Tag: writing

Passionate pursuits

In Chapter 14 of East of Eden, Steinbeck gives us a beautiful portrait of his mother, Olive. There is warmth and admiration in his description of her, but there is economics there as well.

In addition to being a schoolteacher, Olive’s goodwill extends primarily to her family, then to her neighbors, and, on special occasions, perhaps as far as the county line. Her social concern moves outward in concentric circles, but eventually it stops.

Until her neighbor, Martin Hopps, is killed in World War I.

His death awakens something different in her. Olive throws herself into the work of selling Liberty Bonds. Her motivation is clearly not greed, even if she may have been compensated for selling the bonds—a detail Steinbeck does not specify. Something in her orientation has changed. The death of a young neighbor has altered the way she sees her relationship to the larger community, and her actions follow from that change.

Her bond-selling becomes almost a personal mission. Eventually, she receives recognition in the form of an airplane ride in an Army plane. But the recognition is almost beside the point. The economic activity came first. The transaction was the vehicle through which her particular concern could be expressed.

This is a useful reminder that economic outcomes do not begin with prices. They begin with people, situated in relationships and institutions, acting from particular orientations. The same market opportunity can produce very different actions depending upon what an individual values, whom they feel connected to, what obligations they recognize, and what has happened in their lives.

Olive’s story is therefore more than an example of altruism. It is an example of institutional clearing: a personal experience, a relationship with a neighbor, a national event, a market mechanism, and a particular individual orientation come together to produce an economic action.

Economic outcomes can be driven by many fuels. Price is one of them. But so are memory, obligation, affection, loyalty, recognition, identity, and a sense of contribution. To understand the outcome, we have to look not only at the transaction, but at the person and the institutional world through which that transaction is being cleared.

This version makes Steinbeck do some of the theoretical work for you rather than turning the passage into a generic “people aren’t motivated by money” argument.

Get in the game

When I was a young loan officer, just out of college, a couple came into the bank to apply for a car loan. They were only a few years older than me, and already homeowners with some equity in a starter home. Their employment history showed they hadn’t gone on to higher education — instead, they’d entered the workforce and bought a house.

At first, I was taken aback by how much further along the path of building net worth those few years had put this couple. But it was the fact that they had acted — taken a risk, made a purchase, and settled in — that gave them their financial edge. This was all in a working-class neighborhood in a northern suburb of the Twin Cities. Split-entry homes built in the late seventies: two bedrooms up, two down, double slider windows, a double attached garage. Nothing fancy.

When I hear today that people are struggling to get into housing, that the cause is price, that people are locked out, I can’t help but think of this couple. They did what they needed to do. They picked the best option available and stuck with it. That put them a step ahead of their age cohort who’d gone to college. They were ready to move up to the next level of housing before they’d even had time to think they could get what they really wanted.

Time and again, I’ve watched people delay or postpone a purchase because they feel they’re not getting enough for their money. The whole idea of a starter home is to get in the game — start building equity, learn a little about being a homeowner and doing renovations. Whether it’s an inability to envision interior improvements to a house or to imagine influencing positive outcomes across a neighborhood, some people won’t get where they want to be, because they won’t put in the effort to find the path.

When a book is just what you wanted

MAN AND LAND IN THE UNITED STATES

There is another relation of man to land, however, which shall be the focus of our book: under what social arrangements, laws, and customs has man been allowed to use the land, and how has he in fact used it. This is more properly a man-man relationship than it is a man-land one. Men, acting through the tribe, or the family, or the government, have set up rules under which other men are allowed to own, sell, buy, lease, inherit, and otherwise use land for their benefit.

Sometimes these arrangements are specific and written, perhaps highly complex and detailed; sometimes they are less definite, subject to interpretation by the stronger for their own ends. In their totality, these various arrangements constitute a system of land tenure for that time and place.

And, following the success of the American Revolution:

Some specific consequences for land flowed rather immediately out of the victory. Tory estates were confiscated, subdivided, and sold to farmers, to help raise money to repay the costs of the war. Some, but by no means all, large landowners had been Tories, and subdivision of their estates meant a further strengthening of the landowning farmer. As we have noted, quitrents and certain restrictions on land inheritance were abolished, thus moving further in the direction of freedom in land ownership. During and after the war, grants of land were made to soldiers as a reward for their military service. In many cases, these soldiers sold their land rights, thus setting the stage for extensive land speculation and for the building of new large landholdings.

The indirect consequences of the Revolution, as far as land was concerned, were greater and more enduring. The whole pattern of public land ownership and disposal, and of private land ownership and use, which we shall describe in more detail in later chapters, grew naturally and more or less inevitably out of the attitudes toward land that had evolved during the colonial period and which were strengthened—one may almost say solidified—as a result of the Revolution.

