This New England

Something to fly you through the winter. See Festival Ballets's A Thousand & One Nights, at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium, in Providence, Friday, Feb. 6, at 7:30 pm; Saturday, Feb. 7, at 7:30 pm, and Sunday, Feb. 8 at 2:30 pm. Dancers seen here are Leticia Guerrero and Mindaugas Bauzys.

-- Photo by Thomas Nola-Rion.

Some Harvard alumni are angry that Harvard investment managers get paid so much, and they want $21 million in bonuses returned to the "nonprofit'' university, which has a $28 billion endowment.

They don't want money managers' pay to exceed that of the Harvard president, who makes a few hundred thousand a year.

David Kaiser, of the Class of 1969, and a professor at the Naval War College, said:
"The events of the last year show the whole way in which money is managed and the whole way managers are compensated needs to be changed. The point of the endowment is to create income for the university. The point is not to get the paper balance as high as possible to create big bonuses.''

Quite right. The controversy also raises the question of whether the more extravagant the pay the better the performance will be.

There's little indication of that. The extravagant pay mostly reflects the circular, or bubble-like nature of investment-manager and executive-compensation:

Those who oversee such people (boards) tend to be rich and so they think that the people they associate with must be rich, or made rich, in part so that those people in turn will make sure that their bosses stay rich. ..

They take care of each other in various spoken and unspoken financial ways. In so doing, they leave little money for anyone else not in their bubble. It's a kind of winner take all approach. And these "incentives'' have a lot to do with the crash we've experienced.

Thus plutocracy gets more and more entrenched, including at such, er, big businesses as Harvard.

Would I have the government come in and start fixing executive and investment-manager compensation. No! It's too complicated and the government doesn't have the competence to do that. But they can make sure tax and other policies don't encourage such, well, looting.

The rest is up to the board.

As they say, capitalism is a terrible economic system, but better than all the others.

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Gritty old Brockton, once "Shoe Capital of the World,'' will get through the winter with anticipation of a statue of Rocky Marciano to be put up late this summer outside the city's high school stadium, which is named for him.

A twenty-four-foot bronze statute of the Brockton native, the only world heavyweight boxing champion to retire undefeated, seems a bit much for a poor town. And the world of boxing is not exactly a good role model, though Mr. Marciano was a hell of a nice guy.

You take your local heroes where you can.

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Northern New England hopes for another record maple-syrup season, assuming they can get through the snow-filled woods easily enough to get out most of the stuff by April.

 Tags  Brockton David Kaiser Festival Ballet Harvard maple syrup Rocky Marciano

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