The Professional Identity Edition

Summary

Slate Money Podcast Summary: The Professional Identity Edition

Date: March 12, 2016
Host: Felix Salmon (Fusion)
Guests: Cathy O’Neil (mathbabe.org), Stacey Vanek Smith (NPR’s Planet Money)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into three interconnected issues at the heart of business and finance:

1. The market for “citizenship by investment” in small nations like St. Kitts and Nevis
2. Why so few women are nominated to boards by activist investors
3. The complex relationship between professional identity, work culture, and personal fulfillment in white-collar jobs

The tone is lively, irreverent, and analytical, mixing first-hand reporting, data, and personal anecdotes.

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1. Buying Citizenship: The Business Behind Second Passports

(Starts ~02:15)
Main discussion led by: Stacey Vanek Smith (Planet Money)

What’s Happening in St. Kitts and Nevis?

• St. Kitts and Nevis is a small Caribbean nation about an hour south of Puerto Rico.
• Facing the collapse of their sugar economy, they turned to “citizenship by investment.”
  • Donate $250,000 outright or invest $400,000 in local property for citizenship.
  • “It’s like a lollipop at the bank, provided you pass the background check.” — Stacey (04:03)
• The background check is minimal (“basically, that you are not a known criminal, although there have been some problems with that.” — Stacey, 04:20).

Who Buys In and Why?

• Not primarily for Americans — “Americans... do it for tax reasons because they don’t like paying taxes. But... the Americans... really, really, really hate people who renounce their American citizenship.” — Felix (06:10)
• Most buyers are wealthy Russians, Chinese, Indians, South Africans, and some Europeans seeking visa-free travel or to avoid taxes.
• No need to live there or even visit.

Impact on St. Kitts and Nevis

• The influx of cash led to a boom in luxury housing development.
  • “All these housing developments started going up... a lot of people didn’t come. So there are all these really fancy timeshares… but there are only 45,000 people in the whole country.” — Stacey (09:30)
  • Locals can’t afford most new units; many houses stand empty.
  • The boom creates construction jobs but drives inequality and disconnect in the local economy.
  • “You can’t get much more useless than an empty housing project...where no one was ever going to live.” — Cathy (11:18)

Notable Moment

• Discussion ties into global debates on “socially useless finance.” Felix references Adair Turner’s book labeling high-end housing developments for absentee owners as the epitome of “socially useless finance.” (10:45)

Comparison with the U.S.

• The U.S. has a similar EB-5 visa, which has been exploited by developers (including Donald Trump) to fast-track wealthy foreign buyers, sometimes with minimal vetting.
  • “So not much of a background check going on.” — Cathy (13:57)

Memorable Segment:

• The team jokes about how “easy” it is for the ultra-wealthy to buy their way into citizenship, while poor refugees face impossible odds.
  • “It’s not a short process and it’s certainly not a cheap process, but it’s also something which is entirely doable [for the rich].” — Felix (11:54)

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2. Activist Investors and the Absence of Women on Boards

(Starts ~15:54)
Main discussion led by: Cathy O’Neil and Felix Salmon

Key Points:

• Women make up only about 19% of board members on average, but the figure drops drastically with activist investor-appointed seats.
  • “Top five activist investor firms: seven out of 174 nominees in the last five years are women.” — Cathy (18:36)
• Carl Icahn: 42 board nominees in five years, zero women.
• Activist investors look for quick, drastic changes, sending their “hand-picked men” to boards for short-term profit, not long-term diversity or value.
  • “The activist investor mindset is not a long-term investor mindset...For that you don’t need diversity.” — Felix (19:24)

Speculation and Theorizing

• Is it about a lack of qualified women, or something deeper?
  • “Women are actually less likely to be foot soldiers at that level...less likely to say, I’m willing to just say this one thing over and over again and only vote on that one issue.” — Cathy (21:05)
  • “Would a woman going in with a mission have a harder time executing the mission than a man would?” — Stacey (21:40)
  • Perceptions about toughness and negotiation skills may deter activist investors from choosing women.
• “The key words here being long term. The activist investor mindset is not a long term investor mindset.” — Felix (19:24)

Memorable Moment:

• Felix shares a nostalgic story about suggesting Cathy for the Goldman Sachs board in a past blog, sparking a discussion on the appearance (or lack thereof) of real diversity on boards. (24:26)

A Real Quote from Bloomberg:

• “To be sure, activists usually seek board nominees with particular business experience...” mocked by the panel as circular justification for the status quo. (23:05)

Broader Implications:

• Diversity isn’t just about gender; it’s tied to diversity of opinion, which boards often resist for stability.
  • “Diversity isn’t just whether it’s female or male...diversity of opinion is something that a lot of boards are actually really afraid of. And it is represented...by diversity of gender.” — Cathy (25:24)

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3. Professional Identity: Why Do We (White-Collar Workers) Like Work So Much?

(Starts ~28:59)
Main discussion led by: Felix Salmon and Cathy O’Neil

Based on Ryan Avent’s Essay in the Economist

• Avent argued he enjoys his “professional life” — being in the office, with co-workers, is central to his personal fulfillment.
  • “All of this being in the office, talking to my colleagues, is actually so much a part of my identity and so part of what makes me fulfilled on a personal level that I enjoy working.” — Felix paraphrasing Avent (29:49).
• Elite professionals work 60-80 hours/week, not because they have to, but because they like it.

