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Ms Mary Elizabeth Truss is now the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, and godspeed to her in that role; it will not be a simple one. She has many challenges, of course, but all of them are coloured by the fact that she has less than two years before she is required, by a law passed by her predecessor David Cameron, to call a general election in 2024, just less than two years from her own elevation to the post. Along with her new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, who introduced on her government’s behalf an anything but mini-budget last week at the Commons, she’s going to ride a very interesting, and very quick, ride in macroeconomics. Meanwhile, Andrew Bailey, of the Bank of England, has unhelpfully said that their supply-side stimulus plans will lead to higher interest rates: an observation which academically is uninteresting, but from a PR perspective, seems to indicate Bailey wants to be a jerk.

President Biden is riding a similar roller coaster, although he has the advantage of having been in office for a little less than two years. He continued the now-long-forgotten fiscal stimulus bills of his predecessor, Donald Trump, and managed to get a capital expenditure bill through Congress which – unlike the spending giveaways of the early days of the pandemic – just pay for long-deferred maintenance of US infrastructure. But with inflation now at 8% (depending on the metric), he’s also hanging on for dear life.

There’s an entertaining game on the Federal Reserve website which allows people to see how good they are at changing base rates. You start in (interestingly) an interest rate environment which is completely foreign to anyone who has been an adult in the last thirty years; this is a Laffer Curve game, so you would need to ask your parents or grandparents for help, and even then, if they don’t know who Arthur Burns was, you should just give up and go back to tracking the Kardashians on Instagram. In any event, the game starts with a random inflation rate and a random Fed Funds rate, and you – as the omnipotent Fed chair – change the Fed Funds rate in response to macroeconomic data (unemployment – remember, the Fed has to minimise that!) and fiscal spending and exchange rates and blah blah blah… I’ve played it multiple times, and the point of the game seems to be to convince you that the Fed governors have a really tough job and you, sad citizen, will never be up to the task. They never ask whether the Fed governors are up to it either, but hey, I get it, this is their website.

I’ll bring up one last item before getting to the point. I am a willing victim of the Wikipedia default mainpage, at en.wikipedia.org for those of us who are most comfortable in English. Today, there was a link for a climate scientist named Chip Fletcher, who makes the blindingly obvious observation that “our communities are scaled and built for a climate that no longer exists”. But the observation clearly is interesting because it made the front page of Wikipedia’s daily update: someone on their staff thought “wow, people out there probably haven’t made this connection before, this might be interesting.” And of course it is interesting, but only because so few people understand time dynamics in complex systems.

I cut my teeth in macroeconomics a long time ago, but one of the fundamental observations of Volcker, Friedman, et al was that any given change in base rate policy by a central bank – that is, any fundamental change in the cost and carry of a fiat currency set by the institution designated to grant access to said currency – has at least an eighteen month lag before the broad economic impact is fully absorbed. I also learned ecology – oddly – for the first time at the hands of a slightly crazy biology teacher at Cape Elizabeth High School, who used to throw small black balls representing hydrogen atoms at us when we failed to properly model organic molecules. He used to say that environmental systems never change overnight – they change over decades, or centuries, and he brought up as an example our local Presumpscot River, which was not much different than an open sewer in the early 80s, but was getting better, because the Clean Water Act in the 1970s was almost fifteen years old, and every year, the river was getting better. He told us that maybe our kids would be able to fish or swim there (he probably missed it by a decade, but hey, that’s prediction), but he also said that just because it would take 50 years to make up for 300 years of waste and ignorance, we shouldn’t turn back.

So now I’m at my point.

Climate change is happening, and yes, it’s human caused – even though the timing of our human intervention over the past three centuries of industrialisation may be coincident with other astronomical rhythms of sun activity etc. that serve to emphasise the effects. But humanity has caused much, if not all, of the change in our climate of late, and we’ve spent centuries creating it, and while we’re decelerating the pace of change, we’re still not actually reversing it. That means we’ll have centuries – at least – of reacting to the impact. Bill McKibbon, who keeps saying “we have No Choice but to stop our behaviour or else the world will change irrevocably” is thus an idiot, and ignorant of systems behaviour. He is roughly as old as my father, born in the late 1930s; even when he was born, the planet had long since passed the point of no return for being burdened by the impact of human actions on climate. What we can do now is be responsible – reduce our carbon output, optimize our energy consumption where possible, think carefully about consumption and materialism – but what we can’t do is reverse what had started when England, France, Germany, Japan – hell everyone – started burning coal and oil and natural gas back 200 years ago. And it would be deeply hypocritical of us to tell India and China and Africa “hey, you guys have to stay poor, because we already harmed the atmosphere with the carbon we burned to get good stuff” when we already know we have a couple of centuries of downstream impact which haven’t been felt yet.

