Finkler et al: Financial Management for Public, Health, and Not-for-Profit Organizations - A Review

Finkler et al: Financial Management for Public, Health, and Not-for-Profit Organizations

4th Edition

This was the book assigned to me for my class specifically for Nonprofit Financial  Management as I pursue my MBA  specifically for Nonprofit management.

As textbooks go, it is serviceable. The writing is clean and clear, and is easily understandable for someone that has some background in accounting. I am the Director of Finance at a nonprofit, and I was able to pick up a number of useful things from this, though a lot of it was review.

A couple of things bothered me a bit. There is a chapter about the time value of money (here it is chapter five). The book teaches the student how to approach the problems from a point where the unknowns are plugged into excel. This may just be me being old fashioned, but to me it skipped a step in being overly reliant on technology instead of going back one step and showing the derivation and making the student go through the motions to get an understanding of where excel is coming from. It’s not that it isn’t there - for example the derivation of finding the value of the annuity is footnoted, in small print. Again, a small concern, but one nevertheless.

A second thing is to look at the cost. Due to a mix up with the professor’s syllabus, I had first bought the third edition of this book, before being told that the fourth edition was the only acceptable one. The problem is that at the time, the third edition was less than half the price of the fourth edition. The kicker was I ended up with both of the editions side by side, and looking at the first three chapters I noticed no discernible difference. This may not be true in later chapters as I didn’t make the comparison. If you are assigning the text, have a look at the third edition for the student’s sake.

Gun Control in Our Time

Here's an idea.

If you want to keep a legal gun, you have to join the national guard or reserve. There is that sticky clause in the first part of the second amendment that gets ignored. Maybe have a one-time amnesty, where you can turn in your gun and get compensated for part of its cost.

It may sound harsh, but freeing the slaves was done without any compensation on the former owners. From an economic standpoint, it was one of the largest exportations of wealth in that didn't involve a revolution.

That represented a different turning, one where we collectively said that this was no longer a moral way to order society, I think we are at that same point with weapons that exist solely to kill in the most efficient way possible, No other machine has one use that we allow private citizens to hold but that one use is against the law.

Perhaps have some carve out for smaller-caliber single action rifles used for subsistence hunting, but the past week has been too much and federal action is needed.

Prayers don't stop bullets, nor do laws, but a large scale manufacturing industry can be curbed.

An Economic History of How the Sausage is Made: Lowenstein's "America's Bank"

I had recently read “The Summit,” a book who’s subtitle explains that it is a book about how the Bretton Wood agreement came about to be, and enjoyed it. I read a lot of economics, but not that much economic history of how the sausage is made.

Therefore, when I saw that Lowenstein was putting out a book about the founding of the Federal Reserve, I jumped at the chance to read it. It is right up my alley – heck, it should be up everyone’s alley, popular nonfiction about monetary policy being important.

The book itself is a story well told. The first part basically is setting up the history of banking for the first part of the republic, with federalists sparing against Jacksonian anti-federalist and chomping at the same urban / rural divide that is still with us. This first part is the more compelling part. The second part is about the drafting of the bills that would become the Federal Reserve act and the personalities behind the drafting. For me, this is where it broke down. I wanted more of the details about the policy, and less about Carter Glass being a bit of a hick (though he did have a big hand in both the Federal Reserve and later New Deal Legislation).

For me, one of the strengths was that the book didn’t give too much credence to the various conspiracies surrounding the Fed. The first part of the book is in itself strong enough to support the need for a central bank, even if 100 years ago our ancestors weren’t ready for a kind of European central bank like the bank of England, having centralized deposits was important for the country’s development as a global capitalist power. It does address these various cranks – on one page – and then moves on. I thought that was a brilliant rhetorical move by Lowenstein. I’m still not entirely sure why Missouri has two branches of the Fed, but the book is rich in detail and an interesting read for everyone who hasn’t bought into various anti-centralization conspiracies.  

It could have been done better: Alvin Roth's "Who Gets What - and Why"

Alvin Roth has a Nobel Prize. If you want to get snotty about it, I can google it and remember that it is not a true Noble but instead the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” which is close. It’s as much a science as those other squishy awards they give in things like literature or “Medicine”.

Roth’s Noble is important because I think it was the driving force behind the creation of this book. Someone must have noticed that Roth didn’t have a book for pop econ reading that summarized his work. That person must have gone to Roth and encouraged him to write this.

It’s not that this is a bad book, but that is also not the parenthetical you want someone writing about to start a sentence with when getting to the meat of things. Roth’s work on market design is interesting and important, but the key thing is that when he explains it it sounds like one of those intuitive leaps that is so simple that it feels silly that no one else made them before. That is why the guy has a Nobel.

