Mindset

Don’t be too late.

Say the things you are meaning to say.

Do the things you’ve been meaning to do.

Now is always the time to love and to live. 

Some years ago now, I lost one of my best friends to suicide. While the awful pain has dissipated somewhat, I’m still recovering. I often think about my friend and the unthinkable way he left this life and I have questions. 

After the sadness, anger, and guilt, I searched long and hard for some meaning to this tragedy. I have resigned myself to just one transformative conclusion:

I’ll never know.

I’ll never know why it happened, what it means, or whether we could’ve done something to stop it. I’ll simply never understand the full truth. And that’s ok because in this resigned acceptance, something profound has come to me, a moral understanding of sorts:

Knowing with every part of your being that waiting can be the gravest of mistakes, you understand that now is always the critical moment and you simply cannot wait to love and live. 

Money

There’s something about modern business that has been bothering me. It’s the idea of “caveat emptor” (buyer beware). It’s a relatively old common law doctrine that mostly deals with real estate transactions but has grown to be a pervasive feature of our system. Basically, it transfers the risk and responsibility for assessing quality from the seller to the buyer, which kind of makes sense until you really stop to think about it. 

Caveat emptor is suspect. 

Don’t worry, I am not going all anti-capitalist on you or anything like that. Capitalism, for all its flaws, is like democracy in that it is the best thing we have. While we do have some decent protections in place for buyers like disclosures and warranties, some of which are mandated by law, there’s still something about this idea that is wrong.

Why should the buyer shoulder all the risk? What kind of moral message is that sending when it comes to commerce?  

I noticed recently that there is an interesting relationship between purchase frequency and the moral integrity of price. The more regularly you buy something, the more likely it is that the price you are paying reflects the true value of the item or service. So, while the price you pay for coffee is (usually) pretty economically reasonable, the price you pay for emergency construction services is not. 

I see this all the time in my world. About once a week, I get a call regarding some home repair and maintenance or renovation issue. Almost always, I uncover a situation where a contractor is trying to rip someone off. This is especially true in high-end markets, where people tend to be more price insensitive or at least that’s what contractors believe anyway. To give you a sense of how bad it is out there, I came across a situation recently where a contractor was trying to charge a mere 4x the true market price for a renovation. Yikes!  

Because normal homeowners engage so infrequently in the construction services economy, they are prone to getting ripped off. The same is true in health care. Here, consumers are by design trying to avoid having to pay for treatments and procedures. Who wants to get sick? Or have surgery? And because of our ridiculously convoluted (corrupt) health care system, no one knows what anything really costs or who is getting paid for what. In environments like these, caveat emptor makes no sense. 

Sometimes it feels like there’s no honor left in business. Didn’t we used to believe in things like quality, a fair price, and a reasonable return? Maybe it’s naïve to think that things used to be better. 

There’s a sense in which capitalism is exploitative per se.  Outcomes are so wildly skewed in favor of owners (capital) over employees (labor), there’s an unresolved question on whether that’s really morally fair. Even market-based price discovery, which is often held up as the benign magical superpower of capitalism, can be a little fishy. First of all, despite what the academics say about efficient markets, price discovery is often inefficient. Secondly, even when it works in the aggregate, there are transactions along the way that definitely don’t feel quite right.

Suppose 100 homes sell in a neighborhood. 98 sell at the same price ($400K), 1 sells at wildly high price to some wealthy person for emotional reasons ($500K), and 1 sells at some wildly low price ($300K) because an investor is in cahoots with the shady listing broker and just plain takes advantage of the situation. In the end, the market price reflects the truth ($400K) but not all participants are treated fairly.

I see stuff like this all the time in my world and, often, far worse.

Anyway, since caveat emptor isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and things like price controls don’t work, what should we do? 

I think the only answer is to focus heavily on self-education. The market may be a tricky place but it’s one that we can all master. One of the greatest lies in the world is that finance and business are somehow too hard and complicated for people to grasp. Think about who that lie serves and who it does not.

Our task is to empower ourselves (and others if we can) with the understanding of the big ideas of financial literacy and learn the practical business (life) skills necessary to ferret out the truth in these suspect market situations.  

If there’s a role for government here, it’s to arm citizens with as much transparent real-time as possible and to get busy reforming broken industries like housing and health care. 

At the same time, as individuals, we must refuse to engage in morally questionable commerce whenever possible, even if it’s “legal.”  While markets may be morally agnostic, we are not. When we make mistakes of this nature, there are consequences—sometimes legally, always psychologically and spiritually. Remember, there are countless ways to compromise yourself as you are trying to build wealth and how you make your money matters. Refuse to be the person who takes advantage of others in business. 

News for humans, by humans.

• Today's news.

• Edited to be unbiased as humanly possible.

• Every morning, we triple-check headlines, stories, and sources for bias.

• All by hand with no algorithms.

Sign up now!

Inspiration

Title: Optical Glass House

Where: Hiroshima

Architect: Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP

I absolutely love this design and dream of one day re-creating the incredible glass and tree effect in a house of my own someday. To me, this might be the ideal manifestation of the art of merging Nature and the built environment to create a moment of peace in an urban setting. 

Like what you’re reading? Join us on our socials for more content throughout the week. 🙏 Thank you!