Climate change is hard because frankly, we’ve already cursed our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and we’re now relying on us – who grew up enjoying hydrocarbons – to somehow curtail our addiction, and to develop a picture of rational chemical energy consumption (while we’re still trying to perfect fusion and solar power) for our children and their children that will make the future maybe, possibly, sustainable. In the interim, though, get over it: get used to the forest fires, and the smoke infecting cities on the West Coast, and the floods in Pakistan, and the step function in tropical storms affecting Canada, and the droughts everywhere, and the floods everywhere else. It’s over, people: the world has changed and it’s our fault and no one alive today, even if we do everything right, will enjoy an optimized planet in their lifetimes, because even if humans might possibly live to be 150 years old if narcissists like Elon Musk pull off their pipe dreams, the environment as a complex system is going to take at least the 300 years it took for us to carbonise it to resume normal operations, and more likely, will take a factor multiple of those 300 years to truly work out the impacts we’ve created.

And so we get to the economy, which is no different. In the US – which issues the numeraire currency of all human societies, having replaced gold and its semi-humorous proxy, the pound sterling, back in the 1940s as the core representation of temporal and instantaneous value among individuals independently choosing to engage in trade to take advantage of the differences in productivity, access to primary inputs, and possibilities of creation that exist across all however many billion of us there are on this planet – the Federal Reserve from time to time changes both the quantity of central bank money, and the price paid for that money. But because all seven or eight billion of us transact, at a basic level, in dollars, and we create our personal and corporate value over longer time spans than the instantaneous rate at which the Fed changes interest rates or ceases or starts creating central bank money, it takes awhile for those changes to take place. Paul Samuelson gave me the rule of thumb in, I think , the seventh edition of his classic textbook of economics, of eighteen months lag being a good assumption. That is, the Fed changes rates (or reserve requirements), and roughly eighteen months later the impact fully is absorbed by the broad economy through credit creation or destruction and the impact that has on economic activity. Friedman didn’t seem to disagree with him when I read his and Anne’s treatise in high school.

The economy is complex, and while we endow certain players with outsized power, their power is not instantaneous. Inflation in the US will be here for awhile, no matter how fast Powell and his ilk observe the lessons of Volcker. At least he has a term of office that outlasts the president in office; Liz Truss has barely two years to see if her fiscal policies can reverse the international trade insanity that was Brexit and the monetary expansion that Bailey and others knee-jerk installed in response to a small virus that made all of us go temporarily insane. All complex systems respond with various degrees of delay – no matter what we observe in the Dow, or the cable exchange rate.

And that should give us pause when thinking about the most complex system of all in which we live, that of our planet. We’ve spent 300 years polluting it – but not so much intentionally as unconsciously, as we’ve experimented with this marvellous thing we have which is our own capacity for exploration. We’re actually quite lucky that within only 300 years – maybe eight or ten generations – we’ve realized the self-reflective capability to think hey, maybe what we’re doing is really bad for water, and for soils, and – holy crap – maybe for the entire planet’s atmosphere and weather structure. Maybe we should dial back – but because our impact took awhile without our being conscious of it, we built into our society structures which now depend on pollution, and destruction, and bad things, just to make sure we have food on shelves at the Aldi on the A13 in Southend-on-Sea that sustains thousands of people who never, ever, could have lived there in 1722, when there was a farm there that barely sustained a village of ten or fifteen people. Those structures cannot be deconstructed in a day, regardless of Bill McKibbon’s exhortations – but even if they could, it still wouldn’t affect the world of our children.

My son, and his friends, will live in a world that’s already locked into place. It’s warmer, harsher, more complex, and probably harder to work with. But there’s nothing we can do about it now, at least for their direct benefit, except to help them get ready for the task which will be at their hands to manage, which is simply to survive this new and crueler world which we, and our ancestors, have gifted to them. We can use resources better today, sure, but we need to be blunt and honest: our kids, and their kids, and probably their grandkids, are going to suffer through an Outward Bound exercise the likes of which we never had to contemplate.

