RWL #292
The Queen, the specific competence of peach cobbler, and making beautiful things
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! The semester rolls forward and we are finding our footing. This week I had the chance to teach into the New Hampshire Physician Leadership Development Program, a joint effort between the UNH business school, and the NH Hospital Association and the NH Medical Society. I get to teach the finance sequence for the course. It’s always a pleasure to talk with practitioners in the field - after seven years of teaching undergrads, this is a little taste each year of teaching working professionals like I did before I came to UNH. Each population has its fun points - undergraduates are unmolded and untested - even when they think they are worldly (which is cute); graduate-level (MBA, MHA, exec ed) give you some students who actually know a lot, sometimes about the topic you are teaching (my first MBA finance course, I had the treasurer of a multi-billion dollar semiconductor manufacturer, which was crazy - I wanted to hand him the laser pointer and let him talk), and then you can have a great conversation. Both groups have their strengths and weaknesses. It’s nice to get a little of both.
So before I get to the links, this week I wanted to talk about three quick topics: 1) The Queen, and submission; 2) Specific Competence and peach cobbler; and 3) making beautiful things. So here we go!
The Queen
In case you have been living under a rock, Queen Elizabeth II, died this past week ( https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-61585886 ). I’m an American, and we fought a war some time ago to not give a heck about the British Royals, and that continues to be my general stance on the Royal Family - mostly a bunch of buffoons with too much money leading meaningless lives. However, during COVID my wife and I unexpectedly got quite into The Crown. We’re waiting to see what happens to Princess Di (bad joke - but when the Lord of the Rings movies were making their way out, I heard a guy at a party saying he couldn’t wait for the Return of the King to come out so he could see how it ended. I was like, wait, you are joking? How have you not read LOTR? And even I know the unfortunate fate of Di).
Watching The Crown made me realize that I would only wish being a British Royal on my worst enemies. It’s almost like wishing someone cancer or some other horrible disease. Being a Royal, a good Royal, requires giving up almost everything that makes one a human individual. Instead you become a human robot. it is completely dehumanizing. Being Queen, and a rather good queen as the series shows, required Elizabeth to give up almost all of her freedom to choose how she wanted to live or express herself. It required a total submission of her self to the role. It’s exactly what her successor failed to do, and makes him so sad (along with almost all of her family).
Submission, despite the connotations, is not always bad. Islam means submission to God. Islam, Christiniaty, and Judaism all have their roots in the same principle of submission to God. The 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous requires submission to a “higher power” (step 3). Almost every powerful social movement requires some sort of submission of the individual to the cause. Submission of the self often allows one to achieve things that one could not.
One of the things I learned early on as an organizational leader was that I was inhabiting a role that the organization granted me. My authority came from my ability to perform the duties of the role, not from my self. To perform the role, you have to submit to it - you have to give up your self and allow the role to speak for you. Sometimes that is quite easy, but often the price is quite high. Especially when you are inhabiting a role like the Queen’s that controls almost every aspect of your life - what you can do, who you can talk to, who you can show respect to (because your respect is the State’s respect), who you can love, and on and on.
Queen Elizabeth submitted to the role she had thrust upon her so completely that we know very little about her as an individual human being. Which is as it should be if one would be queen. We know quite a bit about Charles. Much more than we would like. And even more about some of his progeny (and their miserable spouses). So, once again, I have no particular respect for this family. They are an interesting social phenomenon - I am glad they are the responsibility of someone else’s country. But I have respect for Elizabeth as a model of submission to duty, may she rest in peace.
Specific Competence and peach cobbler
Last week I wrote about the 3 C’s of meaning, competence being one. I divided competence into general and specific, with specific referring to a focus on perfection of a particular activity.
My father, who is a regular RWL reader (Hi, Pop!), is something of an expert gardener. He has a small functioning orchard of fruit trees in his yard, and earlier this week he brought us a basket of apples, pears, and yes, peaches. Although I don’t particularly care for gardening myself, I have always admired the abundance he brings forth each year from his yard - fruits, vegetables, and flowers. Gardening is one of those areas of specific competence that can lead one to transcendence. Regardless, the peaches were excellent, and I promptly turned them into peach cobbler. My wife found a recipe for “peach cobbler for two”, and it was perfect. Cooking is an area of specific competence that I enjoy pursuing (unlike gardening). So it was a nice melding of our (my father’s and mine) interests.
(the cobbler)
If you have peaches coming in on your tree, I recommend the recipe.
Making beautiful things
I think there is something fundamentally human about the desire to make beautiful things. It fits in my formula for meaning under specific competence as well. The focus to make something is a very powerful tool for approaching the transcendent. Making anything. If you’ve been following RWL for any amount of time you know I have pursued a variety of arts - drawing and painting, photography, even poetry and spoken word. And of course I have my podcast (http://healthleaderforge.org). I have not, however, done much with video. In my lifetime, video has gone from film (with the cost of developing), to video on cassettes, to digital video on chips, to video on our phones, with on-phone editing tools. And yet I have largely stuck to still images. Video scares me a bit - though based on Tik Tok, it probably should not. In fact, Tik Tok makes a great case for the democratization of the medium. So this past Thursday was just a perfect morning for a run. I went out by myself because my wife was doing an exercise class and decided to run through College Woods, a preserve with walking trails owned by UNH and with a trail head about 100 ft from the LHH. I run, but I mostly have never enjoyed running. It is a chore I do because it is good for me, like flossing my teeth. But when I went out this past Thursday, there was something about the crispness of the September air, the angle of the sun - something - that just had me leaping from the tree roots and rocks on the trail like I had shed 30 years (and as many pounds). I was jamming out to my tunes and really loving the feeling so much that I decided to capture a few clips of video of my run, and then try to splice them together when I got home. Thus, I present you, dear reader, with my latest video masterpiece, “morning trail run with the Black Eyed Peas”
I am completely tongue-in-cheek about it being a masterpiece, but it was fun to capture the video and fun to think it through as I edited it. And that is the point - the act of creating - even creating something that is not that great - is something that is fundamentally human. Humans are makers. No other species makes art - pointless, beautiful things - that we are aware of. We’re all running around with powerful art-making tools in our pockets these days - we should be making. Even if the product is mediocre. The aspiration and the effort are transformative.