Structural and Cultural Explanations

• White-collar competition (law, tech, finance) is “winner take all”; doing better means working harder and more hours (30:24).
• John Maynard Keynes’s prediction that we’d all work 15 hours/week by now proved wrong — now the rich work the longest hours.
  • “The rich are working way more than the poor...Is that some weird aberration, or are we moving to a Star Trek-style utopian future where work and leisure are the same thing?” — Felix (31:02)

The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Workaholism

• There’s “something zen” about the single focus of work, which can make life simpler, even relaxing (!) — Stacey (32:15).
• Outsourcing home life (childcare, chores) enables the work-centric model; this isn’t new but used to be reserved for “academic or scholarly men.” — Cathy (33:24).

Social Consequences

• Professional relationships substitute for neighborhood/community ties. People spend more time and form deeper bonds with colleagues.
• “It creates homogeneity...you talk to your colleagues who make around the same amount of money...and then you can compete very, very specifically with that.” — Cathy (37:03).

A Critical Note

• What about those who don’t enjoy work or have no access to rewarding jobs?
  • “If countries and economies are run by the elite and the elite actually don’t mind working so much, does that mean that they set things up for the benefit of the people who don’t mind working?” — Felix (34:24)

Personal Reflections

• Cathy speaks about finding a way out of the “rat race” as an independent consultant and the social discomfort of lacking a traditional professional identity (35:02).

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4. Numbers Round

(Starts ~39:54)

• Cathy: $33 billion — Amount of money in “forgotten” or unclaimed bank accounts in the U.S.
• Stacey: $1 — Symbolizes both the return of the dollar breakfast menu at Taco Bell and the idea that “you can get a meal for $1” (42:34).
• Felix: $15.6 trillion — Total household and nonprofit income in the U.S. (Q4 2015), all-time high. $86.8 trillion net worth for households and nonprofits (44:21).

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Memorable/Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “It’s like a lollipop at the bank, provided you pass the background check.” — Stacey (04:03)
• “You can’t get much more useless than an empty housing project in the island where no one was ever going to live there, right?” — Cathy (11:18)
• “Women just don’t think in a single track. I think women actually have nuanced perspectives.” — Cathy (21:54)
• “The activist investor mindset is not a long term investor mindset.” — Felix (19:24)
• “All of this being in the office, talking to my colleagues, is actually so much a part of my identity and so part of what makes me fulfilled on a personal level that I enjoy working.” — Felix paraphrasing Ryan Avent (29:49)

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Key Timestamps for Segments

• 01:15 — Intro and guest introductions
• 02:15 — St. Kitts and Nevis citizenship segment begins
• 15:54 — Women & activist investor boards
• 28:59 — Work, identity, and professional fulfillment
• 39:54 — Numbers round

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Final Thoughts

This episode of Slate Money uses wit and deep subject knowledge to connect seemingly disparate business stories — offshoring of citizenship, gender and power in corporate governance, and the modern white-collar obsession with work — revealing how economics shapes identity, opportunity, and social norms. The hosts challenge each other and draw on research, real stories, and a healthy dose of skepticism.

Listeners walk away with insight into the structural forces shaping global finance, workplace norms, and the limits of individual agency in systems built for the already-powerful.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Hello and welcome to the Professional Identity edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Fusion. I'm joined, as Always, by Kathy O', Neill, the data scientist and [e-mail] hello. Hello, Kathy. And in a fit of very good news for all listeners out there, Jordan Weissman has transmogrified into Stacy Vanek Smith. Hi, Stacy.

[C]

Hi, Felix.

[B]

Who are you? Stacey.

[C]

I am a correspondent for Planet Money on npr.

[B]

You. So this is Eklund. We actually have someone who knows about trying to convey financial concepts over audio, which is a rare and special thing on this podcast. Maybe, maybe we can, you can help us out in terms of like, trying to explain shit, because sometimes we're very bad at that.

[D]

We're learning from you, Stacy.

[B]

We are going to talk about that.

[C]

Feels like pressure.

[B]

Stacy had a big story on Planet Money this week about buying citizenship. We are also going to talk about activist investors and how they have a little bit of a blind spot when it comes to women. And we are going to talk about basically white collar work and whether we secretly actually rather kind of like it and want more of it. But Stacy, let's start with you. Tell me about one of my favorite places in the world, St. Kitts and Nevis. Did you get to go there?

[C]

I did get to go.

[D]

Wait, I don't even know where this is. Tell me where this is.

[C]

It's in the Caribbean. It's about an hour by flight south of Puerto Rico.

[D]

Okay, so what are we doing with them?

[C]

So it's a Tiny, tiny island nation. It's these two islands, St. Kitts and Nevis, but it makes up one country. And their whole economy used to be sugar, basically just sugar, sugarcane. They were an old British colony. Their sugar industry shut down. They had nothing really to replace it with. They didn't really have a tourist industry built up. It's very competitive in the Caribbean, as you can imagine. And they, about 10 years ago, started this very interesting business of selling citizenship to their country.

[D]

Wait, what does that even mean? You mean anyone could buy a citizenship?

[B]

How much does it cost?

[C]

Well, it depends. You can either don't. Well, they call it citizenship by investment, but you can either donate $250,000 outright to the country, or you can make a $400,000 investment in property. So you can buy an apartment or a house.

[B]

Or if I buy a $400,000 apartment in St. Kitts, then I wind up with citizenship, sort of as a free added bonus. Extra.

[C]

Yes, it's like a lollipop at the bank, provided you pass the background check.

[B]

Which is presumably about as stringent as you would effect as you would expect in St. Kitts and Nevis.

[C]

Well, they do outsource that, from what I understand.

[D]

What are the qualifications, besides the money.

[C]

Basically, that you are not a known criminal, although there have been some problems with that.

