Politics – Econtrepreneur.com

Diversity Wins

Every VC fund needs a token, white, male, general partner.

Sputnik ATX does mark-to-market portfolio updates quarterly and the results thus far have been fantastic (89%IRR, not that I’m bragging). Our goal is to help people reach their full potential, and we believe that IRR is a key outcome to measure if we’re doing our jobs well. Diversity is another measure of that success. How are we doing?

Two metrics we’re just as proud to cite: over 40% of our portfolio companies have a female founder, and over 20% have a black founder. How do we do it? We joke among our team that our secret to success is maintaining a token, white, male, general partner.

Yes, I’m the only white dude.

The fact that we have only one white male on our team gives us an unfair advantage. I highly suggest more VCs try this approach. If you’re a general partner (GP) reading this article, please consider ways to get your own token, white, male GP and do so NOW.

What we’ve learned at Sputnik ATX is that when diverse people (education, culture, work experience, ethnicity, gender, etc) all have a say in decisions, we make FAR better decisions. There is copious research to support me on this (check out this HBR article.).

We’re well past the time to continue to allocate capital to homogeneous white dudes and yet, the flow of capital to these funds is shockingly disproportionate and persists. It’s time for lip service to end, and action to begin.

At the risk of alienating allocators looking at our next raise, I just have to say to every fund of fund manager and pension fund manager, please stop giving money to funds where the GPs all look like me. It’s hurting your returns, its skewing investment away from quality founders, its exacerbating US economic apartheid, and preventing everyone from reaching their full potential.

Note: I highly suggest reading the links in this article, and the book on US economic apartheid is especially interesting. Also, after writing this article, Sputnik ATX shockingly found another white guy who joined our team as a temp this summer. Congrats Matt, you beat the odds at our fund. Let’s not get too comfortable. Our investor returns depend on it.

Donald Trump is Neville Chamberlain in the War Against COVID-19

It’s time America unites to fight our common enemy instead of one another.

At the dawn of World War II as Hitler rose to power and started militarizing Nazi Germany, UK Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, cut defense spending and engaged in a strategy of placating evil. Sure, historians debate the full extent of Chamberlain’s lack of vision, but his all but flat-out ignoring the threat of Hitler didn’t make the war go away. Today, Chamberlain is regarded as one of the worst PMs in UK history, and one of the leading factors no one checked Hitler’s rise to power earlier.

Enter COVID-19, and US President Donald Trump. We have a new invasion, and in the first year, it will likely kill over 200,000 Americans. World War II took the lives of just over 400,000 Americans, over a period of four years. In short, the war against COVID-19 is deadlier than World War II in its ability to kill Americans faster. And yet, here is the President of the United States, at first denying the risk, then when obvious wearing no mask, ordering testing to slow down, holding massive rallys-cum-super-spreader events, and asking people to ignore the obvious: we are at war. Neville Chamberlain couldn’t have done it better, I think Trump is using his playbook.

When Imperial Japan attacked the United States, a draft card was a sign of patriotism. Many courageous youth even lied about their age and health conditions to get into the fight. Healthy and able Americas were united in their desire to sacrifice whatever was required to protect those who couldn’t fight: E pluribus unum. Presidents and Prime Ministers of Allied forces asked for sacrifice, and a willing country united against a common enemy with patriotic ferver.

Back to COVID-19. Wearing a face mask is the draft card of this war. True patriots wear a face mask to protect Americans who can not protect themselves. Strong leaders care for those who are at risk, and many patriotic Americans wear masks in the great American tradition of doing whatever is required to protect those we love.

Sadly, despots and tyrants use propoganda at times of national crisis in an attempt to aggregate their power. The love of power, and the selfish exercise of power to harm the public good, is why our founding fathers created our democratic system. So that once every four years, we vote and make sure that our country is led by someone who puts others above themselves, in the best traditions of America.

Bring on America’s Winston Churchill. It’s time America unites to fight our common enemy instead of one another.