So with that, willing good for all of you, I present you with the links!
(pic above is fro this morning’s paddle on the Oyster River - with sunrise backing off from un-Godly early to just obscenely early, you might see some more sunrise pics from me over the next few months).
Read
What: Persuasion, The F.D.A.’s Misguided War on Vaping
Why: I am not a fan of raising the age to buy vaping materials to 21 (as is the case in NH and nearby MA). I think the short piece makes a good argument for making vapes more available. I think the legal age should be 18 at most, if not 16. Why?
First, they are far less harmful than cigarettes. I don’t have the evidence, but I suspect relatively few (though probably non-zero) people move from vaping to smoking.
Second, whenever you criminalize something, you create a new class of criminals. Do we really want to waste police assets on this? Do we want kids who are caught with vapes to face criminal prosecution for possession? I think not. A firm talking-to by an adult is probably in order, but not a criminal conviction.
Thoughts?
**
What: The French Press newsletter, It’s Time to Remember Tolkien
Why: David French (hence the cute name of the newsletter) is a Christian Conservative writer and thinker. For my colleagues, don’t disregard him because of that. He’s thoughtful and aware that he is an outlier in modern American discourse, and his awareness of his own heterodoxy makes him especially worth reading. This is a lovely piece in praise of Tolkien (LOTR - do I really have to say that?) without disparaging Martin (Game of Thrones). Can we come back, as a society, from the nihilism Martin captures in GOT (not saying he embraces it).
**
What: The Verge, The Humiliating History of the TSA
Why: Follow the science, people who love Big Government -
Actuaries measure the cost-effectiveness of an intervention — say, a pharmaceutical drug or a safety device like a seat belt — with a metric called “cost per life saved.” This calculation tries to capture the total societal net resources spent in order to save one year of life. For example, mandatory seat belt laws cost $138; railway crossing gates cost $90,000; and inpatient intensive care at a hospital can cost up to $1 million per visit. As long as an intervention costs less than $10 million per life saved, government agencies are generally happy to back them.
The most generous independent estimates of the cost-effectiveness of the TSA’s airport security screening put the cost per life saved at around $15 million. And that makes two big assumptions: first, that the agency is both 100 percent effective and 100 percent responsible for stopping all terror attacks; and second, that it stops an attack on the scale of 9/11 about once a decade. Less optimistic assessments place the number at $667 million per life saved.
I hate the TSA. I get why it exists - it might be cost-prohibitive for airlines to do this on their own because of liability - but it still sucks. I remember watching my 15 year old daughter get a full pat-down in public - her breasts and groin probed - and I will never forget it.
The main problem as I see it is the TSA, with it’s terrible pay and crappy work conditions, is ripe for penetration by organized crime. I don’t have any proof that it has been, but I would not be surprised.
There has to be a better way than having thousands of people in the employ of the government with crappy jobs they are neither proud of nor enjoy.
**
What: Tyler Cowen, The IRS Has Problems That $80 Billion Won't Solve
Why: Courtesy of the “Inflation Reduction Act”, the IRS is due to get an additional $80B for enforcement. My wife is a tax accountant and she actually thinks the IRS needs a lot more funding because they are so understaffed and operate with antiquated systems that she frequently can’t get answers for her perfectly legitimate clients. But I have concerns. As does Cowen.
**
Watch
What: TED Talk, What capitalism gets right -- and governments get wrong (11 min)
Why: I am a huge fan of KMW. You should be, too. Check out her talk. Then listen to her on The Reason Roundtable.
She’s an anarcho-capitalist. But in this talk, she takes a measured tone, allowing that maybe government can do some things right (though probably not the TSA. No, definitely not the TSA.)
**
Listen
What: The Art of Manliness: Grappling With Life's "Wild Problems" (41 min)
Why: I have shared many of Russ Robert’s EconTalk podcasts over the years that I have been writing RWL, but he is also an author, among other things. When I met him, he was a professor at George Mason University (where I did my PhD studies); he is now the president of Shalem College in Israel. In his spare time he writes books. His latest is Wild Problems. His argument, as I understand it (I have the book on my shelf - I have not read it yet) is that some decisions cannot be made using empiricism because we cannot know in advance the likely set of outcomes.
In this interview, Roberts talks about, among other things, how Bill Belichick the Patriots head coach) takes lower round draft picks so he can get more picks. The idea is higher round draft picks are still relatively unknown for performance on a given team and at the professional level, so by trading for more, later round picks, he can afford to be wrong. I love this logic because it is exactly the kind of thing I try to do.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next week!
Mark
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picaso