Delayed responses are the reality of complex systems. For those who would deny the long term consequences of our actions, I have no patience: their ignorance and stupid attraction to linear consequences is demonstrably worthy of contempt. For those who would somehow claim what we can “make a difference for our kids”, though, I share a similar contempt. My job is to help my son, and his friends, prepare for a bruised and cratered world that wasn’t my own at his age, and to help him think beyond an election cycle, or the time until he’s middle aged, or the time until his children are middle aged. Our job as human beings – members of the first species on earth that seemingly combines sentience, with self-awareness, and with the capacity to project forward the consequences of our choices – is to arm our children with the knowledge that their event horizon is beyond their own lifetime. Eternity is not for the blessed; it is for the as-yet unborn who will choose their path on a planet we cannot imagine.

Shoreditch – where I happily live – attracts large crowds on Friday and Saturday nights, dressed in a variety of colourful but wholly impractical costumes, spilling out onto the streets from the cocktail bars, clubs, and restaurants: clothes for show: circus wear.  Early the following morning the streets are cleaned by men and women in heavy boots, overalls, and thick gloves, who remove the vast amounts of debris – glasses, bottles, discarded food containers, and nitrous oxide canisters – and sweep-up and wash the pavements and kerbsides.  The Sunday morning crowd is dressed for work, not pleasure: function trumps style: industrial wear.   

Our attire is a sign of our standing, of our place in the world.  If I were to wander through an art museum, looking at figurative paintings from, say, Bruegel onwards, it would be easy to distinguish those who must work to live from those who lived off the work of others.  It is said that the clerical class in ancient China grew their fingernails long, to make it obvious to others that they worked at desks rather than by manual labour.  In Hans Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus, painted in 1523, the nails are short but the fingers inky: scholarly hands.

If the style of our clothes tells a story about who we are and how we live, the fabric from which our clothes are made tells a different but equally important story about the trade in raw materials and manufactured goods.  Whereas once most people wore clothes that were made locally from materials that were gathered locally – whether animal skins or plant products – today’s clothes are manufactured in places where labour is cheap and transport links are good, from a wide range of natural and synthetic materials that are often sourced far away from where the garments are sold.  What we wear today reflects our position in a complex global trading system.  While economists tend to focus on the processes of manufacturing and distribution, quantifying the financial value of goods made, transported, and sold, it is artists who are best able to help us think about what this means for both makers and buyers, to consider the symbolic value of the fabrics within which we wrap ourselves.

Continue reading “Art and commerce”

There is a beautiful passage in Anna Karenina (part III, chapters 4 and 5) which describes the pleasure to be found in demanding physical work.  Konstantin Lévin, a landowner, spends a day with a group of forty muzhiks – peasants who work for him on his land – harvesting the summer grass.  They work in a long row, each man with a regularly sharpened scythe, cutting a swathe through the meadows under the heat of the sun. The day is long and hard, especially for Lévin who is unused to hours of repetitive physical work, but he finds happiness in belonging to this collective endeavour, seeing the large fields of his property transformed around him.  At some moments, he loses all sense of time and place, the rhythmical movements of his arms and legs becoming automatic, his mind at ease, as if his blade acted upon its own will: In this hottest time the mowing did not seem so hard to him.  The sweat that drenched him cooled him off, and the sun, burning on his back, head and arm with its sleeve rolled to the elbow, gave him firmness and perseverance in his work; more and more often those moments of unconsciousness came, when it was possible for him not to think of what he was doing.  The scythe cut by itself.  These were happy moments.  

Agricultural workers around the world would have cut grass together each year in a similar way for hundreds of years.  However, in 1877, when Tolstoy’s novel was published, machines were routinely supplanting human labour: the novel ends – famously – with a woman’s suicide assisted by a train.   The process of automation of work has continued ever since.  The modern farmer no longer has need of forty men to cut the grass of her fields: instead, she will have a tractor driven perhaps by a computer.  She will have other machines to bale the hay and transport it to where it will be stored for the winter.  Today, work is more about controlling machines than swinging scythes, which means much less sweat but much greater productivity. 