What Every #Bitcoin Investor Should Learn From a Dictator Named “Awesome”

Bitcoin investors should learn a lesson from Awesome, a dictator who lost his life introducing the one of the world’s first fiat currencies

Bitcoin investors should learn a lesson from Awesome, a dictator who lost his life introducing the one of the world’s first fiat currencies. A fiat currency is a form of money to exchange goods and services that has no intrinsic value. For example, a gold coin is not a fiat currency, because it is made of gold, something that has value in, and of, itself. Paper currency, like the US Dollar, is a fiat currency because the note has no intrinsic value.

Bitcoin has a lot in common with early fiat currencies, so let’s take a second to review fiat currency and take a quick history lesson from one of its early adopters.

First off, how does fiat currency get its value? Fiat currency has value when:
1. It has limited supply
2. People believe it has value
3. It can be easily transferred to facilitate economic transactions

Right now, Bitcoin meets all three of these standards. There is limited supply due to its unique block-chain encryption standards, people believe it has value from the increasing rate of exchange to the dollar, and it can be transferred easily to facilitate economic transactions using online Bitcoin wallets. So how did fiat currencies get started and what can we learn from these early currencies about the future of Bitcoin?

In 1294 Gaykhatu (literally, “Awesome” in Mongolian) was the leader of one Hoard of Mongols ruling over what is now Iran, Iraq and Southwest Asia. Taking his name a little too literally, Awesome decided that he needed fiat currency like that introduced by his distant cousin Kublai in China.

Awesome was in the middle of a crippling drought in his territory, and after several years of expending all of the royal treasury building a seriously sweet palace (still unfinished, of course), he was broke. When he heard that Kublai was just printing his own money, he saw his path to riches and summoned the Ambassador from Kublai’s court, demanding to see the new paper currency.

So smitten with this idea, Awesome copied the idea and printed his own money. He liked the notes printed by Kublai so much, he even copied the Chinese characters on them. He demanded that everyone accept these new notes as currency. However; Awesome had competing currencies. He didn’t think about confiscating all the gold and silver currency in circulation and soon discovered that no one wanted his paper money (Kublai at was smart enough to make some of his Chao out of copper to help with the perception of value).

Awesome also launched his new currency during the worst cattle plague his realm had ever encountered, and printing new money at such a tumultuous economic event was just poor form. Needless to say, no one thought Awesome was awesome. Riots and violence broke out around his kingdom.

Topping it off, Awesome himself emptied out his treasury of the notes he printed for himself, buying lavish materials for his palace from merchants foolish enough to accept his worthless piles of paper. Awesome was bankrupt, his markets frozen from the lack of a credible medium of exchange.

In the end, he was pelted with all manner of foul, medieval produce without refrigeration, and openly mocked over the irony of his increasingly worthless name. His cousin was so angry, he didn’t stop there, he killed Awesome by strangulation with a bowstring and took over his kingdom. Yeah, that ended badly.

So, what does this have to do with Bitcoin? Bitcoin has value only from the drug dealers, money launderers, illegitimate governments, and black market moguls who see Bitcoin as a valuable exchange to conceal their dirty doings. Like Awesome, these neer-do-wells created a virtual currency that can’t be traced to support their palace building.

And like Awesome, this party will crash back down to earth. There are two primary structural problems to Bitcoin that will undermine its ability to satisfy all three standards for a fiat currency.

First, quantum computing stands to make any encryption 100% worthless in the next ten years. We are rapidly approaching a future where there will be no secrets stored on computers, because no computer can encrypt itself sufficiently to prevent a quantum computer from hacking any and all methods designed to protect it, end of story. This means that the encryption protecting Bitcoin itself, Bitcoin wallets, and any and all servers that are used to process and secure its ownership rights, will all be broken and worthless. This destroys the fundamental premise of value, to say the least. Goodbye limited supply!

Second, governments can block people from using Bitcoin as a measure of exchange. Why would they do this? Because Iran, North Korea, drug cartels, tax evaders, and money launderers are using Bitcoin to evade sanctions, bank laws, taxes, and pretty much violate every lawful economic law on the books. They are already starting to do so, in China and South Korea, and the impact of this on Bitcoin value is just beginning.

