Public Service Announcements

In retrospect one of the most influential professors in my years at university was not even in the music department--he was a newly-hired philosophy professor teaching Philosophy 100, a first year introduction. I actually spoke to him a few months ago on the phone and thanked him for his inspiration. He was impressed that I am a composer (I didn't tell him how insignificant a composer!).

One of the things he liked to do from time to time was what he called "public service announcements" at the beginning of class before we got into the nitty-gritty. I had a theory professor who did something similar--what he called "ear training" that usually consisted of playing us a particularly unusual piece of music, like a player-piano study by Conlon Nancarrow. The only instance I can recall at this late date from my philosophy professor was when he warned us against hard contact lenses one day.

But I would like to take up the tradition and offer some thoughts on things that lie outside the usual boundaries of the Music Salon. Maybe they will even be useful to some readers.

There is a massive transfer of wealth going on right now from the Boomer generation to their children as many people in their 40s inherit fairly sizable sums of money. I experienced this myself quite a few years ago and can offer some advice. First of all, whatever your current level of understanding is, you will now have to enter the world of investment and finance. The alternative is to hand over your assets to financial advisors or flip-flam operators--and sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. Just look at FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. The standard path for many is to walk into your bank and purchase whatever mutual funds they recommend. You could do worse, but you could certainly do better. The problem with mutual funds is that there are management expenses that over time can seriously reduce your gains. Another problem is that statistics show that over 90% of active managers do not beat the market. The obvious solution is simply to buy the market, an option offered by what are called "index funds" that simply track a stock index. I think an even better solution is to buy an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks the index. The three biggest ones are SPY which tracks the S&P 500 list of the biggest and best US companies, DIA which tracks the Dow Jones Industrial Average and QQQ which tracks the NASDAQ. A conservative plan is to put 60% into equities (stocks) which make up these indices and 40% into bonds. But this should shift over time. When you are younger you should put more into stocks and less into bonds and vice-versa as you grow older. As no-one really knows where the markets are going over the short-term there is no point in paying experts for their financial advice.

Ethics: this should be a central concern for everyone, but it is surprising how little thought is put into it. There are three main ethical theories: deontology, which emphasizes duties or rules (such as do unto others as you would have them do unto you), consequentialism (which used to be referred to as utilitarianism) which strives to achieve the best result for the greatest number and virtue ethics, which actually goes back to Aristotle. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

What distinguishes virtue ethics from consequentialism or deontology is the centrality of virtue within the theory. Whereas consequentialists will define virtues as traits that yield good consequences and deontologists will define them as traits possessed by those who reliably fulfil their duties, virtue ethicists will resist the attempt to define virtues in terms of some other concept that is taken to be more fundamental. Rather, virtues and vices will be foundational for virtue ethical theories and other normative notions will be grounded in them.

I'm a virtue ethicist as I have long been of the opinion that a lot of the other ethical theories tend to obscure our basic intuitions about virtue and vice. We tend to know virtue and vice when we see them! Interestingly, moral philosophy shares similar methods and problems with aesthetics.

I will make no comments on political issues as there is no surer way to create outrage and dissention! But I will say that I think a modicum of individual liberty is fairly important.

So let's end with one of those pieces for player-piano by Conlon Nancarrow.

UPDATE: If you want to do your own research on investing, I recommend Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy J. Siegel.