Risk

Confession time.  My partner and I do a lot of risky things.  Not the skydiving and Alaskan hunting sorts of things, but business risks.  Why?  What makes us start a B&B, 2 hotels, restaurant, catering service, limo service, rentals and flips, Christmas Market Oklahoma, foster kids, and a number of other things.  I’m no great businessman.  Only the hotels and rentals made a sustainable living. But we laugh the failures off and say we survived to tell about it. Even the system kid who pulled a knife and is now in prison.

Becoming a single parent at age 19, I read a fair number of child psychologists--Dodson, Dobson, Spock and more recently Eldridge.  They say that kids who have a stable family become people who take risks.  Don’t confuse this with gambling.  Gamblers are the guys who will spend a dollar on a lottery ticket simply because it has a million dollar payoff.  Never mind the billion to one odds.  But if you offer people a $50 bill or the chance to win $120 with two-to-one odds, most people will take the less risky route of 50 bucks.  The fewer risk takers will opt for the average payoff of $60.     

When Eldridge explained so clearly that having a family that encouraged you to try something new, that even bad  mistakes can be overcome by intellectual honesty, persistence, and discipline, it gave me pause.  So then what is in store for USA as our social fabric disintegrates?  Will children raised by single parents (or more realistically by a gang of peers), will abuse and neglect and bullying and government schools cause us to become a nation that no longer takes much risk? It seems to be coming true.  I find a spiritual component to risk as well.  If God care for you, is in the process of making your life worth something he planned, then go for it.

Indeed, USA has gone from economic growth of 4.5% in the eighties, to 3.5% in the 90s to 3% in the 2000s to 1.8% in the big recovery last year.  Risk-taking has been disturbingly scarce in America of late: the number of self-employed, job creation at start-ups and the sums invested in businesses have been low.  The rich and educated have always been more daring.  But then you find out they got that way by living on the edge more.  Comes now a growing body of economic research that links low tolerance of risk with past emotional trauma (“from which there seems no escape”, the psychologists would add).  They have been studying personal financial behavior of Europeans after their recession of the early 1990s, tsunami survivors of 2004 in SE Asia, and Americans after 2007.  The results are that people are much more risk averse, even if they didn’t sustain personal loss.  Another study of Italian banking students, half of whom were shown a gory horror flick just prior to a test on risk, saw significantly more cautious scores among those who watched the movie—except those who love and laugh at horror movies.

All this makes sense to me since I hired onto a major company in the seventies, whose bosses had grown up in the Depression and fought in WW II.  They didn’t understand the new generation.  Traditionally, factories who had an assembly line worker who screwed something up would punish the worker by making them take the day off.  The traumatized employee returned fearful of job loss the next day vowing to do better.  But when my generation came along and wanted a day off, the threw bolts into the assembly conveyors on purpose. Temporary joblessnes was no punishment. Management didn’t know how to deal with it.

I think I drove my bosses nuts.  I would make goals to do what seemed very hard at times and commit to doing whatever it took to finish it.  The customers who were division offices within our company loved such things, heralded the jobs, but back home it was icy.  I remember a boss closing the door to my office and going ballistic over me promising too much.  “You should never promise ANYthing!  That way no one can say you didn’t achieve something you promised! And your reputation follows you around. If you don’t make waves you will get promoted.”  Hmm.  I read about Boone Pickens and why he quit Phillips for exactly this kind of management. 

I had to think about the invitation to become a campaign manager.  Politics is about telling people what they want to hear, and I always took too much delight in seeing the fallacy, the buffoonery, the pitfall, the opportunity in their assurance of failure.  Would I do okay? But at least I didn’t have to do the talking and I had a guy who could.  We muddled through and won.  Now we laugh about how we survived when everyone expected us to go up in smoke.

America has always confounded the critics by succeeding where they could only foresee abject failure.  Having supportive parents while just outside the window was a world waiting to be conquered, was our secret weapon.  Having a God who held us in the palm of His hand and didn’t mind us floundering was our secret weapon.  I just hope it is not so secret that we lose it without ever knowing what it is that we lost.