At the end of Bitcoin, no governments will allow an asset class that has a primary purpose to undermine the faith of their regulated, lawful financial system and allow untraceable and untaxable exchanges of value between two parties. In short, all these ICOs are a threat to the established global financial system, so the governments who created this system will not permit Bitcoin to stand. You can’t fight city hall, let alone every major world government.

When these governments begin to go to war against crypto-currencies in earnest, belief that Bitcoin has value will plummet, the ability to use it to exchange goods and services will evaporate, and its demise will be the latest chapter in fiat currency collapse. When this happens, I hope the Winklevoss twins have good security. I’d hate to see them go the way of Awesome.

Joe Merrill is an Austin-Texas based venture capitalist at Sputnik ATX and Linden Ventures. Follow his blog at http://www.econtrepreneur.com or on Twitter @Austin_VC

Tax Facts – What Government Doesn’t Want You to Know

Warning: this blog post is about taxes. Taxes are an inherently boring topic, but useful if you want to understand something that will seriously impact your life. So, please read on if you want to learn the economics of what takes 40%-50% of your income. Otherwise, stop here and remain blissfully unaware.

There is a lot in the press these days complaining about the tax cut package passed by congress and signed by the President. Almost universally, the comments in the mainstream media have an agenda that appears to be almost perfectly tailored for the echo chamber created on each side of the aisle for the major news outlets’ political sponsors. However, a careful scrutiny of the history of US tax law (and tax rates) paints a very different picture of how these tax cuts will impact the United States insofar as its impact on the tax base and the demand-side of the economy.

While US tax law goes back to the very founding of the Republic and the tariff system created by Congress to fund it, personal income tax is a relatively new idea. Although there was a brief period from 1861 to 1872 where a personal income tax existed to help pay for the civil war, it wasn’t until the 16th Amendment was passed in 1913 that the government actually got the right to tax our incomes for the first time.

From 1913 until 1931 at the start of the great depression, the federal tax rate hovered at around 1.1% for the poorest families and while progressive (meaning wealthier families paid more than this), it was not punitive for rich people either, with 7% as the top bracket for people earning over $12mm a year in today’s dollars (adjusted for inflation).

However, from 1932 to 1941, Hoover and FDR had tax policies that, by any survey of the most liberal-minded economists, had disastrous results on the economy. Tax revenue in 1931 was 834mm USD. In June of 1932, Hoover decided that the worsening economy required government to start collecting more taxes to balance the budget. Hoover almost tripled the top rate from 25% to 63%, and the low rate increased from 1.1% to 4%.

The amazing result was that tax revenue fell from $834mm to $427mm in 1932. Why? Well, when you take money from people’s pockets, they have less to spend. Less spending results in less profits, and lower corporate tax collections (if companies are losing money, they don’t have profits to tax). This fell further by 1933, with a mere $353mm in taxes collected as the economy continued to shrink and the government took more and more of the pie for itself (a concept economists call crowding out). FDR raised them up to 76% when he took office (he raised the top rates to 76% by 1936) and unemployment spiked to 20%. By 1937, FDR realized that his efforts to spend money to lower unemployment were only partially successful. Unemployment was down to 15% but the government was spending huge amounts of money and creating large debts in the process.

So why did this happen? This has to do with the impact of taxes on the overall economy and the velocity of money. Since the government can only tax profits on money in circulation, the speed with which money moves around between firms in an economy have a major impact on taxes. For example, if our economy only had four companies, and each company has $100 a year in profit on $200 in sales, then the economy would have $800 in sales, and $400 in profit to share. However, if the government taxes 50% of that profit, there is $200 less money for the companies to share with the economy, and the economy will shrink. Now, think about how many times a single dollar is exchanged in a year between consumers and companies, and how each time the dollar is exchanged it creates a taxable event. More exchanges equals more taxes.

So if the government raises taxes very high, they reduce the number of taxable exchanges by the amount they took in taxes multiplied by the number of times those dollars would have been spent in a transaction. In short, the government is taking money so that it can’t be spent and then taxed. While I’m not calling for the abolition of taxes so that we’ll have economic stimulus, it is a good idea to understand that when taxes go up, the economy goes down by a multiple of that tax collected.

