Money Archives - Page 18 of 27 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Creative Capital

The Inscrutable Foibles of Hillbilly Talk

Although the parallels between my life and that of J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” seem flat-out astonishing, it’s actually the differences that are more interesting. Vance and I both started out with grandparents who migrated from southeastern Kentucky to the Dayton, Ohio area, and we ultimately ended up in pretty much the same place: Yale …

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Creative Capital

Why Were Pittsburgh’s Scots-Irish So Successful?

If Malcolm Gladwell is right that the cultural legacy of the Scots-Irish explains the poor outcomes experienced by people in southeastern Kentucky, how do we explain the exceptional success of these same people in Pittsburgh? One answer to this conundrum is this one: “Cultural legacy explanations are garbage.” That’s the Politically Correct answer, but it’s …

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Creative Capital

The Culture of the Scots-Irish

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” –Peter Drucker (supposedly) Whether or not Drucker ever said that, every corporate executive knows it’s true. No matter how brilliant a strategy might be, if the corporate culture is toxic, the strategy will fall as flat as soggy Cheerios. On the other hand, if the corporate culture is healthy, a …

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Pittsburgh Business Show Ready to Launch Second Year

by Douglas Heuck

Last year, Linda Jo Thornberg created the Pittsburgh Business Show with notable success, attracting 157 exhibiting business and 2,800 attendees. Prior to this year’s show, April 25 and 26 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, we asked her how she got the show started and what to expect in its second iteration. Q. How …

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Creative Capital

Leaving Kentucky for Two Very Different Reasons

You can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the boy. – Mamaw Vance Last week I outlined the more-than-slightly-unnerving parallels between J. D. Vance’s life and my own, as outlined in his remarkable book, “Hillbilly Elegy.” This week we’ll balance the scales by noting some of the profound differences. The …

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A Lesson in Growth from Austin, Texas  

by Paul Scripko

With the U.S. Census Bureau reporting continuing populations losses for metropolitan Pittsburgh, the region is one of only a few “large” U.S. metros reporting losses, putting us in the company of Youngstown, Ohio and Altoona/Johnstown, Pa. This is not a good story. Companies often choose where to locate or expand in places people want to be. …

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Creative Capital

The Weird Parallels Between the Hillbilly Elegy Author and Me

I just completed a series of posts on Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” a book that experienced an astonishing publications history—despite being 700 pages long and a hard slog—because it caught the exact tenor of the times. A very different and more accessible book that enjoyed similar popularity, and for the same reason, is …

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Creative Capital

How Private Capital Made America the Greatest Society

Last week we discussed Fundamental Law of Private Capital #1—that private capital is the secret weapon that allows some economies to out-compete others. This week we’ll turn to Fundamental Laws #2 and #3. Fundamental Law #2: Private capital is the progenitor of all other kinds of capital. From the beginning of human civilization, virtually all …

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Creative Capital

Three Fundamental Laws of Private Capital

A few years after “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” exploded on the scene, the University of Chicago surveyed 36 well-known economists, asking if they agreed with Piketty. The results? One yes and 35 no’s. How could a book so celebrated upon publication diminish into obscurity in a few short years? Presumably, it had something to do with …

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Creative Capital

The Rich Will Lose Their Money Soon Enough

We are talking about Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” including its extraordinary publishing history and its subsequent fade from grace. I reviewed the various problems with Pikkety’s theses as they have been noted in the economics literature, and I also proposed my own view of the book’s central problem: that its author is a naïf. …

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Creative Capital

On r > g, Part II

Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” exploded on the scene in mid-2013, but it’s impact faded quickly. I reviewed last week the widely discussed reasons why Piketty’s book fell from grace, but I also proposed a reason of my own: that Piketty is a naïf. A naïf, for this purpose, is a person who knows his narrow subject …

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Creative Capital

The Trouble with “Capital”

In the summer of 2013 a remarkable event occurred in the publishing industry. A challenging, 685-page economic text written by an obscure French economist and published by an academic press became an overnight best seller. Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (referred to here simply as “Capital”) sold so quickly that Harvard University Press couldn’t keep up …

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Creative Capital

Examples of What to Say

Even small children love to hear simple stories about their ancestors, and as children grow into teenagers and then young adults the stories can become more complex and serious. For example, consider Great-Grandpa Henry Knox’s many shortcomings as a rancher. Or the general klutziness of the Knox men, who are disposed to walk around with …

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Creative Capital

Tell the Right Stories to your Children

In the last few posts I’ve spent a lot of time talking about kids who grow up in wealthy families and the issues they face, as well as talking about how virtually all American kids are raised these days. I’ve devoted so much time to these subjects because I want to emphasize the many minefields that surround …

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Creative Capital

Trust Fund Baby Syndrome: An Interesting Case

In the fall of 1997 I found myself in the spacious, many-windowed living room of a large home in a southern state I’ll call Florida, although that’s not where it was. I have also slightly modified some of the details of the family to protect their privacy. Ostensibly, I was there to discuss more aggressive …

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The Keys to a Happy Retirement

Baby Boomers are leaving the workforce, or soon will leave it, in an unprecedented wave. Census data tell us that the number of retirees in the region soon could swell to six figures. In this final edition of our “Silver Tsunami” series, we ask, as Butch Cassidy might, “Who are those guys?” Though their circumstances …

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Creative Capital

A Pampered Generation

The typical trust fund baby is well-known to all of us: a life devoted to spending down the family’s capital on themselves, not working, having difficulty maintaining relationships, living empty lives. The fear that people will be ruined by money is so pervasive that, following the French Revolution, trusts were abolished in virtually all civil …

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Creative Capital

Poor Parenting Saps the Wealthy

We are talking in a roundabout way that has taken us back to first principles about the human maturation process and how it interacts with the fear of affluent parents that money will ruin their children. There are several characteristic ways that affluent families go wrong, launching the shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves phenomenon that, as Jay Hughes has …

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Creative Capital

Understanding the Trust Fund Baby

We are talking about the complex process through which infants and children are transformed from little beasts into responsible adults. More particularly, we are talking about how that process often goes wrong and never goes perfectly. In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” for example, Sigmund Freud proposed a…, well, a “Freudian” take on the issue. Freud pointed …

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Creative Capital

The Talk

No, not that talk. Talking to kids about sex is a walk in the park compared to talking to kids about their family’s money. The worst that can happen with the-birds-and-the-bees conversation is massive parental mortification. The worst that can happen with the money talk, however, is… Well, let’s look into that. For more than a century, …

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Creative Capital

Make your Plan Now (While You’re Calm)

“Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will be.” –Janet Yellen. Last week I suggested six steps we could take to prepare ourselves for the next market crisis—which, Janet Yellen notwithstanding, will in fact happen. This …

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Creative Capital

What Will You Do in the Crisis? Part II

“I’m less interested in the return on my money than in the return of my money.” –Mark Twain Whether the markets crash next week or years from now, it’s not too soon to be thinking about how we will navigate the next crisis. With asset prices as high as they are and investor complacency (measured by market volatility) as low …

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