Measuring the back-stop jobs

Here’s a familiar story:

This is a story of a layer of social life that doesn’t appear in any contract, law, or job description — and yet, without it, the whole thing quietly falls apart.

Call it the system of imperfect obligations. No single person is required to act. No one is legally on the hook. But someone steps up anyway — and in doing so, they hold something together that would otherwise fracture.

You know these moments when you see them:

The stranger who jumps into a pond to pull out a drowning child. The passing drivers who stop at a roadside crash and stay until help arrives. The employee who becomes a whistleblower, knowing the personal cost, because the fraud had to be exposed. The friend who drives an elderly neighbor to chemotherapy every Tuesday — not because they were asked, but because someone had to.

None of these are rights. They aren’t enforced, and failing to perform them carries no legal penalty. They live in the space between law and love — the domain of norms, trust, and quiet expectation.

What’s remarkable is that this space scales. When a community of people consistently honors these unwritten obligations — not because they must, but because they understand that everyone benefits when they do — something more durable emerges. Consider diamond traders, who conduct enormous transactions on a handshake, backed by centuries of community reputation rather than legal contracts. When trust reaches that kind of density, informal obligation starts to function like institutional infrastructure.

That’s the hidden architecture. Rights protect us from the worst of each other. Laws keep order. But it’s the imperfect obligations — the voluntary, uncompelled acts of people showing up when no one technically has to — that make a community worth living in.

We don’t talk about this enough. Maybe because it can’t be mandated, it gets overlooked in policy. But cultivating it matters: in how we raise children, build organizations, and decide what kind of neighbors we want to be.

The backstop only works if someone is willing to be it.

A book about risk

I’m quite enjoying Allison Schrager’s accounts of how people navigate risk in their lives. The book is full of stories about poker players and surfers, as well as bankers and bond traders.

Although the framework follows the model of an individual making a decision, in the background there are many communal references. This passage is about the paparazzi partnerships.

Since the best shots come down to being in the right place at the right time, photogs often form teams or alliances to share tips and sometimes royalties to increase the odds or payoffs they’ll be in that place. In 2003, Baez founded a group called PACO, “like the jeans,” combining the words “paparazzi” and “company.”

PACO consisted of ten experienced photographers. They traded tips on where certain celebrities hung out and when. So if Baez spotted a celebrity eating lunch at a trendy restaurant, he would alert the other PACO members. He says, beaming with pride, “Back in the day when we’d show up, the other guys would say, ‘Oh no, here comes PACO, because we were the best.”

Family ties show up in several of the vignettes. Somehow the prospects of his first love trump a degree from Stanford. When talking about the business executive Arnold Donald, she recounts.

It was a way to get both worlds: the liberal arts experience he wanted and the Stanford engineering degree.

During his sophomore year at Carleton, Donald married his college sweetheart, who also received a place at Stanford’s engineering school but no scholarship. Rather than take on the financial risk of student loans, they went to Washington University in St. Louis, where they both had scholarships.

And background players can even accumulate into a whole world of their own. For the poker player, there’s a benefit to syncing with the subculture.

The world of professional poker is a unique subculture-complete with special outfits and lingo-that appears foreign to outsiders. Its obsessive fan base watches games on television or in person for hours, is preoccupied with stats, and gambles on the players and games. Winning at poker comes down to luck and skill. Luck is being dealt a winning hand. Skill is knowing how and when to bet, and having the discipline and ability to infer what other players are doing.

Although not explicitly described or measured in terms of their influence, social relations, network effects, family ties, and workplace mechanics are ever-present in Schrager’s stories on risk.

MN is #1- Helium Edition

A recently discovered helium reservoir in Minnesota boasts “mind-bogglingly” high concentrations of the gas that are even greater than initially thought, potentially paving the way for commercial extraction.

Resource exploration company Pulsar Helium, Inc. announced the discovery of helium stores in late February, after a drill just outside of Babbitt, in northern Minnesota, located gas deposits at depths of 2,200 feet (670 meters). Initial measurements showed helium concentrations of 12.4% — which “is just a dream,” Thomas Abraham-James, the president and CEO of Pulsar Helium, told CBS News at the time. But new laboratory readings have surpassed those results.

Live Science

The find is special.

Normally, helium is obtained as a byproduct of natural gas production, as it accumulates underground in pockets of methane and other hydrocarbons. Minnesota is one of just a handful of locations globally where helium is known to exist without hydrocarbons — the others being in Greenland and southern and eastern Africa. These sites all feature a crust of granite rock rich in uranium and thorium, as well as a rift system that fractures the rock to expose the helium produced through radioactive decay. A dose of volcanism then releases helium atoms from the rock.

Northern Minnesota has a love/hate relationship with the extraction of natural resources from the ground. The article doesn’t address how mining methods affect, if at all, the environment.