back then, the bailout was optional – a “grand experiment,” as Tom Dyson put it. But the corona bailout is being done out of necessity. Because of everything we’ve talked about in the last few days, the government has no choice: Bail out the Treasury or risk going bust.

Nobody is against the current bailout. Not our trading partners, not our politicians, not the CEOs of big business, not the owners of mom-and-pop shops, nor the 26 million unemployed Americans. They are all depending on the US central bank to bail them out and, along with them, the entire world’s economy.

Think about it. For the first time since Obama was elected, Republicans and Democrats have come together to embrace a massive spending spree larger than any in our history. The only differences among these traditionally competing groups in this case is how much to overspend: whether the bailout should stop at $4 trillion or $6 trillion or $10 trillion or more.

The Problems With Free Money 

Free money, as I’ve said a hundred times, is never a good idea. And it’s an especially bad idea when it’s the federal government giving it out to foreign countries, domestic corporations, and to its populace through blanket giveaways like this one.

When money is given freely, it is often wasted. And it always creates dependency and entitlement. When fake money – dollars created out of thin air by an entry ledger in the Fed’s books – is given away freely, the net effect is reduced productivity, greater social and corporate dependency, and a weakening of faith in the US dollar. The first of these damages, reduced national productivity – has already happened on an enormous scale. The second is happening now. And the third is almost sure to follow. The only question is when.

I’ve no doubt that a portion of the productive sector of the economy will recover strongly after America opens up its economy next month. But I’m quite sure that it will not fully recover, as thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of businesses will not be reopening and millions of Americans workers will remain unemployed.

How long the Corona Recession will last is anybody’s guess. Trump is hoping it will be short-lived and the economy will be firing on all cylinders by election time. His opponents would rather have America endure another bout or two of lockdown to ensure public discontent till then.

Nobody can possibly know what’s coming. We’ve never been in this sort of situation before. But it would be foolish to presume that we can replace the $10+ trillion we’ve lost these last three months by simply resuming our old work lives.

I’d say we enjoyed a good economy last year, but the fact is it wasn’t very good at all. The recovery after the crash of 2008 was a tepid one, with growth averaging a measly 3% a year. And the debt, as I explained Wednesday, mounted strongly during the Obama years and then skyrocketed once Trump took office. The $30 trillion of federal debt we’ve incurred will have to be dealt with sooner or later.

So how will America deal with this humongous debt?

Will we follow the historical pattern of inflation leading to hyperinflation leading to debasement of the currency and then total economic collapse?

Or is there another way?

A Bit More History 

From 1933 to 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt instituted the New Deal – a series of large-scale reforms and programs meant to stimulate the economy and end the Great Depression. (See “Did You Know,” below.)

The New Deal was popular. It put the Democrats into power for nine administrations, from 1937 to 1964. And it is credited with bringing the American economy back from near collapse to the strongest in the world.

Many good programs were launched through the New Deal, including the Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934 (which opened up international trade) and the regulation of the worst practices of banks, insurance companies, and brokerage houses (which, till then, had been basically free to bamboozle and swindle their customers).

But one thing that wasn’t good about the New Deal was a series of executive orders that suspended the gold standard, unlinking the value of the dollar to the price of gold. This changed US monetary policy forever by allowing the amount of dollars in circulation to be a decision made by a handful of central bankers, rather than millions of businesses and consumers that make decisions by prices, which are controlled by supply and demand.

What some New Deal fans don’t talk about was that in 1937, during Roosevelt’s second term, there was a significant downturn in the economy. Production and profits declined sharply and unemployment jumped from 14.3% in May 1937 to 19.0% in June 1938. This proved to some the faults in the New Deal. (Maynard Keynes, for ones, was a doubter. He attributed the eventual recovery to the efforts of the private sector up to and through WWII.)

Whether it was the New Deal or private enterprise or both, there is no argument that what made America the leading economic power after WWII was the expansion of the gross national product.

The halcyon days of the 1950s and early 1960s were the consequence of the enormous expansion of capital enterprise that took place during those years. Growth in production eradicates debt and creates prosperity by virtue of added authentic economic value. That and the population explosion married to an expansion of consumer consumption were the true driving forces of America’s economic ascension.

Could it happen again?

Could America be first again? That’s a question that will be answered in the next 10 years. Can American enterprise innovate its businesses to lead the world? Or will faith in the US economy and its dollar crumble and send America down the path of the collapsed empires of the past?

You can ponder that question, if you will. But if your goal is to get yourself and your family into recovery mode, you’ll have to put your energies into building wealth the old-fashioned way: producing and selling value for a profit, and saving that profit for the future.

I’ll be talking about how you can do that in future blog posts as, after today, I’ll be back to talking about something I don’t need Wikipedia for – personal productivity, business growth strategies, personal finance, and the well-lived life.

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