99 Black Men

For the 3.84 of you who read this blog, you will recall that I spent most of my working hours as an economist. This blog is filled with stories of my time in academia and how that worked out. I have done a lot of media requests for my opinion on various economic policies. You can find them here.

Sometimes I was asked to weigh in by other organizations given my training. That happened to me in the spring of 2025 when I was contacted by the 100 Black Men of America, Inc. I had heard of the group. In fact, there have been chapters in almost every city that I've lived in such as Milwaukee, St. Louis, Birmingham, and New Orleans.  They were having their annual conference in New Orleans in June of 2025 and since I was one of a few black men with a PhD in a business-adjacent field who lived in the city, they asked me if I'd be a judge at a youth competition about wealth building. I agreed.

The students were in high school and had been given the book Rich Dad's Cashflow Quadrant: Guide to Financial Freedom written by Robert Kiyosaki to read as a guide. I didn't like the book or the first book the author had written about wealth building, but no one asked me. On the day of the competition, I showed up at the downtown hotel to find tons of people running around. They weren't all men, but I'd bet that 99.9% of them were black. It was a pretty cool sight.

We were set up in a large ballroom which probably fit 600 people. There was a stage for the teams to give their pitch and a table where I and the other 3 judges sat down below in front. The competition was pretty straightforward in that each two-person team was given a scenario of a young lady who was 18 years old. She was graduating high school and planned to attend college. There were other details about this fictious person, but the key fact was that she wanted to have $3 million in net worth by the time she was 30 years old. The teams were supposed to use 8 minutes to pitch their ideas of how this person was going to reach her goal. 

There were 3 teams. One I remember was from Kansas City. Another team was from Atlanta and I simply can not remember where the third team was from. During the briefing given the week before and then again right before the competition, it was stressed that the students should all get the same question. That made sense. It would be unfair to ask one team a really easy question and then ask a really hard one to another team.  In fact, the organizers went so far as to give us suggested questions and answers. That's where the controversy started. 

After the first team, which happened to be the students from Kansas City did their pitch, the other 3 judges simply read the question off of the piece of paper and listened to see if the answer matched what had been written. The judges were to give scores for the answer but also how well the students understood the situation and how well their plan would work. However, when it was my turn, I did not read the question on the paper. Why bring me all the way down there to read a question off a piece of paper? A staffer could do that. Instead, I asked my own. My question dealt with taxes and whether their calculations for the made-up scenario accounted for future tax increases/decreases. Seemed reasonable to me. Maybe all of this future wealth would be eaten up in taxes. 

However, here is what I was supposed to have asked "The book talks about real investors not putting their money with financial advisors or pension fund managers with entities who uses government and union pension funds, stocks and mutual funds for long periods of time because in doing so, it only makes these financial advisors/experts and their company more money. The author of the book mentions a strategy known as the "velocity of money." Describe this strategy." That question (which really isn't a question) is crazy long and didn't seem to have anything to do with the situation of getting the young lady to her goal. In addition, it was written as a "suggested question" so why should I have felt bound to use it?

Well, the problem was that it was NOT a suggestion. The organizers looked at me like I had just slapped one of the students. I was careful to ask the same question of the other 2 teams but right after Kansas City got off the stage, one staffer came over to ask what the hell was I doing? There wasn't time to go into detail right then, but I told her I'd be sure to ask the same question to all teams. That wasn't her issue. The issue was that I had not asked the stupid long question above. What I found odd was that the coach of the Kansas City team was looking daggers at me. She was so mad that I thought she might come over and punch me. 

I was sort of confused. How did the coach know that I had not asked the question on the paper? Had she been given the questions in advance? That didn't seem fair. Clearly, the staff should have known but the teams shouldn't have had a clue. It didn't seem to me that the students had advanced knowledge of the questions given their answer. The other two teams gave really quick answers to the question. They simply said something like "yes we took taxes into consideration" and I was done with it. That's all Kansas City had to do too.

After everything was done, it turned out that the Atlanta team had earned the most points and won. The Kansas City team came in third. There were some pictures taken right after the competition which I quickly did and literally ran out of the ballroom. That Kanas City coach was hunting for me and several of the staffers were wanting to get a piece of me too. It was a pretty funny scene. You would have thought that I had just skipped out on a check at dinner and was running for my life. There wasn't a crowd chasing me but I sure felt like there was.  

The group was supposed to have been the 100 Black Men of America but they kicked me out, so I guess now they'll have to be 99 Black men.