Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am
Stuck in the middle with you
-Stealers Wheel

Why “Professor Axelrod”?

Several years back, I was running a hedge fund; a friend of mine discovered this, literally squealed, and declared that she was nicknaming me Bobby Axelrod and that she likewise identified with Wendy. I gave her a curious look; unlike everyone else in the game at the time I hadn’t actually seen Billions, which was at the time in its third season. She castigated me for this and told me I’d love it; I reminded her that I basically didn’t watch television as I thought it was mostly drivel, but she convinced me to try it.

OK, she was right. I binge watched the first two seasons that weekend, enjoyed it more than any show I’d watched in a long time, and called her the next Monday. “So, Wendy, this is Bobby. I appreciate the nickname. You aren’t intending to cause problems for my marriage, are you?” We laughed, but I figured I’d preempt any trouble; I knew her own marriage was in a rocky situation and the show dynamics made me think there might be a similar sort of circumstance - and let’s be fair, she was both an absolute bombshell and a master manipulator, if we were about to play chess I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t on the market.

We both laughed it off and stayed up to date on the show; Billions really didn’t hold up the next few seasons but at least the ending had some closure and there were several memorable moments and a lot of good characterization along the way. (I recommend the series - and there’s a couple great characters who get their arcs later in the series, like Taylor Mason and Charles Rhoades Senior, but it’s hard to match the first couple seasons.)

And as to the “Professor” part? Well, it’s much like you’d expect: I had a bit of dabbling in academia based on my business successes. To be fair, this is almost entirely guest lecturer here and there, telling supposedly-entertaining stories about various things that have transpired in the business world and relating them back to the topics at hand for whatever class I’m guesting for, which tends to be either on the business school audience or the engineering side of the house. I don’t think I’m likely to go back and formally get a PhD; I’m not really sure what a doctorate would get me at this point in life other than catching me up with some of my friends and peers. I have instead told them, tongue-in-cheek-but-perhaps-not, that I’ll just pick some level of economic success and buy a university at that point. (Remind me to hire Bret Devereaux if I get around to doing this.) And unlike another of my friends who I shall not name at this point, I’m doing this teaching role to mentor people, not to meet cute young grad students - though, I suppose, more power to you.

I have been… all over the political spectrum, over the years. Open-minded? Politically promiscuous? Pick whatever terminology you like. I have not literally been a Communist - I was raised by an economist, so I at least had that sort of memetic dynamite defused at an exceedingly young age. But I’m familiar enough; I speak fluent Marxist, and I’ve walked in a lot of different social and sociopolitical circles over the years, mostly in the days when my hair was longer.

I’ve been homeless-level poor a couple times in my life, I’ve had decamillionaire successes several times and a couple shots at being a billionaire (that haven’t yet landed), I’ve nearly died a couple of times and certainly been in a handful of other circumstances where I probably ought to have. And a decidedly unrepresentative number of people I know have died young; any Bayesian or actuary looking at my friends circle would cast a curious eye and say “that’s … disproportionate, what gives?” (It may just be that I know more people than most, I suppose, but still, musing on this sort of put me in a bad state of mind.) My only consistent conclusion is the ancient Chinese blessing/curse: we live in interesting times.

I told my daughter who is dabbling in her punk phase that I’m a lapsed anarchist - somewhat true, though probably more sympathetic to Iain Banks or Ursula Le Guin than Luigi Mangioni or Gavrilo Princip - because the first two are intellectually interesting, and the second two are losers. But if I hadn’t already been sick of them by that point, having a bunch of yobbos show up, riot, and vandalize got me and friends incidentally tear-gassed while trying to go about day to day life, and left me with a decidedly less warm view of the black bloc anarchist community.

I’m also at this point a lapsed libertarian; I like a lot of the ideals, for a lot of the same reasons, but anarchism and libertarianism look similar if you squint and they break for the same reasons. John Galt is just implausibly self-sufficient, and Ayn Rand writes Just So Stories for libertarians the same way Kipling did for his daughter. Sure, they’re definitional in their own way as a lot of the classics are, and on a more recent front I still think exceedingly highly of Virginia Postrel’s The Future And Its Enemies.

But I’m afraid the basic problem has been that a live-and-let-live strategy of personal freedom has not worked in a world of increasing overreach, bureacracy, regulation, and state power. And even if we were to achieve it on a regional, or state-by-state level, or even federal level for the United States, I’m not sure it stands up to a globalized world of increasingly autocratic homogenized states focused on systematized resource extraction and collectivization or autocracy. Freedom and liberty are, in some sense, a luxury, in the same sense that prosperity is not the natural state: the default state we find ourselves in as humanity is poverty and oppression and it is only by effort and advancement that we pull ourselves up out of that.

As I mentioned, I’ve held a lot of beliefs on the political spectrum, so I’m familiar with the various flavors of socialism and free-market economics and corresponding who-gets-what and how-do-we-pay-for-it sort of concerns. I’ll expect to write about this at some point; it may take a bit and it may require more than a bit of writing; I think I could write a book or possibly several books about how to fix the US (and global) economy on a smaller and larger scale. Free markets and free trade got us quite a ways especially by comparison to Communism, but I think most of us can all safely say we see at least a few of the flaws in the system too, and globalism has become a dirty word for a lot of people.

And perhaps, maybe once I get a coherent plan down on paper, I’ll put it into practice. I wouldn’t have pictured myself with political aspirations… but, times change. It’s probably not a reasonable thing for me to do; having said that, I would leave you with these words of wisdom.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

-George Bernard Shaw

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