However, at the time of these tax increases during the great depression, some Keynesian economists (those who believe that government expenditure is key to stimulating the economy) were shocked because these New Deal tax increases were increasing unemployment and New Deal spending wasn’t improving the economy to compensate.

Government spending was just helping us to limp along while incurring huge debts in the process since demand for government program spending far outstripped taxes collected. Governments are like us, if they borrow a lot of money today, they will need more income in the future to pay off the debt and maintain their standard of living. Sadly for us, when governments need to increase their income, they must raise taxes (taxes are the only way they get money legitimately). So FDR decided to raise taxes again and again. By 1940, the upper rate for wage earners was 94% for upper income earners, and 23% for anyone earning more than $500 a year. Needless to say, the economy was so bad by this point, it took World War II to force dramatic changes in production and labor and end the depression. At the end of WWII, Truman decided to start cutting government spending and lower taxes beginning in 1945. Economists complained at the time that Truman was going to guarantee another depression, after all government spending is what they believed saved them from the depression getting worse, right? Actually, Truman’s decision restored accountability in the economy and the nation grew to full employment in very short order. Needless to say, the corporate tax rate was dropped from 90% to 38%, providing companies plenty of additional cash to grow and hire new workers. In a recent survey, 2/3 of all economists agree that FDRs policies made the great depression worse and enabled it to stick around for a long time.

What does that mean for us today? Well, during the Obama administration taxes went up, and so did regulation (a quiet form of taxation because it raises the cost of doing business). So despite the Federal Reserve pumping unprecidented amounts of money into the economy through quantitative easing, the velocity of money (over 10 before Obama was elected) fell to just over 5 when he left office.

So, if we are to fix this, we need to have policies that would lower taxes and lower regulation to a sensible level. Both would be good ideas, if your goal is to grow the US economy. So when I hear people opposed to both of these, regardless of their intentions, we need to recognize that they are advocating policies that hurt the financial future of America’s families.

That is why it is all the more important to have sensible people in government who can not only enact policies that help working class families, but are able to explain these policies in a way that unites the American people behind them. Alas, that last part is what both parties appear to be lacking these days: leadership.

Note: some nut job out there may construe (how, I don’t know) this article as some sort of tax advice and then think about suing me. I’m not a tax adviser, this is not tax advice, so don’t make any tax decisions from my article. And yes, this is proof positive that attorney’s can ruin our lives.

The Multi-Trillion Dollar Opportunity

Want to be wealthier? Stop being a jerk-face to #women.

America has a multi-trillion dollar problem that just hit home for me. My daughter was sexually harassed by another student at school, and worse, the school didn’t protect her when they knew it was going on.

When examining why some economic agents like companies, churches and schools continue to protect sexual predators, I’ve come to realize that this problem is probably the single largest drag on the global economy (at least the largest I’ve ever seen) and that our legal system provides warped, perverse incentives that perpetuate this perversion. The cost to our society of this broken system is staggering. And yet society continues to look the other way to a situation that reminds me of the old story about the gardener and the rabbit. It goes something like this:

Once there was a gardener who woke up every morning to discover that a rabbit ate much of his crop the night before. He tried everything to get rid of it, but the clever rabbit eluded him night after night. Finally, in desperation, the gardener built a strong fence around his garden, even digging a portion underground, to keep the rabbit out. Supremely confident in his fine fence, he slept well that night, only to awake and discover that the rabbit ravaged his beautiful garden once again. He had fenced in the rabbit the day before.

Like the farmer, our tort laws regarding sexual harassment are fencing in the rabbit, and providing incentives to churches, schools and workplaces to protect harassers.

So, let’s look closer at the perverted incentives for schools, churches and companies (which I will call social agents). If a person commits sexual harassment, and if anyone at a social agent had any inkling that that person was a perv, then the social agent bears some liability for the perv’s actions since it was foreseeable that harassment would take place. However, social agents and individuals tend to want to see the best in people, so when perv’s do something pervy, we try to explain it as “we must have just misunderstood what he/she meant”. That is because we are nice.

