The End of Evil: Ruminations on My Life, Investing and Discovering the Holy Spirit

By W. Bruce Erickson

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462857173

W. Bruce Erickson

He won numerous teaching awards during his career as a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, but he’s still a great fan of Michigan State University – where he earned his undergraduate degree in the Honors College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics – especially its basketball teams. W. Bruce Erickson lives in Minneapolis.

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Copyright © 2011 by W. Bruce Erickson.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011905929

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4628-5716-6

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4628-5715-9

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4628-5717-3

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97254

Dedication

For those hundreds of people

who gave me insight about the world

I traveled in and for the Holy Spirit

who taught me some of his habits and

expanded my understanding of the human

community and the financial markets,

which made me walk to the bank with a smile!

97254-MARI-layout-low.pdf

Contents

Part One: My Early Years and My Life as an Investor

The Power of Faith

My Life as a Conventional Investor

Investing in Small-Cap Stocks

Be Patient and Concentrate

Seeing God

Living with God

Listening to the Holy Spirit

Hearing the Holy Spirit

Part Two: My Confrontation with Evil

Drilling Down into Evil

Self-Evil

Narcissistic Evil

Environmental Megalomania

Gamesman Evil

Pressured Evil

Mass Evil

The Ragged Green Doll

Racially Based Evil or Ethnic or Religious or Tribal Evil

Opportunistic Evil

Evil by Trade-Offs

The Nursing Home

Group Evil

Scam Evil

Organized Scam Evil

How Scam Evil Becomes Organized Evil

Self-Indulgence Evil

Washington Tales

More Problems with Evil

Evil in the Workplace

Good and Bad Managers

The Case of Jane

Other Factors in the Workplace

Are Evil Spirits Real?

Part Three: Fighting Evil

Recognizing Good and Evil

Instinct and the Holy Spirit

Little Evils

Dale

Fighting Big Evils

Fear and Evil

Fatigue and Evil

Auschwitz

Part Four: How to Be a Better Christian

What God Wants

Religion and How We Should Behave

Dealing with People

Part Five: Leading a Happy Life

A Simple Formula?

Boosting Your Happiness Level

First Steps toward a Happy Life

Finding Your Calling with God’s Help

Finding Optimism

The Tough Decisions

A Life of Laughter

Recognizing Our Strengths and Weaknesses

Choosing the Best Activities

The Last Years

Confronting the Inevitable

Part Six: The End of Evil

Reasons for Hope

Young American People

Productive and Achieving Young People

Number 1 or Bust

No Boundaries, Please

Technology Is King

We’re People and They’re People

Was Keynes Right?

Part One

My Early Years and My Life as an Investor

The End of Evil is a book I never expected to write and, in many ways, am disqualified to write. I’m not a theologian or a philosopher. Instead, I have spent my life mostly teaching and traveling. Along the way, I have worked in various government agencies and assisted with federal commissions, been a business school department chairman, and made quite a lot of money investing in stocks, real estate, and venture capital. The subject of evil was never really on my radar. But age, infirmity, and several worrisome trends I see happening in the world have led to me to reexamine my life and reinterpret many of the experiences I’ve had and the people I’ve met in terms of good and evil. It is a journey I think many people should take. Along the way, they might discover, as I have, the power of the Holy Spirit and the direct role he can play in all aspects of your life, from interacting with family, friends, and coworkers to, believe it or not, becoming a more successful investor as well as a happier person.

I became interested in evil slowly, first on an abstract intellectual level and later in terms of how evil is a very real and pernicious influence that can damage and destroy individuals, institutions, and entire societies.

I suppose I should start at the beginning.

I grew up as a city boy in East Lansing, Michigan, but spent my summers on a farm owned by my grandparents near Hannibal, Missouri. I did all sorts of chores, from pitching manure to helping with the harvest. It was hot, grueling work. The farmhouse lacked indoor plumbing and many of the physical comforts I took for granted in the city.

Early on I developed an interest in the business side of farming. I had a lot of questions. How much milk and cream did a cow produce? How much did production cost versus how much my grandparents made? Why were milk prices higher in Michigan than they were in Missouri? Why were there so many state and federal regulations? I eventually noticed several things, the most unsettling of which was the fact that most farmers—whom I otherwise admired as honest, hardworking, and honorable—cheated the federal government. They gamed the Soil Bank and other Depression-era programs and conducted much of their activities on the underground economy. These observations fueled my interest in learning how things really worked behind the scenes and led to an early interest in business and economics, and later to a PhD in economics and a career in academia.

