Our guest this week is Larry Siegel. He is the Gary P. Brinson director of research at the CFA Institute Research Foundation. Prior to that, he was director of research for the Ford Foundation's investment division for 15 years. Siegel began his career at Ibbotson Associates in 1979. He specializes in asset management and investment consulting and has served on various boards as both an advisor and a director. He has also served on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal and currently serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Portfolio Management and TheJournal of Investing. Siegel is a prolific writer and has authored several critically acclaimed books in recent years, including Unknown Knowns: On Economics, Investing, Progress, and Folly as well as Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago and his MBA in finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. BackgroundBio Unknown Knowns: On Economics, Investing, Progress, and Folly, by Laurence Siegel Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance, by Laurence Siegel Research"Lifetime Financial Advice: Human Capital, Asset Allocation, and Insurance," by Roger Ibbotson, Moshe Arye Milevsky, and Kevin Zhu, ResearchGate, January 2007. Popularity: A Bridge Between Classical and Behavioral Finance, by Roger Ibbotson, Thomas Idzorek, Paul Kaplan, and James Xiong, Jan. 15, 2019. "Bursting the Bubble—Rationality in a Seemingly Irrational Market," by David F. DeRosa, SSRN, April 29, 2021. "Equity Risk Premium Forum: Don’t Bet Against a Bubble?," by Paul McCaffrey, CFA Institute, April 8, 2022. The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do, by Erik Larson, April 6, 2021. "Value Investing: Robots Versus People," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, June 30, 2017. Endowments and Investing Lessons"Don't Give Up the Ship: The Future of the Endowment Model," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, April 7, 2021. "Where's Tobin? Protecting Intergenerational Equity for Endowments: A New Benchmarking Approach," by M. Barton Waring and Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, April 21, 2022. "Debunking Nine and a Half Myths of Investing," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, March 12, 2020. Inflation"Protecting Portfolios Against Inflation," by Eugene Podkaminer, Wylie Tollette, and Laurence Siegel, The Journal of Investing, April 2022. "The Novelty of the Coronavirus: What It Means for Markets," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.com, April 1, 2020. "Will Demographic Trends Drive Higher Inflation and Interest Rates?" by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.com, Feb. 10, 2021. Other"Cliff Asness: Value Stocks Still Look Like a Bargain," The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, May 31, 2022. "Tom Idzorek: Exploring the Role of Human and Financial Capital in Retirement Planning," The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, June 7, 2022. TranscriptJeff Ptak: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I'm Jeff Ptak, chief ratings officer for Morningstar Research Services. Christine Benz: And I'm Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar. Ptak: Our guest this week is Larry Siegel. Larry is the Gary P. Brinson director of research at the CFA Institute Research Foundation. Prior to that, he was director of research at the Ford Foundation's investment division for 15 years. Larry began his career at Ibbotson Associates in 1979. He specializes in asset management and investment consulting and has served on various boards as both an advisor and a director. He has also served on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal and currently serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Portfolio Management and The Journal of Investing. Larry is a prolific writer and has authored several critically acclaimed books in recent years, including Unknown Knowns: On Economics, Investing, Progress, and Folly as well as Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance. Larry earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago and his MBA in finance at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. Larry, welcome to The Long View. Laurence Siegel: Thank you. Ptak: Thank you so much for joining us. We're really excited to chat with you. I wanted to start with your early career. You worked for Roger Ibbotson early in your career. In fact, you were Ibbotson's first employee if I'm not mistaken. Talk about Roger's influence on you and more broadly, the impact he has had on our understanding of markets and investing. Siegel: Roger was not only my first boss, he was my first finance professor at the University of Chicago. So, I got fed the Ibbotson—and to give credit where it's due, to Sinquefield—view of the markets early. I was 21 years old. And I would describe that view as that asset classes are what's important; that security, individual securities, are best viewed as components of asset classes, although when you get involved in the business, you realize that you have to understand the market at the security level, too; and that long-term performance is very strongly in favor of equities. So, at the time, pension funds, who were the main customers for Ibbotson Associates' work, had relatively little in equities, and one of our missions was to improve the returns of those funds and thus for the sponsors and the employees by holding more equities. This was in the early ‘80s. I was hired in 1979. So, you can see that was a good strategy. Benz: So, sticking with your background in your early career, you think young professionals should have a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts. Why is that? Siegel: Well, not every single one needs to, but the ones who are going to rise to the top in the business need a grounding in the common cultural heritage of the human race, and that's given by humanities and social sciences that the liberal arts broadly construed. Investors invest in businesses or governments, but mostly businesses, and businesses exist to serve the needs and wants of people, an ever-changing group of people around the world. So, without a deep understanding of human affairs—in other words, of the why of business—young investment professionals are likely to fall into some intellectual traps: short-termism, geographically narrow thinking, where you only think about your own country, and a bunch of other well-documented behavioral biases—you shouldn't do that. Ptak: Maybe a dumb question to follow up on that: Why doesn't the market do a better job of creating incentives to ensure that younger professionals—let's talk about those who are heading into finance and in investing in particular—that they have a liberal arts background and they're able to better avoid some of those traps? Why haven't those incentives really taken shape and why is it still so typical to see this procession of MBAs and people with the traditional finance background dominating finance and investing? Siegel: Well, if you're as old as me, I'm 68, you have observed that it used to. The market, when I was getting out of school, was in a very different position. There weren't many MBAs. It was an unpopular decision to go to business school. And most of the people who were accepted in business school had an Ivy Plus background where a liberal arts education is required in order to graduate. By Ivy Plus I mean the University of Chicago, Stanford, Northwestern, places like that, plus the Ivy League. So, this staffed the investment business with a fairly broadly educated group of people. What happened in the next 40 years is that business got too big. And the MBA programs mushroomed from a little specialty of a dozen or two dozen schools to something that everybody felt they had to get in order to get a job. So, it just became more of a trade school degree rather than an academic degree. And I'm sorry if I'm offending anybody here, but that's the way I see it. And the investment business became more of a trade. So, the market became less efficient, I think, because it just got so big that it had to pull in a lot of different people, including people who had specialized early because they wanted to be in finance because they were seeing people in finance made a lot of money. Benz: Speaking of specialization, do you think that the only way to truly specialize is to have had a generalist humanistic education first? In other words, are the most successful specialists people who trained as generalists first and is there any evidence for this? Siegel: I think there is among CEOs and maybe CIOs, chief investment officers. The greatest businesspeople in the world have generally had a pretty broad background and a lot of them started, the legend is in the mail room, but they may have started in engineering, accounting. They may have started in sales. Whatever they did, they found their way to the investment business through a kind of evolution over time. An organization needs foxes and hedgehogs. Isaiah Berlin, drawing on an ancient Greek story, said that there are two kinds of people of foxes who know a little about everything and hedgehogs who no one big thing. Einstein, for example, was a hedgehog. He really only cared about physics, and he was very productive. We would have a very different world without him. I am suggesting that you're better off looking for foxes, but you also want to have a few Einsteins in there, and an organization that consists entirely of foxes would be very unfocused and would be more like a college dorm than a business. Ptak: Wanted to shift and talk about something that seems like it's been an awfully short supply lately, which is optimism. You wrote a book called Fewer, Richer, Greener, evincing optimism about the global economy and humanity in general. Have you always been an optimistic person? Or has it gone back and forth or been situation dependent? Siegel:
