I’m occasionally described as an “entrepreneurial risk taker” because I left my fancy job in journalism to start Beliefnet in 1999. Though I love the sound of it, I’ve never felt it was really accurate. The reason: I always knew that if I crashed and burned, I would be fine. My parents have enough saved to help us through rough patches. I had a degree from a good college, some rarefied skills and friends in high places. If I lost my job, it would be challenging, not catastrophic.
I was reminded of this by two articles I read recently. The first was a Minneapolis Star Tribune interview with an anthropologist who spent a year studying investment bankers as if they were Javanese fishermen. Karen Ho of the University of Minnesota reported that “investment bankers have tons of job insecurity” but it’s of a special sort:

“Because of their fancy elite and kind of privileged networks they move in, as well as their lavish compensation, the way they experience downsizing is very different from that of the average worker…They cultivate a culture of liquidity, of continual restructuring and downsizing that they understand from their particular cultural point of view and privileged location as a productive challenge, as a building of character, precisely because their cushion is so thick.”

The problem is, these investment bankers, lacking understanding of what risk-taking or job-churning means to people without the same network and savings, recommend “this kind of churning for other workers who have very different experiences.”
In other words, risk takers who bear no real risk recommended economic changes that increase the risk for people without thick cushions.
In a recent issue of Time, David Von Drehele traces the story of Joseph Zachery, a veteran firefighter in Kansas City, Missouri, who earned $60,000 and had a $100,000 home. To help support an aging mother and a son in college, Mr. Zackery decided to create his own business demolishing vacant homes. He used a portion of the equity to buy machinery for his new business. That raised his mortgage to $188,101, or $1,647 monthly, an amount he expected to be able to cover with revenue from the new business.
Then on July 13, 2007, when he was working in the hazardous chemicals unit, he got a call that there was a chemical spill at a local hospital. En route to the scene, his car collided into a trash truck.
His injuries and its treatment – including electroshock that left him unable to remember his neighborhood – sentenced him to spending most of his time shuttling from doctor to doctor instead of demolishing homes. The bank is now moving to foreclose on Mr. Zachery’s mortgage and kick him out of his house. He’s looking at declaring personal bankruptcy.
What Mr. Zachery did was not greedy over-extension, it was taking a slight risk to build a business. He didn’t realize that he was in what Time called, a “one strike and you’re out” economy.
People sometimes ask, what’s the role of houses of worship in a time like this? Usually the answer is to help people deal with their struggles, providing hope and even financial help. Very true. But I think there’s another role: helping people not so much pity or love their neighbors but to truly understand them. This will invariably lead to a deeper understanding of the phrase “there but for the Grace of God go I.”
First printed on WSJ.com