[B]

But this is. I mean. I mean, it's not just obscure Caribbean islands. Right. I mean, this is something that Switzerland has been doing for ages. And, you know, if you wander into Switzerland with enough money, you can get citizenship. It seems to be a relatively sort of standard way of attracting rich people to countries. No, I mean, is there something nefarious going on?

[C]

Well, I don't know if it's nefarious. I mean, a lot of countries do this. You're right. The US has the EB5 program. Canada had a similar program. The difference here is that a lot of those programs pretty much involved residency. So the idea is this is a place you wanted to move so you would pay a lot of money, so.

[B]

You don't need to live in St. Kiers.

[C]

You never even have to visit.

[D]

So presumably the whole point of this is to avoid taxes.

[C]

That is one of the.

[D]

I mean, that's the. What is the selling point for a person who buys?

[B]

Well, there's lots of reasons why people want other passports. If. If you have, say, a Libyan passport and you find it incredibly hard to travel around the world, you're like, I would really love some other possible. Now, I have to imagine that while St. Kitts and Nevis is probably easier to travel around the world on than Libya. It's not easy. I have a bunch of friends from the Caribbean who have got themselves US citizenship, mainly just because it's so much easier to travel as a US citizen than the St. Kitts citizen. And also, of course, if you're a US citizen, then you have to pay US taxes anyway wherever you live and whatever other citizenships you have. So this is not aimed at Americans.

[D]

Well, I mean. But isn't it true that in your story, one person was an American, became a San Kid citizen, and then renounced their American citizenship? So it is possible to do that.

[B]

And it's really stupid. This is one of the things which I've looked a little bit into, this whole question of becoming an American, renouncing American citizenship and that kind of thing. Becoming an American citizen is not that hard, especially if you've been a permanent resident for a while. There's a few different ways you can do it. Rupert Murdoch managed to do it in about a week when he wanted to buy a bunch of TV stations. And you could only be an American citizen to buy the TV stations. Renouncing American citizenship, on the other hand, is an unbelievably drastic and stupid thing to do. And people do it for tax reasons because they don't like paying taxes. But while the Americans are quite happy to welcome people, they really, really, really hate, people who renounce their American citizenship. And if you ever come back to the US on some other passport having renounced your US citizenship, they are going to give you so much grief at the airport every single time. And they will make your life as much of a living misery as they possibly can. And they will track. And so, like, there's this guy like Ken Dart who lives in Belize, I think, who did this. He's like a Styrofoam cup magnate who just made a lot of money on Argentine defaulted debt. But he and people like him, you can give up your US citizenship, but then what you have to do is basically make sure that whenever you travel around the world, you don't even change planes in America.

[D]

So who were the customers for this product?

[C]

Well, Americans, not so much. Roger Ver, the guy I talked to, the Bitcoin Jesus, that's what they call him. He was really an outlier, but it's mostly. Everybody told me it was mostly Russians and Chinese and people from India and South Africa, people who had passports that made it really difficult to travel. Also, from what I heard, some Europeans who wanted to avoid taxes. There's no income tax or inheritance tax in St. Kitts.

[B]

They need to have residence if they, I mean, you have to pay tax where you live, right?

[C]

Yes. Yes you do. So I'm not sure exactly how all the tax laws worked, but that was one of the big selling points. I know. I guess there's some certain rejiggering that you can do to get out of certain taxes. So that was one of the things that people asked about a lot. And there are actually a lot of ads for this kind of thing that you can watch. They're pretty funny.

[B]

Like on the TV when you just, you're watching St. Kitts TV and there's an ad for some accountancy firm.

[C]

It's mostly, I mean, like the f. Like a lot of really, like big financial publications will have ads for this. It's mostly like geared toward very high end customers because it's expensive. But there are ads on certain, like websites, if, I don't know, like yachting magazines, things like that. But they will, they will talk a lot about the tax, the tax benefits.

[D]

So one of the things that you mentioned in your Planet Money episode is all the empty houses that are as a result of this. Is this a good thing for the people who actually live in St. Kitts? I mean, obviously the government gets that money from the rich people who buy citizenship, but what do they lose?

[C]

So, yeah, that's a very complicated thing. Saint Kitts Nevaeh's economy was in terrible shape when this started. They had, I think, the highest debt to GDP ratio in the world, one of the highest. All this money poured into the country as a result of this. All these housing developments started going up because people were spending $400,000 on property there in order to get citizenship. But, but a lot of people didn't come. So there are all these really fancy timeshares. For instance, there were villas that, you know, have three bedrooms and cost $4 million and are owned by 10 different families. So this has been good. It's created a lot of construction jobs. There are all these nice housing developments going up, but There are only 45,000 people in the whole country. And there is so much really expensive housing that most of the people who live there can't afford.

[B]

Is there like a tourist infrastructure? Can, can like, can these things get Airbnb out and people can at least like start putting money into the local economy?

[C]

Kind of. A lot of the housing developments are like right next to big hotels like Marriott Four Seasons are the two big hotels there and they both have these housing developments. So I think the idea is that eventually they'll be kind of co opted by the hotels, but it's a lot of housing for not that many people, and from what I saw when I was there, not that many tourists.

[B]

Adair Turner is the former financial regulator in the UK and his new book talks a lot about socially useless finance. And the number one thing on his list of socially useless finance is housing, basically. And if housing goes up in value, thanks to mortgages and finance and weird residency requirements and stuff, that value of the property is not really helping anyone's economy. It goes into GDP figures, but it doesn't really improve anyone's standard of living. And it seems to me that that's exactly what you're talking about.

[D]

I mean, you can't get much more useless than an empty housing project in the island where no one was ever going to live there, right?

