Last week, on September 30th, I retired from the investment firm Angelo Gordon where I enjoyed a thirty year career. I remain a loyal friend and fan of the firm and have enormous gratitude for the opportunities the firm gave me.
I made this move to pursue a uniquely compelling opportunity outside of finance. The shape of this new opportunity is just starting to evolve, but it reflects my interest in public policy. For now, I’m being purposefully circumspect.
One of my first substack posts, six months ago, foreshadowed my turn toward public policy, particularly policy that addresses poverty. That April post was titled “The Cruel, Untimely, and Much Too Quiet Death of the Expanded Child Tax Credit.”
In that post, I expressed my disappointment that Congress had failed to extend the expanded 2021 Federal Child Tax Credit (“CTC”) beyond a single year. As a finance guy, I loved the CTC’s return on investment from both the perspective of economics and of morality. My interest in this policy initiative has only increased, especially when it can be paired with significant improvements in childhood education.
Here's the link.
As for my career change, my role model is my mother Jill Roberts. Around 2006, at the age of 67, she embarked on a medical career using her philanthropic resources, her sharp mind, and her energy and passion to start the Jill Roberts Center for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (or “IBD” consisting of Crohn’s and Colitis) at Weill Cornell. She went into her Center every day and was essentially the Center’s Executive Chairman, fighting for resources, helping patients, studying the science, and recruiting top medical talent.
My mother died unexpectedly in early 2020.
From my vantage point as her son, the last fifteen years of my mother’s life was by far her happiest time. She was incredibly productive and busy every day doing something she loved. She was able to see, close-up, the tremendous positive difference her Center made for many thousands of patients. She also became deeply passionate and knowledgeable about research into new treatment and prevention methods for IBD. In 2016 she started a Center devoted to IBD research to work closely with her clinical center. It was the first pairing at Weill Cornell of clinical and research Centers collaborating to address the same disease.
I saw how energized my mother was by the challenges of her work. She loved learning, not only about medicine, but about all sorts of things. She became a dedicated follower of the philosophy of stoicism. And an eager student of football betting so she could compete in a contest with two of her sons and one of her grandsons. It was wonderful to see the expanse of her intellectual growth, which led to countless discussions and debates between us about current events. Often heated, always polite. (Except for her Yankee fan contempt for my Mets!)
I once told my mother that I envied her passion and dedication and fulfillment at helping to heal and help so many people. My mother assured me that I would eventually find something similar that suited me. I just needed to be on the lookout for it. That conversation, short but indelible, unquestionably helped provide the impetus for this career change.
The power of a parent’s words, when paired with an inspiring example, can have great influence even when that child is fifty-five years old. Even after that parent is no longer around. So it was, and so it remains, with my mother and me.
And whether we parents like it or not, for better or for worse, there is no statute of limitations on how long we retain the power of influence over our children. They will always have our actions and words under the strictest scrutiny and surveillance. Even after we’re gone.
From your CTC piece: In effect, this had the important and vastly underrated effect of removing from these payments any stigma.
I hadn't thought of this, but absolutely true. Our family makes a little less than the single person cutoff per year (until I rejoin the workforce in about 3 years' time; even then, we'd still be below the two-income cutoff). The CTC was manna from heaven. Our grocery bills have skyrocketed and we really feel that. Our three sons are growing (as children tend to do) and clothing them and shoe-ing them adds up.
What's more, the CTC helped free us to more easily bear the cost of their few extracurriculars: music lessons and soccer or baseball for one, a flute ensemble and swimming lessons for the other (the littlest doesn't do anything yet). These are the types of activities that (in moderation!) make a child more well-rounded, expose them to more, supplement their public education.
Our eldest son is a freshman at a Title 1 school, in an international baccalaureate program. He's taking junior year math. He was just selected as one of seven students from his school to go on a Simmons Foundation-sponsored college visiting trip next week, to U of Richmond, American, Howard, Georgetown and the Naval Academy. We are thrilled! We couldn't afford such a trip ourselves.
I feel that the lower-middle class is often overlooked in the discussion about state-sponsored benefits. It's a moral obligation for a country as rich as ours to lift children out of poverty, but to then give children in the lower-income-but-not-impoverished stratum opportunities that come easily to peers of wealthier families is the next step.
Beautifully said