What the book really lacks is structure. We learn much about the markets for kidney transplants and the reciprocal chains that he developed; we learn much about about placing students at the schools of their choice; we learn much about the dangers of exploding offers and how they create suboptimal outcomes. It’s just that what we learn is scattered and feels systemic. It is as if the book was over-written to add a page count so that it legitimately feels like a book. It makes it repetitive and hard to engage with.

I know I had my issues. When a book makes me think and expands what I know or challenges my beliefs, I fill the front cover and title pages up with my own notes. I read this book front to back and I didn't even lazily dog-ear a page. So in the end where I want to say that this book is  a good introduction to the works of Nobel-Prize Winner Alvin Roth, I’d have to offer a caveat - It could have been done better.

"Inequality: What Can Be Done": Anthony B. Atkinson's Starts the Conversation

Inequality is bad.

Wait, not the book, but the fact that some have much more than others and that it is truly impossible to justify that in terms of hard work - whatever that means.

Inequality has been the elephant in the room that was ignored for so long until Piketty blew up for some reason last year. It's weird how that happens in the culture. I bought Piketty’s book Capital on pre-order and only got about 100 pages in,. By the time I actually got the book, I had read so many blogs going back and forth over it that I had felt like I had already read it.

Anthony B. Atkinson’s book, “Inequality: What can be done?” didn’t get the same attention when it came out in 2015, and I’m not sure why not. Maybe the bloggers on both sides had decided that it was time to look at something else - secular stagnation, when will the Fed achieve liftoff from the zero lower bound, is the Phillips curve still a thing.  Or maybe because Atkinson’s book felt a little less universal than Piketty with his laws so that people could argue if r was less than, greater than, or equal to g. Either way, the fact that people didn’t let this book blow up in the same way is shameful, because it is more straightforward and systematic and economical with the prose. If anything, it fails because it is less grandiose than Piketty, looking at changes that can be made at the national level instead of some global wealth tax. Instead he has a constellation of proposals and an examination of their feasibility and potential cost. If anything for popular American readers, it might be seen as a bit dry and a bit too focused on somewhere that is not America, but the proposals are transferrable. Importantly though, Atkinson doesn’t leave his proposals as the definitive answer, accepting that the economy exists in flux with many variables - making his work not just some answers but a jumping off point for further discussion, We just have to be brave enough to join that discussion.

We need a true mass movement: Critiquing Aronowitz's "The Death and Life of American Labor"

I was reading this short book quickly, as Aronowitz is a good writer, and I mostly agreed with his descriptions of the weakness the the labor movement in America. I wanted to give it to my Democratic friend who works for SEIU to show him that he’s leading himself down a dead end, with a glee that was not comporting with my friendship and respect for the man.

But it was in the second part that I was lost. He lays out a manifesto for the labor union (168-170), which several are already planks of a party, but one that grows internal to the labor movement that he just spent the rest of book decrying. If there is to be mass change for the workers and citizens of the world, I don’t think that his manifesto would work because it seems to accept the irrelevance of the power of the movement (Item one emphasizes that contracts aren’t necessary) but also want to use the movement. Unions need work as the percentage of the labor force in them make them almost irrelevant now what with the neoliberal ideology pervasive but they are held up as what is bad since the main concentration is in government. Perhaps it is time to let labor die and grow a new mass movement where the key identifier is not as worker (since who knows how much longer any of us will actually continue to be full time employees) and instead look at making larger changes where our identifier is as citizen.

True and Truer: Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capital"

I bought this several years ago, but I had left it on my shelf for too long, one of those books I know I should have read, but other books just kept getting in the way. I don’t remember the impetus, but I was looking at all my unread and half read books that I had relegated to the shelves - their newness lost and becoming dusty fixtures - and I grabbed Braverman’s study of the nature of work.

What struck me most about this work was that it was researched and written in the late 60s and early seventies, right before the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system and contemporary with the flashes of revolt amongst the various people who had been forgotten in the capitalistic system (students, women, african-americans). In a way, a naive look at the time is that it was the last time that Capitalism may have been said to work in the way its cheerleaders say it will work with shared growth like Kennedy’s rising tide lifting all boats.

Knowledge of the historical record will show that there was always that undercurrent of malaise in the working world as capitalism may have worked on the surface, but underneath that work was born on the back of unpaid women at home and underpaid workers in the factories and mines and white collar workers. Braverman examines how labor was atomized and demarcated and prescribed even for those who were highly educated. What is also striking is how current and relevant the examination is, even with 40 years passing between the initial publication and today. The machines feared have become the robots in our discourse, but the theme underneath it all is the fear of the lack of autonomy and self-direction that takes craftsmen to laborers, no matter if the skill is working with your hands or your mind.

Braverman did work within the tradition of the folks at the Monthly Review, and this speaks to Sweezy and Baran’s “Monopoly Capital,” which I have not read. Despite my own failings, I think this was a worthwhile read.