Continue reading “Hard work”

Some are born rich, some achieve riches, others have riches thrust upon them.  Last week, the owner of a lottery ticket purchased in Illinois won a prize worth up to $1.34bn.  The ticket holder will have to decide whether to take an immediate cash prize of $780.5m, or to take the full amount in instalments over a period of 29 years.  Making this choice will, I assume, depend in part on the life expectancy of the winner, and in part on the way they would respond to Walter Mischel’s marshmallow test.

Before I think about what I would do with a billion dollars, I feel the need for a short digression.  When I was a child, the pound was worth roughly two-and-a-half dollars. The rate varied, month-by-month and year-by-year, but the simple rule of conversion was that one dollar was worth about 40p.  In those days, winning $1.34bn in a US lottery would equate to around £536m, which is a very healthy sum for sure, but only just over halfway to a billion pounds.  Nowadays, the pound is trading at around 1.20 to the dollar, which means that the lucky lottery ticket holder from Illinois is a billionaire in both dollars and pounds. In my lifetime, the pound has lost half its value against the dollar, which makes UK assets – houses, land, companies, and leading football teams – more vulnerable to foreign takeover, and which makes it increasingly hard for British citizens to move to the US without a significant short-term reduction in living standards.  The dollar benefits from the privilège exorbitant of being the leading global reserve currency, but its comparative strength relative to the pound over the past fifty years also reflects the higher calibre of economic policy making in the US.  If there were a marshmallow test for nations, I think we all know that today the UK would make no attempt to defer gratification.

Continue reading “Who wants to be a billionaire?”

For a long while, I didn’t have a television, and I truly enjoyed it; I listened to music, spent a lot of time reading, and Gordy the dog kept me occupied with keeping him occupied. Moving to Maine changed that: the house I bought basically came furnished, which was perfect for me as I was moving from the equivalent of a one-bedroom apartment, with a few hundred square feet, to a modest but still fully detached 1940 cottage, with around 1500 square feet. The prior owners, an elderly couple moving to be closer to grandkids, were making the reverse size move, so it worked out for everyone. And one of the things they left behind was a large, wall mounted television set, and thus, TV reentered my day to day life.

Since the cheapest way to get phone and internet service in the US is to bundle it with cable TV and your cellphone, that’s what I did, gaining access to 1 gigabit download speeds but also to approximately 1200 channels of television. Having lived without TV for a number of years, and before that having had only basic terrestrial service in the UK for four years and then before that living in Alberta (Canadian television is worthy of a completely different essay), but also being a proper Gen-X kid who was partially raised by a cathode ray tube, it was a bit mind-blowing, and I will admit that I lost it for awhile, surfing channels aimlessly, a bit overwhelmed for choices but also overwhelmed by how little quality was out there, and how difficult it was to find anything enjoyable to watch. My mind was being flooded with endorphins as long as the tube was on, a mechanism wired from growing up, but I wasn’t really enjoying myself – until I settled into a kind of routine, finding what I like and screening out (mostly) the rest.

I’m better at limiting myself now: evenings and weekends are all about live sports (I’ll watch pretty much any live sporting event except for fight sports), and during the morning, in the background as I get emails and work updates out of the way, I’ll watch Have Gun Will Travel, followed by a Perry Mason episode, followed by a Matlock episode, followed by In the Heat of the Night, a race-charged local police procedural from the 1980s. I don’t stream anything – I don’t subscribe to Netflix or Hulu or even HBO; the boy has Disney+ courtesy of his mother but I leave that to him – and since all of these syndicated reruns have long since stopped producing new shows, after somewhere between six and nine months, you’ve seen the entire run of each series, and you start over again. The murder mysteries are no longer at all surprising; the moral arc of Richard Boone restoring order via a high body count to the West is known in great detail.

Every now and again, though, I find something interesting. Yesterday I got up way too early – a hazard of Maine in the summer, when short nights end with sunrise just after 4am and civil twilight starting much earlier – and flipped on the television and saw an old episode of Maverick, James Garner’s first really big role and an example of what network television could do back before Norman Mailer strangled the joy out of it. Garner plays Bret Maverick, a wiseacre poker player who occasionally points a gun but rarely shoots straight, traveling across the fictional Wild West operating various levels of card sharping, each episode resulting usually in the loss and regain of his savings or the gain and subsequent loss of a small ill-deserved fortune. Maverick then leaves town at the end of the episode, and the credits roll to the playing of a jaunty western theme song – like The Littlest Hobo, but not quite as melancholy and also Maverick is James Garner and plays poker, not a German shepherd who solves mysteries.