[C]

And all these kind of really cheap housing developments have started going up because a lot of the people who own these places, they pay $400,000, but they never visit them or even see them. So a lot of these really cheap kind of concrete, they called them concrete, $400,000 concrete boxes were going up all over the place. So that doesn't bode well for the future.

[D]

Can we talk a little bit about your comment, Felix, that it's easy to become a U.S. citizen? Because I'm sure a lot of really poor people in the world would be interested in that. What do you mean by that?

[B]

Okay, so I mean, is it easy for, you know, a Guatemalan refugee to become a U.S. citizen or a Syrian refugee? No, of course not. In what we're talking about here is very much like the 0.1%. If you are a very rich person in the world, one of those, like Citoyen Dumont, and you're jetting around and you have like millions of dollars and you can buy an apartment in the US and you can afford expensive citizenship and immigration lawyers, and you want to get yourself permanent residence and then you want to parlay that permanent residence into citizenship. It's not necessarily a short process and it's certainly not a cheap process, but it's also something which is entirely doable. There are very few people out there with millions of dollars who would desperately love to become US Citizens and somehow aren't able to.

[D]

So one of the things that was in the news this week was a description of the visa laundering business that Trump has with one of his Trump towers.

[B]

I love, I love Trump on the immigration system because he said as much in the most Recent Republican debate. He's like, I know H1s, I know H2s, I know EB5s. I've completely exploited all of these things. And so the only person who can fix it is me because I know how fucked up they all are.

[D]

Right. But he is exploiting it.

[B]

Oh, absolutely. And he's kind of open about that.

[D]

So what exactly is the scheme he has at the Trump, at the Trump Towers?

[C]

Well, this is really interesting. So one of his developments in Jersey City, apparently about a quarter of the apartments have been sold to, I guess mostly Chinese investors through the EB5 program, where they have essentially purchased an apartment on a fast track to become citizens. It's not that dissimilar from what's going on in St. Kitts, to be honest. There was a bunch of criticism of the EB5 program that people were getting approved in under two weeks if they just kind of threw money at this.

[D]

So not much of a background check going on.

[C]

Exactly. And apparently funding these really expensive housing developments.

[B]

So yeah, the EB5 program is bad. The really, really bad program which he's also been dinged for is the H2 program. And I would highly recommend know all of the listeners to Google H2 visa. Buzzfeed, who has the Buzzfeed had an amazing investigation on this. The H2 visa is just this really, really horrible guest worker visa where you're basically indentured to a certain employer who can treat you as badly as they want. And it's something which Trump has used in Florida. And it. And he does use it, and he's open about that. And he's open about the fact that it's very cheap labor and that he's saying it should be revamped or even abolished. And he's right about that. On which note, I need to talk right now about Casper, which are mattresses and they are excellent mattresses which are made in America. So you can be very proud that your Casper mattress is supporting the domestic economy. And you can also be very happy because you're sleeping well, because it's got memory foam and latex foam and they come together and they make you wake up or bright and bouncy and bright eyed and bushy tailed and generally happy. So if you want to be a happy person, go out there and buy a Casper mattress today. It's pretty much the best mattress you can get. And it is also incredibly cheap. It's 500 bucks for twin, 950 for king, and you can get $50 off because I'm wonderful if you go to Casper.com slatemoney and use the promo code slate money. Then that $500 twin size mattress becomes a $450 twin size mattress. And you can't say better than that. So Casper.com slatemoney promo code slatemoney all right. Now, Kathy.

[D]

Yes, Felix?

[B]

What's next on this?

[D]

Here's what's going on. We're gonna talk about how women, women don't. There are not enough women on boards of companies. In fact, right now there's about 19% women, which is not enough. But if you want to get really sad about these kinds of statistics, look at a specific kind of board member, which is the kind that's pushed by activist investors. So before we move on, what's an activist investor?

[B]

Dan Loeb, Carl Icahn, none examples.

[D]

But what's their mission in life?

[B]

So the mission of an activist investor. And actually Warren Buffett had a great little thing about this. In his latest letter to shareholders, Warren Buffett says, well, what I do me, Warren Buffett is I find really good companies. And I go, wow, that's an awesome company. I should buy that company. And then it's going to, it's so awesome. I'll make lots of money. And that's how business works. And then he says, well, he has this partner, George Paolo Lehman, who owns burger king and 3G investments and various other like, financial entities. And he's like, he has the opposite way of making money and it also works very well, which is he, instead of going out looking for really good companies, he looks for crappy companies.

[D]

Right.

[B]

And the idea is you look for a crappy company, you take it over. And then because it's crappy, there's a lot of low hanging fruit. You can fire a bunch of people, you can reorganize a bunch of stick, you can make it more efficient, you can do like balance sheet magic on it, you can lever it up, you can do all manner of stuff and then by the time you're finished with that, it's worth much more than when you started.

[D]

So how do you get all those things done?

[B]

The way you get all of those things done is by getting control of the company. So you can do that in one of two ways. George Paolo Lehman does it by just simply buying the company. But there's a more sort of leveraged way you can do it. If there's a public company which is not so well run, you can try and impose your nominees to the board and, and then your nominees will basically impose a new CEO and the new CEO will force all of these changes. And then even though you haven't bought the company, you may have only bought like 5% of the company, you can still affect the same kind of change.

[D]

Thank you so much. That was a beautiful explanation of what investors, activist investors do. So there's this specific activist investor named Carl Icahn and he is very active. He's nominated 42 people to boards of companies that he has some influence on and zero of them in the past five years. Zero of them are women.

[C]

Yeah, that's rough.

[D]

And he's not the only one. If you look at the top five activist investors firms, seven out of 174 that have been nominated in the last five years, seven are women. So it's not a single statistic, it's a trend. And it begs the question, why aren't there any men being pushed by these activist investor firms? I have theories.

