Thinkers and doers.

Thinkers and doers.

Businessmen have a different set of delusions from politicians; and need, therefore, different handling. They are, however, much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be "patriots", perplexed, bemused, indeed terrified, yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. You could do anything you liked with them, if you would treat them (even the big ones) not as wolves and tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish. It is a mistake to think that they are more immoral than politicians. If you work them into the surly, obstinate, terrified mood, of which domestic animals, wrongly handled, are so capable, the nation's burdens will not get carried to markets, and in the end public opinion will veer their way.

John Maynard Keynes

No, I didn't pull this off a blog. If nothing else, the cultured, grammatical language should be a tip-off. Besides, you already know that Keynes, the most famous economist of his day, died in 1946 and therefore was spared the sight of seeing the most famous economist of our day get away with likening the real estate community to the Ku Klux Klan without knowing a hill of beans about either (but it did sell lots of copies of Freakonomics).

But I digress. No, Keynes gave us this insight back in 19-and-38 to explain why Franklin Roosevelt's fondness for using the business community as a political punching bag just to pick up a few yahoo votes might hinder the all-important task of rebuilding business confidence, badly battered by eight years of depression and lots of talk along the lines of "maybe communism is the answer". More relevant to today's topic is that his comments are a revealing (perhaps unintentionally so) analysis of businesspersons (including, by extension, real estate agents), also known as "doers", by one of the most famous of economists, a group also known as "thinkers", aka "pointy-headed elitists". But on balance it's a surprisingly sympathetic and knowledgeable analysis of doers by a thinker, at least by thinker standards. It may also have a message for today.

I'll admit that my knowledge of doers and thinkers is confined to real estate; we're all specialists these days. Some of the sayings common among agents—"paralysis of analysis", "keep throwing it against the wall until it sticks"—suggest a preference for manly action over lonely introspection. And, in fact, you really do want your agent to be a go-getter. You really don't want your agent paralyzed by self-doubt and lack of purpose, soliloquizing Hamlet-like—"Should I go look at houses for my clients today? Oh, what's the point? What's my purpose? Why am I here???"—while the marketplace gallops past.

Not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with thinking. It's kind of like physical exercise: I do it myself, sometimes, and keep meaning to do more of it. I only wish that the people who sit around doing most of the thinking about real estate were equipped for the job, not just by nature but by experience. And here, in a triumph of paradox and mixed metaphors, we've collided with a roadblock to the thinker's understanding of real estate that you could drive a truck through. Because the only way that thinking about real estate and explaining it to the public is going to put food on the table is if you toil each day, no, not in the real estate marketplace—right idea, wrong answer for this imperfect world—but in the community of ideas, also known as academia, aka the ivory tower.

Of course, the publish-or-perish imperative suggests that even academia expects a certain amount of doer-ly activity from its real estate thinkers, or at least doer-ness of a thinkerly sort. But I happen to think that you get your real estate insights the old-fashioned way: you earn them. Not by dipping your toe in the cold waters of the marketplace but by diving head-first, so that the deep-running currents can be felt, not just fantasized.

Which, I suspect, is how Keynes picked up his insights into the psychology of the business community. Sure, Maynard was a tenured professor at England's leading school of economics, and a gen-u-ine intellectual, Eton- and Cambridge-educated. But he also walked on the wild side, both personally and intellectually, and he excelled in the world of business.

In fact, Maynard may represent the best of both worlds, or at least the optimal blending of both worlds, or maybe as good a blending as you'll get. Thinker and doer, man of ideas and man of practical experience, outspoken rebel yet consummate insider, man of conscience yet man of the world. A man who was what so many these days, read and worshipped by so many, claim to be.

And one heck of a wordsmith.