Predators depend upon our kindness to do their dirty deeds. I’m not suggesting that we stop being nice, but I think how we respond to inappropriate behavior must change.

First, we need to speak up when boundaries are crossed and not care if we offend. If a man or woman in your office puts their hand on your back or shoulder, that is crossing the line. You don’t need to touch people to do most jobs, and should only do so when it is required as a part of your job description and, even then, minimize this as much as possible. There is no such thing as an OK sexual joke at the office (or at home for that matter). Grooming people by talking around the edges on mature subject matter is not subtle, it is blunt and we don’t like it. Stop doing it now. It’s time to grow up and start respecting people appropriately.

Second, in today’s Donald Trump school of management, tort laws provide cover to economic agents who pride themselves by saying that they are protecting innocent men from the wild accusations of an accuser when really, they are just protecting their bottom line. This encourages the victim blaming and cover-ups that we see in the news every freakin’ day. Current tort law “fences in the rabbit”, by providing companies legal incentives to align with predators to fight off harassment claims to avoid paying damages. Instead, we need to look at the REAL damages.

Social agents incorrectly assume that the biggest harassment cost they need to avoid is financial damage from lawsuits. This false belief encourages them to deny harassment claims and fend off harassment accusations with no thought to the emotional and personal cost to the victims. In fact, the far bigger expense is the economic loss of productivity and the broken lives of their employees, investors and customers due to their policies that fence in rabbits.

At the macroeconomic level, ranges of the GDP cost due to gender discrimination and harassment vary between 10% and 25%. Given that global GDP is around 78 trillion dollars, we’re talking about 8 to 20 trillion dollars in lost global income creation each year due to harassment and discrimination. In contrast, we fret about the billions of dollars we spend defending lawsuits from harassment. Our priorities are wrong.

Social agents only hedge these defensive costs with defensive expenditure: insurance coverage, harassment training for employees, lawsuit settlements and, if they’re super progressive, on-site counselors to help those affected by sexual harassment. However, I believe that the best defense is a good offense. Let’s do something to get the 20 trillion dollars, please.

I would like to call upon our elected officials to pass new tort laws to permit and encourage persons sexually harassed to work with social agents to pursue justice against sexual predators together. This can be done by permitting and encouraging churches, schools, and companies to sue their students and employees who harass, and recover damages commensurate with the social cost, the total social cost -not just the defensive expenses. It is time for pervs to pay up or smart up. In this way, social agents have an economic incentive to identify and root out sexual harassment because they will share the benefit of legal actions against those who harass. Harassers have an incentive to change their behavior, and the homes that foster future harassers have economic losses to incentivize them to change their ways.

What I hope you now understand is that sexual harassment is an economically expensive epidemic, and the emotional and psychological cost to our wives, daughters, and girlfriends is incalculably higher. So, let’s shift that expense to those who create it, and make it possible for our churches, schools and companies to recover damages from those who create the problems.

When groping results in the loss of your parents 401(k), maybe parents, clergy and managers will stop saying, “boys will be boys”, excusing Trumpian “locker room banter” and begin teaching proper respect for women. Furthermore, suing predators will become an effective way for social agents to capture the expenses they bear to treat harassment victims who often require special accommodation to cope with school and the PTSD or other problems harassment creates in their lives. Better yet, maybe my daughters will be able to live in a world where their contributions are valued by society and they can live without fear.

Furthermore, when we replace faux corporate hand-wringing and cringing with “ka-ching” whenever a crude joke is told in the office, and the offenders lose real money to their employers, people will stop telling crude jokes, putting inappropriate hands on backs, grooming victims and doing other macro-aggressions. No one is trying to stop appropriately asking out a coworker on a date, it just needs to be done the right way, don’t be a perv.

In short, it is time we make harassment the problem of the perpetrators, and enable our social institutions to go after them to the economic and emotional benefit of all. Enough is enough.