[B]

Wait, wait, wait.

[D]

I'm sorry. Why aren't there more women? Sorry. There's plenty of men.

[C]

It's even hard to say the word.

[D]

I know.

[C]

In the same sense.

[B]

Where are the men? Actually, there are lots of men.

[D]

Where are these men?

[B]

So, so this is, this is really fascinating and it actually there's something rational going on here. I have, I agree, rational explanation of this. And Stacy is looking at me like, are you?

[D]

I really want to hear this.

[C]

I really want to hear this.

[B]

If you do the kind of women's empowerment, Davos conference circuit type thing, you will hear over and over again how diversity at board level and indeed at every level, senior management level, everywhere else is incredibly important for creating long term value. And that you need a bunch of women normally somewhere north of 30% at basically every level of the company in order to make sure that the company basically understands all of the perspectives that its customers and its stakeholders have and so on and so forth. This is a generally accepted principle and that over the long term, companies with a lot of women in senior posts will outperform companies without them. The key words here being long term. The activist investor mindset is not a long term investor mindset. The activist investor mindset is I'm going to come in, shake things up, make it more valuable and leave. And for that you don't need diversity. And to understand all stakeholders for that you just have to be a kind of monomaniac. And you go in there and say like, I need to do this and I need to break that and I need to change the other and then I need to get out. And clearly these activist Investors just reckon that they're just going to get their mates to do this.

[D]

Yeah. So, I mean, I agree with everything you said, but I just want to add a little bit of a layer of like how this actually works. So the activist investors don't themselves get on the board, right?

[B]

Sometimes they do, but rather sometimes, but.

[D]

Mostly they choose like hand picked men to be their voice on this board. And those men have to just as you say, be like monomaniacal. They have to be like single minded. Like, this is what we need to do to improve short term profits as in like next year. And here's, here's my feminist voice coming in, which I don't think women are willing to be foot soldiers at that level like men are. I actually think women are actually like less likely to say, I'm willing to just say this one thing over and over again and only vote on that one issue.

[C]

Well, it would be hard to say because I guess there are only seven them. Right? I mean, is that true though? Like, would if the woman went in with a mission, would she have a harder time executing the mission than a man would?

[D]

I mean, I think women just don't think like in a single track. I think women actually think. Well, on the other hand, they actually have nuanced perspectives.

[B]

I don't know, man. I was looking at Carly Fiorina during the Republican nomination.

[D]

I laughed so hard that my mic, my headphones just fell off. You're right, there are exceptions.

[B]

Stacey, what do you think of my theory that it's about long termism versus short termism?

[C]

Well, that's interesting. The thing that keeps going through my head is I wonder if this is somehow tied to feelings about women being weaker negotiators. I'm wondering if there's a feeling that women would be less tough because you'd have to go into a board with everybody kind of work like having an opposite.

[B]

And do you think that there's any reason to believe that women are weaker negotiators are less tough?

[C]

Well, it's something that's being talked about a lot and why negotiations tend to go less well for women. But I think there's definitely a perception that women are not as good at negotiating as men or not as good at not being in a situation where they're pleasing everybody. So I wonder if there's a feeling like, oh, we really need someone tough in there. We need, you know, this guy who's also my friend.

[D]

Actually, that's a good theory.

[B]

My favorite thing, this is all, by the way, coming from A Bloomberg article about this very subject. So you should all read it. We will have the link in the show notes. But my favorite thing about this whole story is the to be sure graph in which is like, apparently sort of mandated by God in every Bloomberg article. And. And the to be sure graph in this Bloomberg article reads as follows. To be sure, activists usually seek board nominees with particular business experience, said the co chair of Sholtaroth and Sable's shareholder activism practice. As though like, well, that explains why there aren't any women.

[D]

By that theory, you're choosing like, men who've been around, around the block a few times. And that's why, you know, we have to wait for a few years and then we'll have women with that equivalent kind of experience. And that's just not true. I mean, women have been working in business for long enough, so we should be seeing more than some.

[B]

Yeah, we are not in 1921 right now, there aren't any women with that kind of equipment.

[D]

Well, it's the same argument you see, like in like mathematics professors. There are like very few mathematics professors in elite schools, even though a lot of graduate schools have lots of women in them. So it's just, there is something else going on. But Felix, I'm going to go back to my theory about it and I want to bring a very nostalgic story for me. Felix.

[B]

Okay.

[D]

Do you remember what Was happening on October 18, 2012?

[B]

Off the top of my head, no, I do not.

[D]

On that date, you wrote a Reuters blog about the Goldman Sachs board of directors.

[B]

Oh, is this Ruth Simmons?

[D]

You were actually responding to someone's. We will have a link for it on the notes. But I do want to say the last line of that blog post, and this is the first interaction I had with you.

[B]

Oh, wow.

[D]

Was that you said, if you really, if Goldman Sachs really wanted diversity on their board, they would put Cathy o' Neill on it. Oh, he said that it was like the sweetest thing ever. I didn't know who Felix Salmon was. And ever since then, of course, I've loved you. So my thing is like, yes, it would have been great for me to be on the Goldman Sachs board, but it's just not going to happen for so many reasons. Can we just list the reasons?

[B]

No, if we listed the reasons, this podcast would be three hours long.

[D]

So I mean, like, diversity is. Diversity isn't just whether it's female or male, but it does. It's correlated to that. Right. So like, diversity of opinion is something that a lot of boards are actually really afraid of. And it is represented. There's a correlation to diversity of gender. That's my theory.

[B]

I have to do a little mea culpa here, though. I was tangentially related in kicking one of the very few women on the Goldman Sachs board off the Goldman Sachs board.

