The right stuff

If I were William Safire, I might try to track down the first use of the expression “the right stuff,” especially as it applies to daring achievements by men. It’s certainly much older than Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book about test pilots and astronauts.

I’ve just finished reading Teddy Roosevelt’s lively and argumentative autobiography, in the Library of America edition, and noticed two instances (pp. 440-441 and pp. 486-487) where he uses “the right stuff” in the modern sense. The first comes from the chapter describing his time as New York City Police Commissioner, and the second is from the chapter on being the governor of New York.

Occasionally a policeman would perform work which ordinarily comes within the domain of the fireman. In November, 1896, an officer who had previously saved a man from death by drowning added to his record by saving five persons from burning.... Whenever I see the police force attacked and vilified, I always remember my association with it. The cases I have given above are merely instances chosen almost at random among hundreds of others. Men such as those I have mentioned have the right stuff in them!

If ever we have a great war, the bulk of our soldiers will not be men who have had any opportunity to train soul and mind and body so as to meet the iron needs of an actual campaign. ... But if the men have in them the right stuff, it is not so very difficult.

Risk and retirement

The government wants to protect us from investment risk, but what kind of risk do they mean? A recent article in the New York Times (“You’re on Autopilot, but Check the Speedometer”) focuses on target-date funds, which adjust an investor’s asset allocation depending on when he or she plans to retire. The closer you are to retirement, the more “safe” bonds and money market funds you would have.

The federal government has approved these funds for use in retirement plans, which could mean an massive influx of money from plan participants. But the use of target-date funds is a one-size-fits-all approach that short-circuits some of the important questions that financial planners typically ask. How much money do you have to start with? What’s your tolerance for risk? What do you plan to do in retirement?

When retirement plan representatives talk about “risk,” they typically mean the risk that you may lose money over a given period of time. But given the debt load and woeful savings of the average American, the risk of not enough growth — though much less talked about — seems much much significant. Even someone who retires at 65 with a fairly large nest egg might need additional growth over a retirement that could last twenty or thirty years — and that means stocks.

The criticism that certain target-date funds get to 65 with too much stock, then, seems somewhat misguided. Finance professor Zvi Bodie believes that target-date funds with too much stock are “a disaster waiting to happen.” The PlanSponsor survey on which the article is based gives Fidelity’s target-date funds a D for risk.

Morningstar, on the other hand, gives most of those same funds four stars out of five for risk-adjusted performance. Fidelity apparently realizes that 65 is not the finish line, that stocks are an appropriate vehicle for long-term investors, and that even a retiree may be a long-term investor.

Best advice from a writer

This may already be widely circulated (it certainly should be) but in case you haven’t seen it, here’s Neil Gaiman’s response to the question, “What’s the best advice you’ve ever received from a writer?”

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed by John McPhee

In my reading lately I’ve been returning to some old favorites: Patrick O’Brian, The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, and The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher, which I first read when I was in high school.

Now I’m rereading The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. John McPhee has the cleanest, crispest prose style since Hemingway, and I can read him no matter what mood I’m in. He’s not exactly a lyrical writer, but in books like The Pine Barrens and The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed he attains a kind of poetry.

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed is about a Presbyterian minister named Bill Miller and a few of his associates who set out to create a new kind of airship: a dirigible in a plump triangular shape intended to give it more lift and maneuverability than the traditional zeppelin design. When the book was published in 1973, the Aereon had progressed from a hand-held model powered by a rubber band to a 26-foot manned prototype. Then Miller ran out of money.

Miller and his predecessor Monroe Drew had high hopes for the Aereon, which they envisioned carrying Bibles, food, water, and tractors to underdeveloped countries at low cost and without the need for roads. I’m not sure whether to be encouraged or depressed by finding out that the Aereon company still exists, still headed by Bill Miller, and that Bill Putman and Paul Shein, mentioned in McPhee’s book, are on the board.

Like the electric car, the dirigible didn’t die a natural death, and like the electric car, those who experienced it are passionately devoted to bringing it back. (A recent article covers a resurgence of interest in airships, though largely as a toy for the rich.)

Conventional wisdom says that dirigibles couldn’t handle severe weather, but the historical record says otherwise. Dirigibles had an extraordinary safety record (the wreck of the Hindenburg notwithstanding) and when the US Navy set out to test the airships’ safety, they didn’t get the results they wanted.

The true mission, apparently, was to collect data that could be used to kill the airships. This went on from 1954 to 1957, and the airships did not coöperate. They went out over the Atlantic on radar picket duty during blizzards that stopped all other forms of transportation — highways, railways, airports. They came back carrying ten or twelve tons of ice. Even their propeller blades were so thickly coated with ice that they were like clubs. But the airships flew, did their job, and returned, when nothing else was moving. They proved themselves anew against their supposed enemy the wind, which could not stop them with anything less than the force of a hurricane.

What I remember most from this book, though, is the description of a trans-Atlantic voyage by the Hindenburg, ten months before it caught fire in Lakehurst, New Jersey. A professor of architecture named Jean Labatut brought a movie camera with him on that trip.

At such low altitude, a detailed frieze was constantly evolving beneath him, and he filmed it — animals, houses, towns, forests — in scenes dominated always by the two signatures of the Hindenburg, its reflection on water and its shadow on the land. Sometimes the reflection appeared black on white water. When the reflection ran into a shoreline, the shoreline cleanly ate it up. The Hindenburg just telescoped and disappeared. The shadow — great, unimpeded beluga — was somewhere else. Labatut would pan his camera and find it, rippling over the Maine islands or across great tear-shaped log booms on New Brunswick bays or across a field of high northern daisies on Prince Edward Island where a herd of cows ran in terror before the encroaching airship....

Across the Channel, Utrecht was celebrating some sort of centennial, and people ran through the streets waving orange pennons at the Hindenburg. In the slanting afternoon light, the Dutch canals appeared as dark as obsidian. The reflection of the airship in the canals was silver. The Hindenburg was so big that segments of it shone from several canals at once, and its reflection moved from canal to parallel canal like a shuttle through a loom. The Rhine, its improbable turrets reaching up to the improbable Hindenburg, formed the airship’s final glide path.

Hope on credit card abuses

As I noted in an earlier post, for many families credit card debt (and bankruptcy) have a lot more to do with medical expenses, unemployment, or divorce than with expensive vacations and plasma TVs. In 2005, a new bankruptcy law made it much more difficult to erase credit card debt. In an effort to keep credit card debt from blowing up into a national disaster on the scale of subprime mortgages, the Federal Reserve and both houses of Congress have been working to rein in some of the excesses of the credit card lenders. This is from the New York Times: 

The House and Senate bills as well as the Federal Reserve require that lenders apply payments to the debt with the highest interest rate. All would ban “double cycle” billing, in which interest is charged on some already repaid debt, and all would extend the time required, currently 14 days, between a statement mailing date and payment due date.

All the measures would, under various conditions, prohibit lenders from raising interest rates on existing debt. The central bank proposes that except for increases caused by changes in stated variable and introductory offers, lenders may increase interest rates only if minimum payments are more than 30 days late.

The recommendations don’t seem to include a ban on “universal default,” under which a single late payment — or a number of other factors — can cause a customer’s interest rate to shoot up on all of his or her credit cards, plus mortgages and auto loans.