This particular episode involved Maverick getting stuck on a jury deciding the fate of an innocent cowhand that the people of this week’s town wanted to hang, and Maverick’s sense of justice was offended. He manages to convince his fellow jurors of the injustice – and inaccuracy – of a guilty verdict, all but one. Pike, the juror in question, is convinced that the coincidences cited by the accused that he says proves his innocence are simply too outlandish, too improbable, to be simultaneously true. And Maverick then strikes upon an idea – and also figures out a way to earn back the money that had been swindled from him at the beginning of the episode to set up the whole jury thing in the first place.

Maverick says well, Pike, I think you might have too much confidence in calculating the odds of the man’s story being false. And I think I can prove to you that people shouldn’t trust their ability to calculate the odds on a linked set of events like that. Let me show you, he says, and takes out a deck of cards and gives them to Pike. Shuffle them, cut them, shuffle them again, he says; I won’t touch them, and the deck is clean, but verify that yourself.

Pike does so, and agrees the deck is clean.

Now, says Maverick, what are the odds that the first five cards I draw will be a “pat hand”, do you think? A pat hand, mind you, is five cards that do not need a draw to improve – a flush, a straight, four of a kind, and a full house.

Pike thinks a moment and says, oh, maybe 1 in 10.

And what do you think the odds of doing that again, on the next five cards?

Same again, says Pike – 1 in 10. Pike is a good businessman, his fellow jurors agree, and he’s the best with numbers in town.

So, asks Maverick, that’d be what, 1 in 100 odds that you’d do that twice in a row, right?

Pike thinks and says, yes, exactly.

So, asks Maverick, five times in a row would be, oh, 100,000 to 1, right?

Pike thinks for a moment and says he supposes so.

What do you think the odds would be to put together five pat hands out of the first 25 cards you draw? Now think, says Maverick: it’s not five in a row, just that out of those 25 cards, I can put together 5 pat hands – not in a row, but in aggregate, using all the cards?

Pike thinks for a moment; it’s not quite 100,000 to 1, he says, but I doubt you’ll be able to do it in a day’s worth of shuffling and dealing.

Great, says Maverick – that’s one way of considering the odds, a lot like you thinking about the odds of the man being innocent. But I’ll bet you that if you draw 25 cards, we’ll get those five pat hands – and if I’m right, you’ll admit that your using your odds to suppose the man into guilt (and of course a noose) are similarly wrong, and you’ll vote Not Guilty. And to make it really interesting, if you lose, I get $500. And if I lose, I’ll bow to your judgment, and we’ll all agree in the man’s guilt, and I’ll pay you $500. Deal?

Pike thinks. He asks to reshuffle the deck, worried that he’s being conned by the professional card player. But he agrees, and draws 25 cards.

Of course, Maverick wins the bet. Pike wants to find a reason for being wrong, but admits he lost, duly votes not guilty, the terrified boy escapes the gallows, and Pike reluctantly pays up.

As the episode ends, Pike asks whether Maverick what the odds were to lose that bet. Maverick said, oh, I’m not sure of the exact odds, but he tries the trick for fun and has never lost. He calls it Maverick Solitaire, now a semi-official term in probability – and the 25 card draw wins almost every time (simulations done by bored stats majors pegs the odds at 98.1% of winning on any given draw from a 52 card deck). What I was actually betting, says Maverick, was that you, Pike, were an honest and honourable businessman who would settle a bet even when he lost – and the odds on that bet, for both of us and for the accused, were very good as well.

Great episode, great story, but what made it so interesting was the obvious lesson being given not just within the story, but to the viewing audience in general, in probability, and more specifically, in our intuitional failure in being able to assess probabilities in reality and apply those to our decisions. Maverick doesn’t even try to say he’s particularly good at probability; he describes his understanding to simple repeated experiences of playing a game, which indeed is how most card players get better at card games over time. He knows enough probability to be able to spot how other people miscalculate it, but makes no claims for his own immunity to being similarly dense. As he states at the end, he wasn’t taking a particular chance, or even calculating any mathematical odds: his bet was on the integrity of his opponent, and on the likelihood he would make good when he lost a fair bet. Indeed, in so doing, he really simply acts as an advocate of human justice: he doesn’t want a young man to lose his life because of a jury’s ability to stumble blindly based on bad probability, instead of focusing on the facts.

