For the one percent, a good advisor acts as a bookkeeper, a confidante, and, on occasion, a fishmonger.
.. While retaining legal counsel or consulting a financial adviser now commonly leads to short-term relationships, wealth managers maintain clients over the long term, sometimes amounting to lifetime employment.
.. It is not uncommon to find wealth managers working with the children or grandchildren of their original clients.
.. As one manager put it, the client has to “undress” in front of the wealth manager.
.. As a fiduciary, the wealth manager is bound to protect clients’ wealth from risk: This includes not just financial risk but the threat of spendthrift heirs dissipating the family assets or of family members with embarrassing secrets who might be targeted for blackmail.
.. one manager in Dubai described her client relationships in terms that emphasized the emotional labor and caring involved: “They’re asking you to take care of their family. You can’t just think of it as another piece of business … It’s not just a matter of signing documents; it’s the whole concept of doing the right thing for that family. You have to be able to say, ‘Mr. A., don’t worry—your kids are all going to be put through university. It’s all going to be okay.’ You have to be very businesslike. But also family-like.”
.. An English wealth manager based in Dubai explained that such outlandish requests are surprisingly common in the profession, in part as a way of testing whether the practitioner is “worthy” of the client making a long-term investment in the relationship:
.. And they don’t like change: they want to go to the same doctor all their lives, the same dentist, and the same lawyer or fiduciary.”
.. I said, “I’m your wealth manager, not your fishmonger.” And the client said, “Well, today you’re a fishmonger.”
.. Clients may also have a pragmatic reason for posing these tests: They allow the client to discover whether the wealth manager possesses the kind of social networks and influence necessary to provide extraordinary personal service.
.. a study of 19th-century British lawyers showed how their familiarity with clients’ business dealings allowed them to create whole new industries, such as the country’s railroad system; the professionals established a kind of private market, accessible only to the upper crust of British society.
.. Several specifically mentioned helping clients get treatment for their drug-addicted children—a particularly common problem in wealthy families.
‘Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master’
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars.
.. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
.. In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve – and die, if it come to that – than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters.
.. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jordon Anderson
Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together
The Chinese are quite able to think in terms of a map but also to talk about navigation on an equal footing with La Pérouse. Strictly speaking, the ability to draw and to visualize does not really make a difference either, since they all draw maps more or less based on the same principle of projection, first on sand, then on paper. So perhaps there is no difference after all and, geographies being equal, relativism is right ? This, however, cannot be, because La Pérouse does something that is going to create an enormous difference between the Chinese and the European. What is, for the former, a drawing of no importance that the tide may erase, is for the latter the single object of his mission. What should be brought into the picture is how the picture is brought back. The Chinese does not have to keep track, since he can generate many maps at will, being born on this island and fated to die on it. La Pérouse is not going to stay for more than a night ; he is not born here and will die far away. What is he doing, then ? He is passing through all these places, in order to take something back to Versailles where many people expect his map todetermine who was right and wrong about whether Sakhalin was an island, who will own this and that part of the world, and along which routes the next ships should sail.
Syria’s Paradox: Why the War Only Ever Seems to Get Worse
Experts on civil wars say there are several reasons Syria is “a really, really tough case” that defies historical parallels.
The average such conflict now lasts about a decade, twice as long as Syria’s so far. But there are a handful of factors that can make them longer, more violent and harder to stop. Virtually all are present in Syria.
Many stem from foreign interventions that were intended to end the war but have instead entrenched it in a stalemate where violence is self-reinforcing and the normal avenues for peace are all closed. The fact that the underlying battle is multiparty rather than two-sided also works against resolution.
.. Each side is backed by foreign powers — including the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and now Turkey — whose interventions have made Syria an ecosystem with no entropy. In other words, the forces that would normally impede the conflict’s inertia are absent, allowing it to continue far longer than it otherwise would.
Government and rebel forces are supplied from abroad, which means their arms never run out.
.. They introduce self-reinforcing mechanisms for ever-intensifying stalemate.
Whenever one side loses ground its foreign backers increase their involvement, sending supplies or air support to prevent their favored player’s defeat. Then that side begins winning, which tends to prompt the other’s foreign backers to up their ante as well.
.. In most civil wars, the fighting forces depend on popular support to succeed. This “human terrain,” as counterinsurgency experts call it, provides all sides with an incentive to protect civilians and minimize atrocities, and has often proved decisive.
Wars like Syria’s, in which the government and opposition rely heavily on foreign support, encourage the precise opposite behavior
.. Pro-government forces have conducted by far the most attacks against civilians, but opposition fighters have led some as well.
.. “It’s more important to stop the other side from winning than it is to win yourself.”
.. There is reason to believe that Russia, for example, would like President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to step down, or at least make some concessions for peace. But Russia can’t force him to act, nor can it simply quit Syria without abandoning its interests there. Mr. Assad, meanwhile, might want a fuller Russian intervention that brings him victory, something Moscow is unwilling to provide.
.. The only certain way to break the logjam is for one side to surge beyond what the other can match. Because Syria has sucked in two of the world’s leading military powers, Russia and the United States, that bar could likely only be cleared by a full-scale invasion.
In the best case, this would require something akin to the yearslong American occupations of Iraq or Afghanistan. In the worst, invading a war zone where so many foreign adversaries are active could ignite a major regional war.
.. in the best case, one side would slowly grind out a far-off victory that would merely downgrade the war into “a somewhat lower-level insurgency, terrorist attacks, and so on.”
.. “Outright military victory in a civil war often comes at the price of horrific (even genocidal) levels of violence against the defeated, including their civilian populations.”