[Mid-shot of a man with unruly gray hair, wearing a tattersall jacket and a red and black-striped bow tie behind an oak desk with stacks of books, a green banker’s lamp and a Grecian vase. He holds a sheet of paper and peers over his reading glasses.]
You could say my story begins with a speech
by a famous colleague of mine, Thomas T. Delmonico
Jr., who won the MacArthur Young-Genius Prize
for his Hyper-Loss Sensitivity Model while we
were fellows at the U. of Chicago. I’ll read you
this bit . . . third of the way down, where he arrives
at the seeds of this theory. . . Quote,
The value of “quick fail” came to me from my sister,
who was in med school when I was at Chicago.
She’d grown up playing doctor, always bandaging
your arm or sticking a thermometer in your mouth.
Two years into med school she says she’s seen the underbelly
of the profession, the grind of residency, the threat
of litigation, all that. “So bail out,” I said. That floored her.
She comes on with some spiel about loans and the years
of her life already given to becoming a doctor. “Those costs
are sunk,” I said. “They’re gone, and you won’t recover
them by staying the course.” Her mouth was gaping,
but I went on: “The good news is that you’re free.
Throw off that stethoscope and breathe!” Took her
two more years to realize I was right. It’s shocking,
frankly, how many corporate leaders get in the same fix,
never pull the ripcord on a distressed course of action,
not even on their own golden parachutes! Billions
in bad money chase after good every year in the service
of . . . ego? cowardice? What happened to self reliance?
Me, I’m a shark. Bite the data—swallow or spit—move on.
Been married twice. Engaged three times—five best
decisions of my life. Viros non paenitet. No regrets. Unquote.
[Brown takes off his reading glasses, folds the speech into a paper airplane and flies it past the camera.]
Delmonico was twenty-nine. The very embodiment
of the rule that economists do their best work early.
He cashed his prize in at Harvard, and I went west.
My career has always seemed in his shadow. And when
you live in the shadow of someone, the world is more . . .
gray. . . You could say Delmonico’s theory looks
ahead—full speed ahead. Mine? Mine looks back.
Asa Brown, 66, Economist
“Failing Fast, Revisited”
[Title fades. Long shot, Brown, at the window now, turns, lets his hand run across the spines of books on a shelf as he returns to his desk.]
My career began under a cloud of suspicion
—my own. That, top of my class though I had been,
I lacked the creativity to do something really
special. What does one do with such doubt?
[Mid-shot]
Some would say, I drifted. Three tenured
positions. Countless conferences and the easy
dalliances they provided for the body and mind.
White-paper pursuits of sensational theories
whose bedeviling variables resolved in a solution
of vodka and tonic. Then the hangover. Then
the return of the uncertainty principle. Elusive,
even according to course evaluations:
Professor Brown has an annoying speaking style.
Questions, questions, questions. I don’t think
they’re rhetorical, because he waits . . .
with this knowing smile. “In a global economy,
might we represent the traditional tension
not as guns and butter but the pen and the sword?”
Then he just sits there on his desk and smiles.
And I’m like: I don’t know, Shakespeare. Not a mind
reader. . . . A not uncomfortable life with its garden-
variety disorder. But eventually what is that if not
self-sabotage. Anyway, I came to see it that way.
[Long shot]
Hi, everyone, my name is Asa Brown, I’m an alcoholic.
[Still shot of a bulletin board with the Alcoholics Anonymous steps taped in the middle. Then return to Brown seated. Mid-shot]
Say what you will about Alcoholics Anonymous,
its simple steps and superstitions. It understands
something fundamental about the value of regret
in a life. My theory, the one the Nobel committee
chose, is in real ways co-authored by each single
member of my AA cohort. I can still taste the stone
soup of honesty, vulnerability and love served
in that Legion hall where souls were bared. Transformative!
You could hear it stitching up lives torn by waste.
[Brown rises and paces the room as he speaks.]
. . . Gerrard, let’s call him, sobbed remembering the night
he blacked out and left his dog outside in a storm.
So sensitive was his Richter scale, that he felt even small
aftershocks of the big quake that collapsed his life.
(I should say that Bingo, let’s call her, was let in
by a neighbor and is with us to this day as far as I know.)
But he didn’t tell us his story to excoriate himself.
He was reaching deep down in that wellspring
of humility that true penitence requires, seeking
inspiration . . . And we were his necessary audience.
[Mid-shot, Brown seated.]
Sometime into my second year, I realized
that recovery itself could be expressed in theory.
My dear, dear friend who still believed in me,
the great anthropologist Windsor Blackstone, and I
wrote our way to a Fulbright and went out into
the field. To make a long, jargon-filled story short . . .
[Jump cut]
so after years of fieldwork we were able to assign value
to transformations like those I had known by triangulating
anthropology with biography, and, paradoxically,
with Delmonico’s Well-Being Scale, which I very well
knew how to use. We found that cultures with rituals
for exploring and performing regret—with rites
and other avenues of atonement (secular and religious),
scored higher on all measures of social benefit.
[Brown takes a book from the desk and draws a piece of paper from it, reading glasses on.]
I hope it’s helped. I think it’s helped. Helps
me anyway when I think of it as a contribution . . .
[Jump cut]
Delmonico himself sent a let—a note, after
the Nobel. Just one line: It’s about damn time . . .
[Fade]