“The absence of standards is the social equivalent of the absence of an acknowledged fair price for a good in the marketplace. At best, it leads to haggling; at worst, to market failure.”
– Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of Moneyball and The Blind Side, in Home Game, his new book released this week. Tonight, Meredith Whitney, the bank-industry analyst who appeared on the cover of Fortune last August, interviewed Lewis at her new Manhattan office.
“An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood”–Home Game‘s subtitle–isn’t typical material for Lewis, who launched his career and his fame on Wall Street when he wrote Liar’s Poker 20 years ago. But as he’s done with his subsequent writing about business and sports, he finds similarities and absurdities in the worlds he explores. And now he does this too as he writes about his own parenting adventures.
The parenting “market,” Lewis notes, is dictated by “an unsettling absence of universal, or even local standards of behavior.” So he, a father of three, and most other dads are winging it, hoping that their children turn out well.
Tonight, Lewis’ three-year-old daughter, Dixie, adorably roamed the new digs while Wall Street bigwigs (who shall go unnamed since this was an off the record affair) milled about. Whitney’s sleek new space, by the way, used to belong to the New York Jets. So one informed guest told me. Talk about business and sports intersecting! Nice to see the office now in the hands of a Fortune Most Powerful Woman.