It reminded me, interestingly, of how Mark and I originally bonded, early in our working relationship at Barclays Global Investors. I was in London and we went out for lunch, and he was on a bit of a rant about exactly this topic – how human minds seem to be wired to not understand probability – and it became a long conversation about the role of probability in markets versus the role of behaviour and the psychology of market participants. Of course, that isn’t an either-or discussion, and markets don’t consist of individuals solely reliant on intuition in calculating odds: teamwork and the evolution of readily programmable simulations allow us to overcome (or at least, become aware of) the failings we have as individuals, and human psychology is not a constant. But that’s what made for a good conversation, and our willingness to play with the ideas, listen to new ideas, challenge them in the spirit of mutual improvement instead of an ambition to win, and a ready reliance on our sense of humour (however difficult to merge American and British notions of such things) proved to be a solid foundation for a friendship which has now, with fits and starts, spanned more than two decades.

What were the odds of that happening? A teacher I knew in high school used a great phrase in these sorts of situations – “odds are slim to none and slim just left town” – and of course that’s correct, but one of the particular challenges for human beings is making sense of chains of improbable events. All events are improbable, really, when viewed in isolation; but when you chain events, certain outcomes become more likely, even as they remain elusive to direct prediction. The inability to understand that “paradox” – it isn’t really a paradox but to most people it is – that is, the paradox of apparent causality really being simply the most likely outcome out of a set of still variously probable potential outcomes, and the paradox of highly unlikely outcomes being realized not invalidating the overall trend or relative likelihood of other events in the future – sits at the heart of the crisis we seem to collectively feel exists in the 2020s.

In fact, it’s at the heart of how we observe the universe and how it seems to operate. Quantum mechanics is, really, just a highly formalised way of describing the sometimes independent, sometimes chained probabilities of events occurring at subatomic scales – that is, it’s just a highly specialised way of describing the human condition. It bothers people, physicists included, that causality appears to break down, indeed that even the directionality of time seems to break down in the formalised calculus in which we express those physical events, but it’s fascinating to me that it is so bothersome when we see the same in our own interpersonal interactions. Climate modelling has the same bother for most people: why can’t we find discrete reasons for global warming, so we can do something about them? Well, simple: because the reasons are not discrete, and changing our behaviour will change the outcome but in ways which aren’t directly predictable, even if we can make a pretty good guess. So we take actions based on the pretty good guess, the biggest action of which should be humility in the face of a global physical level of complexity that nevertheless we as humans seem to have some influence (but not control) over, and we marvel at the complexity – but instead of doing that, the species-level equivalent of going to lunch and listening and reflecting and laughing, we are bothered by it.

I think I understand the why of that bother, though, even though it speaks volumes about how immature we remain. We are afraid of leaving this life, of leaving to others our works and our memories, knowing intuitively (and we’re right on this one) that the use of our works and memories after we are gone have nothing to do with us, but only to do with the needs and fears of those who come later. Just like in markets, the probabilities and the mathematical relationships are hard to intuit, but the psychology of fear, of desire, and the ongoing simple hard work of reminding ourselves to be humble and willing to admit being wrong, is at the heart of the challenge.

Perhaps that’s the most remarkable element of the Maverick episode: at the end, Pike admits he was wrong, and buys Bret a friendly “no harm no foul” drink at the town saloon. That was no more realistic today than it would have been in 1964, when the episode was produced, or in 1875, the age in which it was set. The smart money bets on human beings refusing to admit when they are wrong – election fraud conspiracy theorists and human climate change deniers being perhaps today’s laughable but all too real object examples, but that’s just today, and even those of us who can comfortably acknowledge these obvious factors of modern life are simultaneously being wilfully or even violently ignorant of other forces to which we’ve overemphasised our lousy intuition for probability and chains of interaction.

Maverick took a chance on Pike being not just an honourable loser in a bet, but on his being willing to acknowledge that the bet revealed him to be susceptible to failure, not just on a deck of cards, but on a verdict in which a man’s life hung in the balance. Because he had a good screenwriter, and because all of it was just for play, James Garner won the bet and sold the performance. Unfortunately, the odds aren’t as good for the rest of us in real life. But being humble, and being human, requires us to draw the next card, and to make our bets, no matter what.