[D]

Oh my goodness.

[B]

Which is what this book, which is what I would guess that this blog post was peripherally about, which was Ruth Simmons was the president of Brown University and she gave an interview to the Brown student newspaper, basically saying, oh, I'm so ditzy. I don't really understand anything about finance. And why did I join the Goldman Sachs board? Because I thought maybe I could learn something about money. And I'm like, this is not the person you want overseeing a major systemically important financial institution. And a few other people said similar things. And before long she was gone. But, you know, they paid her a few million dollars, so she was okay.

[D]

Yeah. You mean you do get paid a lot to be on these boards. That's another weird thing.

[B]

It kind of depends. It changes from board to board. But Goldman Sachs, they. They do okay. The board.

[D]

I think it's something like 500k a year just to be on the board. But I mean, I guess the thing is that you said in the article that like, and I agree with this, that board of directors aren't. Aren't really meant to have strong opinions that are different from the management of the company. They are meant to sort of identify with the management of the company.

[B]

Well, a lot of the time the board is picked by the management of the company. In fact, most of the time the board is picked by the management of the company. So it's unlikely that the board is then going to turn on the chairman CEO who picked them. Yeah. Anyway, please, people out there listening to this podcast who are nominating new board directors, can you just like for the next couple of years, can you only nominate women? Because maybe that, that will help get the. Get the ratios up. Slate money is also sponsored this week by Carbonite, which. Do I even need to tell you what? Carbonate carbonite is just this obvious thing which you need, which is you put your life is on your computer and your computer is a thing which can break. And so make sure that the stuff which is on your computer is also out there in the cloud. And so you install Carbonite on your computer and that's it. You install Carbonite on your computer and then everything on your computer is backed up to the cloud. And if something happens to your computer, you don't lose your stuff. It's kind of a no brainer. So don't take the risk of losing everything. Get carbonite [e-mail] youm don't even need like a credit card or anything. It's a genuine free trial. But then if you do decide to buy this thing at the end of your free trial, and honestly it's not, I mean, you will see in the free trial how painless it is. It's just sort of sitting there on your computer backing up. You won't get any of the benefits because you know by sod's law you don't ever need the backup while you're in your free trial phase. But if you do decide to buy, which you should because it's just sensible, if you use the offer code slate, you will get two free bonus months, which is kind of awesome. So use the offer code. Slatearbonite.com get more free backup stuff, which is something we could all use. Next up is work. Ryan Avant, who very briefly succeeded me as the finance [e-mail] for about three weeks before the whole thing imploded, then went back to the Economist. And then went back, he went back to the Economist in Washington, then he went back to the Economist in London. And now he's like this grand pooh bar at the Economist. And they have this magazine which used to be called Intelligent Life and is now called something else. And he's written this amazing essay for them under his own name, which is very rare for the Economist. And he's saying I enjoy my professional life. He's saying this is genuinely part of how I define myself. And when people talk about like work, life, balance and I need to make sure that I have time to do blah, blah, blah, and it's like I could disappear back to North Carolina and be closer to my family and work remotely. But all of this being in the office, talking to my colleagues is actually so much a part of my identity and so part of what makes me fulfilled on a personal level that I enjoy working. And this is one of the reasons why like white collar professionals are regularly working, you know, 60, 70, 80 hour weeks is because it's actually not that unpleasant and people quite like it.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, and he also described the sort of environment in which it happens. Like he, you know, even if we didn't like it, like it's going to happen. Right. So he talks about the, the fact that we're often talking about very competitive fields, like especially if you want to make partner in a law Firm and where it's like winner take all kind of thing where you, you can't just do really well, you have to do better than the other guys. And doing better means being more productive, which generally speaking means working harder. So it, it to some extent, he addresses this beautifully. To some extent it's like this is the system we have, so we're going to decide that we like it this way.

[B]

So the question is, what does this mean for the future of work? Because it's a very counterintuitive outcome. John Maynard Keynes famously expected that we'd be all working about 15 hours a week right now, because that's all you need to work to maintain the kind of standard of living that would have been very enviable back in Keynes day. And we're not. And what's happening is that the rich are working way more than the poor. And that is almost unprecedented in human history. And is that some weird aberration or are we moving to, you know, a kind of Trekonomic style utopian future where work and leisure are the same thing and that people are doing stuff just because it's the way they get personal fulfillment?

[D]

I mean, I think, I think it's a little bit of a stretch to say that people love their work so much that it is in fact leisure. But yeah, really interesting. Like we have this thing where a lot of people cannot get enough work, you know, if they're, especially if they're minimum wage workers. And then we have all these rich people who are like, I can't even meet my kids because I've been at the office for four years.

[C]

Yeah, I really love how he talks about how sort of how pleasant it can be to be so myopically focused on work and how there's something sort of Zen about being a workaholic. Not that I'm calling him a workaholic, but there's something kind of Zen about working too much. It was very interesting. Just the idea of how it can be kind of a satisfying thing to be looking at your phone all the time and dealing with work all the time, because it simplifies your life in this way. I had never thought about it that way, but it was so interesting.

[B]

I have a friend who's a lawyer who had a kid and then had twins and wound up with like three kids. And it was a nightmare. And she was like, the only thing that keeps me sane is that I get to just leave in the morning and just go off and do this law a lot. And then I come back in the Evening and they've had all day doing, you know, being looked after by someone. And Ryan talks about this a lot. He's like, we just outsource things like childcare now to be. We buy that for cash because it's actually easier to go off and be a lawyer all day than it is to try and like, chase after three kids all day.