The Grim Economics of Death

40% of Medicare spending is in the last month of life. There is a better way.

Economics is called the dismal science because it is precisely the right tool to answer some of society’s most depressing problems. In today’s post, we’re going to look at the economics of dying, have an honest conversation about where we spend our health care dollars when addressing terminal illness, and look at the opportunity cost of end-of-life decisions. If you read far enough, you might just learn how you can change the world.

For starters, let’s address a few truths about health care spending at end-of-life.

First, and foremost, we are all going to die regardless of the quality of care we get. Death is a heartbreaking reality of life that cannot be avoided.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 40% of Medicare dollars are spent in the last month of life. Most of this spending is dedicated to curative therapies, in an attempt to “fix” the health problem that, ultimately, causes death. However, there is another option.

Palliative care, sometimes called hospice, means easing symptoms of illness as opposed to attempt to cure it. Palliative therapies typically provide people comfort rather than aggressive therapies when faced with end of life illness. There are, literally hundreds of studies that demonstrate that this kind of care not only improves the quality of life when facing terminal disease, but it actually extends the life of persons who receive when compared to those who receive aggressive therapies. Furthermore, palliative care costs about 50% less than curative therapies for end of life illnesses, according to just about every blind study of the subject that was conducted in the past 8-10 years. In short, Americans spend a massive amount of money when diagnosed with terminal illnesses in what will, ultimately, be a futile attempt to live longer, and often in more painful circumstances, because we choose expensive and aggressive curative therapies instead of palliative care.

Please, don’t get me wrong here. I’m not looking to unplug anyone’s loved one from the respirator. All I’m saying is that there comes a time in everyone’s life when out of heartbreak and desperation we make the choice to suffer more, cut our lives short, and leave our families buried in medical debt when there is a better option available to most of us -but it isn’t necessarily the obvious one.

Perhaps it is time that we consider our end of life choices more carefully. Do we really want to continue spending large sums of money so that we can have, on average, shorter, more miserable lives? Why don’t doctors inform us about the reality of these choices?

I think part of the problem is that we, as a society, tend to believe that the more aggressive the health care, the better are our chances for survival. Furthermore, hospitals profit more from providing aggressive care, and doctors are positively recognized for their ability to perform more of these aggressive procedures, and not necessarily measured by the quality of life of their patents. The perceived leaders of the health care system have public reputation and profit incentives to try and cure you, even if statistically that is not very likely to happen and your suffering actually increases.

For this reason, Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner has proposed that we change the incentives when terminal illness is diagnosed, suggesting that insurance companies offer these patients a financial offer: to split the difference between their curative therapy cost and palliative care, opting to pay them a share of monies saved so that they could take a final vacation with the family, or in some other way enjoy their last days with additional financial resources to spend as they see fit, rather then undergo expensive curative treatment that statistically will fail and cut their already precious life short. This would appear to be a good way to extend life, on average, and enjoy that life more before it is gone.

I would like to suggest another option, one that may not be for everyone facing a terminal diagnosis: rather than pursue curative therapies or split the difference with your insurer, why not do something extraordinary for society, something dangerous but effective for social good. For example, why not volunteer to drive an ambulance in Syria to rescue children and women injured in the fighting? Or, perhaps volunteer to do violence intervention and training on the south side of Chicago? Anyone care to volunteer to de-mine former conflict zones? You’ll likely save some lives and do tremendous good. These are certainly worthwhile pursuits, often not pursued by those who expect and desire to live for a long time. However, if you knew you had precious little time left, then what do you have to lose?

Risky and valuable behavior sometimes go hand in hand, and if humanitarian in nature, you can use what little time you have left to leave behind a world much better than you found it. You also leave behind a legacy of selfless service, right up to the end. It may sound crazy, but why not leave behind an amazing legacy of love, choosing to spend your final days saving those that the world forgets?

Of course, there is no judgement or easy answers here. Like most humanitarian questions, there is no clear calculus to make these decisions. However, with a better understanding of what really happens at the end of life, and better options for how we can spend those precious days, we can be better prepared to make the right choices for our families.