The Other Set Of Parents

Yesterday we took a closer look at Caroline Ellison's parents, both faculty members at elite-university MIT. This link provides an introduction to Sam Bankman-Fried's parents; in an odd mirror-image reflection, both are husband-and-wife faculty members at elite Stanford Law School, ranked Number 2 on the US News list, although Stanford recently withdrew from the US News rankings. Both of Sam's parents, Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, hold endowed chairs at Stanford Law, which places them somewhat higher in David Brooks's new meritocratic American upper class than even the Ellisons, of whom only one holds an endowed chair.

This places the family income, I would imagine, at something well north of $250,000 per year. This would be consistent with the private school to which they sent Sam befoere he went to MIT, the main building of which is shown in the photo at the top of this post. According to the first link,

[H]e attended local elite private school Crystal Springs Uplands School in the equally tony Bay Area suburb of Hillsborough and where tuition now costs $56,620 a year. At the school, Bankman-Fried won physics awards, but “kept to himself, spending most of his free time playing computer games (StarCraft, League of Legends) and a trading card game, Magic: The Gathering, according to a glowing, now-deleted profile of him on an investor website.

If he won physics awards in secondary school and went on to MIT as an undergraduate, especially given his backgound and putative talents, wouldn't we expect him to transition into a prestigious physics PhD program, if not at MIT itself, then at, say, Cal Tech or Berkeley? In fact, wouldn't he have been Nobel material? But he didn't, and he wasn't. That's a big dog that simply isn't barking here, just like the dog that didn't bark over Caroline Ellison. Both had parents who were in positions to foster major academic careers for their children after undergraduate degrees at prestige schools, and it simply didn't happen.

I used to look up the ratings for my former graduate school classmates at ratemyprofessors.com, but eventually I got out of the habit. This scandal has brought me back to that amusing exercise, especially when I found that Caroline Ellison's mother was rated "awful". (I dated a classmate who later got the same rating, too. In hindsight, I could see how.) However, like Glenn Ellison, neither Barbara Fried nor Joseph Bankman is listed on ratemyprofessors.com at all.

I can think of two explanations. One would be that law students, like graduate students at MIT, are primarily playing the game, and there's just no point in annoying a powerful professor whose recommendations can make or break a career, who doesn't need the rating and would not be moved by it. The other, equally credible to me, is that the professor is so powerful he can simply get his name removed from the app.

Nevertheles, the first link above does carry informal accounts of Bankman and Fried as professors:

Bankman-Fried’s parents are highly regarded professors at Stanford Law School. Joseph Bankman is a leading scholar in tax law and Barbara Fried is an award-winning teacher who specializes in moral philosophy and the law.

So Sam's mother specializes in moral philosophy? It brings to mind a remark by a priest who said that he had an erudite professor in seminary who, however, was Jewish. Nobody was more familiar with the writings of St Paul, except that the priest one day suddenly realized the professor didn't actually believe a word of them. Interestingly, the article links to a quote from Barbara Fried herself on Sam's moral development, written before the current scandal:

[My sons Sam and Gabe} have shown me by example the nobility of the ethical principle at the heart of utilitarianism: a commitment to the wellbeing of all people, and to counting each person — alive now or in the future, halfway around the world or next door, known or unknown to us — as one.

As far as I can tell, if Sam saw each person as one, he saw them all as one big sucker. The first link above also characterizes Sam's father, Joseph:

“Joe Bankman is sensitive and extremely soft-spoken,” one of the former students said. “Both of [Sam’s] parents were very quintessentially open-minded professor types, more than Socratic types. They seem like really supportive people.”

Bankman was also interested in helping the world, and he was a staunch believer in utilitarianism, the doctrine that the most ethical thing is to work on maximizing happiness for the greatest number of people. He passed this belief onto his son, who became a major proponent through the effective altruism movement.

This is illustrated most clearly by the Bankman-Frieds' effective altruistic participation in Sam's investment schemes:

Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX, his parents and senior executives of the failed cryptocurrency exchange bought at least 19 properties worth nearly $121 million in the Bahamas over the past two years, official property records show.

. . . The documents for another home with beach access in Old Fort Bay -- a gated community that was once home to a British colonial fort built in the 1700s to protect against pirates -- show Bankman-Fried's parents, Stanford University law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, as signatories. The property, one of the documents dated June 15 said, is for use as a "vacation home."

When asked by Reuters why the couple decided to buy a vacation home in the Bahamas and how it was paid for -- whether in cash, with a mortgage or by a third party such as FTX -- a spokesman for the professors said only that Bankman and Fried had been trying to return the property to FTX.

"Since before the bankruptcy proceedings, Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried have been seeking to return the deed to the company and are awaiting further instructions," the spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.

Well, the lawsuits have begun, and they're only likely to get worse. Speaking only as a lay observer, I've got to think the Bankman-Frieds, eminent law professors both (and indeed authorities in moral philosophy) face civil liability in clawbacks of investor assets, for instance in their multimillion-dollar property they secured via FTX and Sam, as well as the potential for criminal conspiracy charges, depending on what they knew of Sam's whole frammis.

Even leaving civil or criminal penalties aside, I can see the potential for legal fees alone wiping out their net worth. Some lawyers, huh? But this is David Brooks's new meritocratic American upper class.