The Personal Ponzi Scheme

by Laura J. Boggess

“I’ve decided that life is a Ponzi scheme.”

I give my friend a quizzical look.

“Do you know what that is?”

“Yeah, sure, sort of. Isn’t that what Bernie Madoff got in all that trouble for?”

She nods her head rapidly.

 “Yes,” she says. “It’s smoke and mirrors--like, convincing others that you have this great thing to buy into…”

I’m still puzzled but I’m listening. Wasn’t this what Bernard Madoff had done? Bilked hundreds out of millions by convincing them to invest in his fraudulent scheme?

I sit up straighter.

My friend is getting her MBA, so she is always enlightening me—stretching my world bigger. The way her mind works amazes me. While we dine in my small office at work, she has educated me as to howthe world is flat, given me insights about the international business world, and helped me understand the virtues of certain marketing strategies.

But a Ponzi scheme?

I listen to my friend expound on her theory.

She explains that she has stumbled on a new source of self-confidence.

The Ponzi scheme.

“Most people get their Ponzi schemes from their parents. As they’re growing up, they’re told they’re wonderful, or special…you know? They get this unconditional love that they build their world on and…and they totally buy into, right? So they grow up feeling good about themselves…”

I am on the edge of my seat. And then she says this:

“And since I was raised by crazy people, I didn’t get my Ponzi scheme.”

My eyes widen.

“I didn’t either!”

We talk more about developing our Ponzi schemes—how to use this concept to build our self-esteem.

I love it. It makes sense. Sort of a self-investment. Building myself up.

That’s good, right?

I am so impressed with our new theory that I tell my husband about it when I get home.

“Isn’t that neat? I mean, if I buy into the scheme that I am a self-confident, all together woman, and act accordingly—then…I am. I just have to buy into it and then others do too.”

Before I am finished, he is shaking his head.

What?

I don’t want to have to pretend to be something I’m not, he explains calmly. I’m sick of all the Ponzi schemes. I’m sick of all the falseness in the world. I don’t want to invest in anything but the Truth.

Can you say ‘deflated’?

Still, not willing to let go, I looked up Ponzi scheme on Wikipedia and this is what I found:

”A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned. The Ponzi scheme usually offers returns that other investments cannot guarantee in order to entice new investors, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going.”

Reading just a bit further, these words jumped out at me:

“The system is destined to collapse (emphasis mine) because the earnings, if any, are less than the payments. Usually, the scheme is interrupted by legal authorities before it collapses because a Ponzi scheme is suspected or because the promoter is selling unregistered securities. As more investors become involved, the likelihood of the scheme coming to the attention of authorities increases.”

Destined to collapse.

Hmm.

It’s not looking so good for the personal Ponzi scheme.

Sadly, I relay my husband’s words to my friend at work the next day.

“He just says it’s not based on the truth…”

She tilts her head to one side, eyes sparkling with mischief.

“But what is truth?”

And then it’s my turn.

***

Announcement: If you want to understand how success happens, I mean really understand...join us for our new book club beginning Monday, January 9th. We'll be reading David Brooks' fascinating bestseller, The Social Animal: The Hidden sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. Written in the context of story, Brooks looks at the multilayered science of decision-making and redefines what society sees as success. Won't you join us? We'll be discussing the introduction and the first three chapters. The paperback edition of the book will be released on January 3, 2012.

Image by Evan Leeson. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr. Post by Laura J. Boggess.

Two Pies Lighter

by Julia Spicher K...

Early on Thanksgiving morning, I drove down an eerily silent College Avenue in State College, Pennsylvania, to deliver a couple of pies to the community kitchen in my church basement. The town felt strangely somber. Streets were empty, students and many of the faculty members—more than half the borough’s population—gone. Anyone who had an excuse to get out was relieved to do so. Nevertheless, an NBC news van sat perched at the edge of campus like a vulture, as if even on that still morning a savory bit of news might break.

As a Penn State faculty member who has never set foot in Beaver Stadium or watched a football game of any sort on television, I’ll just say that I came to this place for another reason. But football money has funded a substantial portion of our library’s holdings. It has endowed two professorships, one in my own department. And thanks to the influx of cash that football season brings to the region each fall, it has made Centre County a better place to live.

In other words, across the university and Happy Valley, we’re all aware that we will be sharing the consequences of these crimes and cover-ups for a very long time. 

What can a person do when the actions of a powerful one or few ruin things for so many? All I could think to do that morning was what I did the year before on Thanksgiving morning: rise early, make coffee, roll out crusts and whisk fillings, slide the pumpkin and pecan pies into the oven, and then drive them over to Saint Andrew’s. 

Like my students who were eager to identify with Penn State when its stock was up, I must consider the price of collective success and my own willingness to buy into it. Now, those students worry that the brand has gone bad. That fast, a university’s winning reputation has been wrecked by willful evasions and strange manipulations and images of hooligans rioting in our streets.

Pressing On

I think of my father’s chagrin after working for more than 30 years for a major corporation that in the late 1990s turned out to be rotten at the top. His retirement a few years too early was embittered by a sense of betrayal at the hands of a company that had once made him proud. I think of those associated with church organizations publicly shamed by corrupt or irresponsible leaders, or the happy-looking families undone by foolish moves.

It is easy for me to tell my students to use their words and their heads when they would prefer to take to the streets. Those are the English professor’s stock sentiments. But what shall I do with my own disappointment and disgust?  

The answer came without much thought on Thanksgiving morning: the pies, the drive over to St. Andrew’s. In dark times, we fall back on those practices that a lifetime of practice has taught us. When words fail or fail to come, meaning and comfort spring from the most ordinary, elemental means: our work, small observances. This is the quiet spirit of Advent.

I will stick around when the TV vans have gone away, just as my father worked on for several years while his company painfully stuttered to a halt. I will continue to teach these kids who will have some difficult questions to answer in job interviews for a few years.

Driving back to my home in Bellefonte—a town of 6,000 where the preliminary hearings for Jerry Sandusky will be staged this Tuesday morning—I felt a rush of gratitude for sunlight on the forested ridgeline, my car two pies lighter. My heart felt lighter, too, with the satisfaction that comes from making something, from giving a gift that will vanish before the sun goes down, from doing one tiny thing I can respect.

Image by Chad Miller. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr. Post written by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of Poetry in America.