The Wisdom of Finance it seems is a primer on the moral hazards undergraduate and more so graduate business students can expect to find once they leave the academy and join Wall Street.

Author Mihir A. Desai employs literature to explain how the principles of business and high finance inform universal human challenges not only in business, but in life.

As a graduate of English Lit and later an MBA, I was a sucker for this kind of book. Indeed, I enjoyed it, if I didn’t think all of the chapters were equally strong, or the morals all that intimidating.

It is substantively a book of moral philosophy.

I ran into my own moral philosopher in business school, the noted Canadian accounting professor Al Rosen, the sort of guy you either loved, or loved to hate. The guy who failed an entire accounting class, but then had to walk it back after the students complained.

What Prof. Rosen taught me — and our relationship wasn’t the easiest — was that numbers masked lies as often as they told the truth, perhaps moreso. And the reason he taught this to his accounting students was that the evolution of accounting was the evolution of storytelling.

If you look at a balance sheet or a profit and loss statement, you were purportedly looking at the viability of a business in a moment of time and that the conventions of accounting storytelling, like “accounts receivable” and “accounts payable” not to mention “fixed assets” were to tell you the value in real time of a business even though none of those values could possibly be right.

The numbers were usually created to pacify the reader, to keep the reader from looking behind the numbers at the underlying value of the business, and the lying liers who wanted you to accept them as truth...usually management. Rosen’s point wasn’t that the numbers were always meant to to disguise malfeasance, just that the nature of the process of storytelling required simplification and gross generalization.

Desai gets at some of this in his chapter about the problem of agency, whether managers are really working for shareholders, or customers, or their employees, or just themselves. This is not necessarily a problem of finance. It is as much a problem of commerce and social psychology.

Economic behaviouralists like Daniel Kahneman, psychologist Dan Ariely, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein get into how the mind actually works when people are given moral choices disguised as financial options.

Another book I read recently, “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much,” by Sandhills Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, shows how perceived scarcity can ruin or enhance our decision making, depending on the circumstances.

But today I am dealing with the moral quandary of what to do in a pandemic that will accord with my personal ethics, and the dictates of business. How much loyalty as a businessman I owe to my employees vs my family and their sacrifices on the road to building a viable business.

if I close up my shops and lay people off am I protecting my employees or letting them down and dumping their personal needs on to society. The customers seem to need our goods and services, and the gov’t has classified my business as essential to the economy...so we stay open to the extent that my employees will come in to work.

In other crisis I have simply met the challenges head on and worked harder. In this crisis I have to change directions fast and, because I am at a high risk of infection, have to stay out of my stores for mine and my family’s safety.

There are my obligations to landlords, to suppliers, to the financial institutions, the utilities, and to govt.

These are not easy questions either. And literature, while a nice diversion, doesn’t really help me all that much.