[D]

And I'll say it a different way. I mean, like, this is actually not a new thing. It used to be, but it used to be reserved for like academic or like scholarly men, right? So they would live kind of like a monk's life. And by the way, my. There are some people that are still that this is their dream. I mean, you know, my husband, for example, sometimes talks about the idea of being at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which would make me want to kill myself within 30 minutes. But the idea that, like, they serve lunch and, you know, you never have to leave the campus and you can live on campus. This is like a sort of a academic dreamland. And the wife, by the way, was the one who. That was the outsourcing of the kids. It's just like, well, have a wife, they take care of the kids. It's not a new thing. But I guess the idea in this article is that our jobs as lawyers and computer programmers and so on have become more and more intellectually stimulating and have become kind of like that, kind of like an academic dreamland. I don't know. It's not true for everyone, for sure.

[B]

And what does this mean for people who don't enjoy their jobs or who can't find that wonderful sort of confluence of profession and avocation, or people who just have normal crappy jobs which involve working really hard and aren't that pleasant? If we're. If countries and economies are run by the elite and the elite actually don't mind working so much, does that mean that they set things up for the benefit of the people who don't mind working? And for the majority, people who actually don't enjoy working? That just makes things worse.

[D]

You know, it's a complicated thing. I personally am somebody who's kind of gotten out of the rat race in that sense. Like, I'm a consultant. There's a lot of social pressure to not do what I've done where I've literally, when people ask me, where am I affiliated with? I just say myself. Or sometimes I say mathbabe.org you know, it's a non entity. And people look at me like, how do you. How do you have an identity.

[B]

And a lot of people who do what you do, a lot of people with, you know, who work as consultants and stuff, create some grand sounding corporation which they call themselves. And so it's not like I'm just me. Oh, no. I work for, you know, important consulting company Inc. And that's just. It has one employee, but at least it sounds grander.

[D]

Maybe that's what I should do. But, you know, and I don't do that. And. But I do feel like I am actually better off than a lot of the people I know who, you know, at the best of times do feel like they identify with their job and their career, but at many times feel like snubbed by their colleagues or by the system. And it's not a great feeling. There's a lot of ego reserved by this thing. And moreover, as the article pointed out, like the friendships that we maintain are professional friendships. They're not people who live in our neighborhood or anymore. And that has good things and bad things about it. Right.

[C]

Well, if you spend most of your day around a group of people, I mean, most of your time is going there. And if you spend eight hours a day at work, which a lot of people do, the majority of your time, you may be spending more time with your colleagues than your children or your spouse. And, you know, that become. I mean, that's a significant relationship. No, it's definitely not a bad thing.

[B]

I think it is a bad thing.

[C]

Well, it depends on your colleagues.

[D]

I guess one thing it does is it creates homogeneity. Right. So, you know, you've talked about how like economists, male, Male and female economists marry each other. Right.

[B]

It's called assortative mating.

[D]

Yeah. And we have, we have assortative socializing as well, through this professionalization of everything. Right. So you talk to your colleagues who make around the same amount of money as you about which private school your kid, their kid got into, and then you can compete very, very specifically with that. Whereas if you.

[B]

But it also creates norms. Like if you were surrounded by people who send their kids to private school, it kind of starts feeling weird to you to do what the vast majority of people do, which is just send their kids to public school.

[C]

Would that be different, though, if you were creating relationships with neighbors? I mean, wouldn't that be. I mean, if you're in a certain neighborhood and you had a certain amount of money, wouldn't it be the same? Possibly.

[D]

I think there's more. I don't know, maybe it is maybe.

[C]

More diversity because people would be at least Working in different.

[D]

I say that, but then, like, think about neighborhoods and how they're sorting too. I don't know.

[B]

All right, we are going to move on to the numbers round, but before that, I need to talk about Mileiq, which is this very natty app which you can put on your phone and then basically forget about. It's a little bit like Carbonite. You don't need to spend a huge amount of time worrying about this thing. You just install it once and then it works. And with Mileiq, what it does is it keeps track of everywhere you drive. This is one of the really clever insight here, is that you are not driving anywhere without your phone. And so if you're driving somewhere, you're gonna be driving with your phone. Your phone knows that it's driving through some clever software, something, and, and it will keep track of all of your trips. And then at the end of the week, or month or year, you can go back and say, oh, that was a business trip, that was a business trip. I had to drive for work, I needed to do this for work. And you add them all up and you realize that you would never normally bother to try and claim for all of that stuff at 50 cents a mile or whatever it is. But now it's so easy. You just click a thing and you get this thing you can send off and make. And this is amazing. The average mile IQ user gets $547 a month in drives. That's over $6,000 a year. That's just the average. And that is not. Sometimes it's reimbursable, often it's tax deductible. This is real money. And you can find this real money just sort of falling into your lap by putting Mileiq on your phone, which is free to download this thing. So you get your 40 drive free trial by texting slate money to 31996. But you don't just get a 40 day free trial. You also get 20% off your annual plan. So text slate money to 31996 and get a 40 drive free trial and 20% off the annual plan. My liq. All right, numbers round, people.

[D]

Okay, I'm ready.

[B]

What's your number?

[D]

Okay, here's the thing. There's nothing to do with this week's news. I hope that's okay. But My number is 33 billion.

[B]

Okay?

[D]

That's the estimated amount of money that's just been lost.

[B]

Whoops, down the back of a sofa is this money which I, like, left in my jeans and got laundered well.

[D]

I'm sure actually if you counted that kind of money, there'd be even more of it. I was just having this, like, senior moment the other day, which is to say I just. I completely forgot my own phone number, which is embarrassing. But, like, it made me realize that, you know, it must happen a lot that people forget things. And I started thinking, what about people forgetting their own bank accounts?