My school years were innocent and happy ones. In addition to going to school, I starting working at age fourteen doing janitor work, painting houses, and even babysitting. I worked at least four hours a day or more throughout my school years. In addition to school and work, I was determined to learn a lot about the world. I got this from my parents, who loved to travel. I started reading the New York Times at about the age of ten. Many of the words I had to look up in the dictionary. But that to me made it fun. I also got a list of what were considered the one hundred best books in Western literature. I ploughed through all of them, even ones such as Pilgrim’s Progress and Beowulf, which were pretty rough going for someone my age. I also developed some rather morbid interests for a young boy, including a fascination with life under Stalin and Hitler and other despots and the unimaginable suffering of people in gulags and prison camps.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had offers to go to Michigan State near our home, the University of Michigan, and several prestigious eastern universities. Michigan State and the University of Michigan were especially anxious to get me. Both offered me full scholarships. The University was the more prestigious of the two, but in the end I settled on Michigan State, which offered me a place in its newly formed Honors College and the opportunity to take any course the University offered, regardless of level. I also discovered humbleness and honesty in the first institution and elitism and arrogance in the latter.

Michigan State knew it couldn’t match the fame and reputation of the University of Michigan and didn’t seem bothered by it. People there were honest and polite and seemed totally dedicated to offering the best classroom experience possible. In contrast, people I met at the University of Michigan constantly boasted of its leading status in the Big Ten and how gifted they all were as intellectuals. The elitist hard sell made my decision to go to Michigan State easy.

At first I majored in the social sciences but quickly decided my particular interest was economics and political science. I often took courses at graduate levels even as a freshman. I graduated in two years and two quarters by taking extra-heavy loads. My grades were good, so I was admitted to graduate school, earning a PhD in economics. I did this while working at least four hours a day. I studied not just my assigned classes, but also monetarism, political science, and philosophy.

After receiving my PhD, I was determined to see as much of the world as possible. Eventually I visited about two hundred countries. But I wasn’t merely interested in seeing the sites. The driving force in this messy life was my desire to understand how economies really worked and not just what textbooks said. I wanted to know what really made different societies tick. To do that, I concluded, you needed to explore the underbellies of countries. So I visited areas where ordinary people worked and lived as well as areas characterized by high crime, prostitution, drug running, and other urban ills. It may not have been the most prudent way to travel because I had frequent brushes with danger, but I learned a lot about different economic models around the world: legal and government sanctioned, gray models in which institutions straddled the line between legal and illegal activity, and economic models that were almost entirely rooted in flat-out criminality.

Another thing that piqued my interest in business and economics was my early interest in the stock market. I know this sound precocious, but by the time I was fourteen, my father was asking me for investment advice. My advice wasn’t always the best, but by the time I was eighteen, the small portfolio I had put together out of money from summer jobs and chores was outperforming his. I learned from this early experience that things aren’t always what they seem in business and that success in investing depended on developing keen instincts for assessing the honesty and integrity of the businesspeople 7 offered and brokered stocks, bonds, venture capital opportunities, and other types of investments. I think I am better than most investors in this regard, but by the time I finished my PhD, I had invested in several outright flimflams as well as stocks controlled by the Mafia and other criminals.

Many of my investments, however, paid off spectacularly. One early venture capital investment in a small private company grew from $20,000 to nearly $450,000 in just three years’ time. As a result I became extremely interested in venture capital investments in start-ups and early-stage companies and met dozens of interesting and intelligent entrepreneurs. From this I learned that successful venture capital investing required an intimate knowledge of the personalities and egos involved and the local communities that nurtured and supported them.

My Life as a Conventional Investor

Before I get into investing with the advice and guidance of the Holy Spirit, permit me to digress a little and describe my life and experiences as a conventional investor.

As I mentioned earlier, I started investing when I was fourteen. Most of my friends at the time made spending money on paper routes and yard work. Others became adept at cajoling their parents into ever-fatter allowances. Me, I invested. At first it was somewhat by chance and coincidence, but I soon become hooked. It was actually my grandparents’ fault. They liked to regale me with the details of how prices for milk were set by the federal government. It was then and still is now a fairly complex process. Something about the various relationships and distances and formulas involved got my attention. I could see patterns and spatial relationships. It was like a game. I started reading more about price supports and other Depression-era programs and soon started reading about stocks and bonds and investing. Luckily we had a family friend, a broker named William Marshall, who took me under his wing. When I had a little cash saved up from painting houses, I was ready to take the plunge.

For developing an investment strategy, I looked to my mother, specifically at how she bought groceries. Size and price mattered the most to her. When she compared the same products, she usually bought the biggest box with the lowest price. Somehow I connected this to price/earnings ratios. If stock A was priced less per dollars earned than