[B]

My mad godmother forgot her own bank account once.

[D]

Well, it turns out lots of people have lost track of stuff they actually own to the tune of approximately $33 billion, as I learned when I looked it up. I just thought that was fascinating.

[B]

And. Yeah, and this is. This is one of the ultimate, like, rich people problems. But it really is a thing that you open up a bank account, you put a couple million dollars in it, you kind of forget about it. And then, like, one day you're like, wait, didn't they have a bank account? You look at it and then they're like, oh, yeah, we changed your bank account to this kind of thing. We started charging you annual fees. We didn't pay you any interest. And you're like, oh, my God, even though I've got my principal back or some of it, like, there's a huge opportunity curse.

[D]

Yeah. Just a couple fun facts I learned. First of all, there is a website for people to look up stuff if they think they lost it and they want to find it again. Second, of all the states, it's, like, done by states, like what happens with unclaimed property and stuff. And in some states, the state can never take that money if it's left in the bank account or something. In other states, after a few years, they get to claim it.

[B]

Stacy, do you know what the rule is in St. Kitts and Nevis? If I open a bank account, I.

[C]

Don'T know what the rule is. I was just wondering what the rule is in New York and trying to think if I possibly have any money. I mean, if I do, it's probably like, $20.

[B]

I'm pretty sure I closed my Marine Midland account back in the day, but maybe I still have that. Do you have a number, Stacey?

[C]

Yes, my number is one.

[B]

It's one of those. We've had one a lot. What's the name of that rule? That one occurs much more often than any other number.

[D]

That's about, like, the first digit of a number. Yeah. That's interesting. That's for accounting. That's one of the ways.

[B]

What's the name of it?

[D]

I don't know.

[C]

I never Know names.

[D]

I just know ideas.

[C]

Anyway, I feel bad about my number.

[D]

Don't feel bad. It's a good number.

[B]

It's a good number, but it's a great fraud detection tool.

[D]

Exactly.

[B]

That's what I'm saying. Because the way that if you look at the first digit of numbers and it doesn't conform to this thing, that's a very good indication that someone's just made up numbers.

[D]

Yep, exactly.

[C]

Oh, well, My number is $1.

[B]

$1. $1.

[C]

Yes. Yes.

[B]

You can't get anything for $1 these days.

[C]

Except that is also what I thought. But Taco Bell this week rolled out the dollar breakfast menu.

[B]

No way.

[C]

I was so excited about this because when McDonald's got rid of its dollar menu, I really, I thought that it was the end of an era and that this was the moment when I was gonna become the person who said things like, back in my day, I used to go to the movies for a nickel. I was like, oh, I'm gonna be the person saying, back in my day, you could get a meal for a dollar. But it's back. The dollar meal's back.

[B]

So have you eaten it?

[C]

No.

[D]

What's in it?

[B]

I feel like you're not really going to get a filling breakfast for $1.

[C]

It looks like. I looked at photos of it. It mostly looks like tacos with eggs in them. But however you feel. Yeah, breakfast tacos. But however you. But the fact you can get a meal for a dollar, I feel like there's something very comforting about it.

[B]

And I feel like $1 is the perfect platonic price for breakfast taco as well. Yes.

[D]

Yeah. Guys, I'm a little bit less romantic about this because I used to work in a store next to Taco Bell. So I saw the back, you know, so. Yeah.

[C]

What did you see?

[D]

You don't want to know.

[B]

Okay, we're not going to go into that.

[D]

Lots of liquid cheese.

[B]

My number this week is a happy number. My number this week is $15.6 trillion, which is the total amount of household and nonprofit income in the United States as of the final quarter of 2015, according to the Federal Reserve. Also $86.8 trillion, which is the total amount of net worth in the United States. Both of these are all time highs.

[D]

Okay, Just get dumb it down for us.

[B]

Right? Basically, America as a big glomping entity has more income right now than it has ever had in its history, and it has more net worth than it has ever had in its history. So, yes, it's unevenly distributed and yes.

[D]

There are probably more unequally distributed at any time in its history.

[B]

I'm not sure about that, but maybe close. You know, I think the 20s were pretty bad. Yeah, but ultimately you're rich people. If you're listening to this podcast, congratulations on being richer than you have ever been in so far as you are that mean American. And that's it. We're out of numbers. We're out of topics. We're just gonna have to wait a week until we've managed to recharge to the degree that we can talk anymore about business, finance, money and all these things.

[D]

And Transmogrify again.

[B]

Transmogrify.

[C]

Oh, that's me. I'm the transmographer.

[D]

You're the one. You claim that Jordan had been transmorgified or some kind of word like that. I don't even know that wor.

[B]

Oh, my God. Transmogrify. Transmogrify. It's an awesome.

[C]

What does mogrify mean?

[B]

It's a good question. I know what transmogrify means, but I have no idea. I don't even know if mogrify is a word. We should. We should look this up. Dear Slate Money listeners, can you please. Can you please send us an email to slatemoneylate.com telling us, number one, whether mogrify is a word, and number two, if it is a word, what it means, and number three, if it isn't a word, what it should mean.

[D]

Yes.

[B]

So, and then next week we will have the mography edition of Slate Money, produced by Audrey Quinn, as ever, who is an expert in mogrification. And. And yeah, so all it leaves to me is to thank Steve Lichti and Andy Bowers, the executive producers around these parts, tell you to listen to the Panoply network of [e-mail] Panoply and most importantly, to thank Stacey Vaneksmith for being awesome.

[C]

Thanks for having me. It was really fun.

[B]

And we'll talk to you next week on Slate Money.