So I don’t judge Billy Ray Cyrus. He got his daughter involved in show business, and now blames the pressures of it for tearing his family apart. And yet, we all know families under stress where the only Disney involvement was a trip to Orlando.

The track record of child stars isn’t great. For every Neal Patrick Harris, Jody Foster, or Ron Howard who manages the transition to adulthood with grace, or at least enough dignity not to share all of their personal traumas with the world, we have the graves of Gary Coleman and Dana Plato to show just how ugly the results of early fame and bad management (often by parents) can be. Justin Timberlake appears in classy Oscar-nominated movies and makes light of himself on Saturday Night Live while his ex-girlfriend Britney Spears causes more train wrecks than the Troublesome Trucks on the Island of Sodor.

So here’s my quasi-judgmental MBA analysis: a family is supposed to be a hierarchy. It may be a steep matriarchy ruled by an iron hand, a la the Tiger Mother, or it may be a hippy commune where the parents serve as tie-breakers and little else. Still, someone is in charge. Someone sees to it that the light bill gets paid and that there is food on the table, no matter if the bill is paid through online auto-pay or a panicked trip to the Commonwealth Edison office; whether the food is nutritionally balanced and free of preservatives or a cold Pop-Tart.

And, in almost all families, the people who run things are grown-ups. They have the money: maybe a lot, maybe a little, but more than the kids have. Money is power.

For too many child stars, though, the hierarchy gets inverted. They become the source of financial support for their families, which gives them power they aren’t mature enough to handle. How can a parent set a curfew if the child can dock the parent’s allowance?

That’s what makes the Cyrus situation interesting. She wasn’t even named Miley when it all started. She was Destiny Hope Cyrus, and her father was the bigger star. Billy Ray wasn’t naive, either. He had some income from endless replays of Achy Breaky Heart at country and western nights all over this great land of ours, and his acting career wasn’t too shabby, either. He had a nice run as the star of Doc, which ran on the Pax network for four years, more than most aspiring actors enjoy. When Destiny got her TV show, Billy Ray got a job on it, too. He comes across as a man who saw performing as a family business, a la the Carters or the Winans, rather than as someone with a desperate personal or financial need to make his child a star.

Had Hanna Montana flopped, Billy Ray probably would have found another sitcom or movie of the week in need of his inoffensive country charm. He could have made a decent living on the summer state fair circuit, enough to keep everyone clothed and fed and living in Tennessee, if not Beverly Hills. Unlike Lynne Spears or Dina Lohan, he would have found a way to be in the spotlight on his own merit.

Billy Ray is now blaming the Disney machine for destroying his family. My guess is that he is premature; Miley Cyrus is not jumping into that handbasket to Hell, at least not yet. Drinking beer and covering Nirvana songs might offend the squeaky-clean Christianist contingent, but neither is especially wild and crazy behavior for an 18-year-old pop star. She’s not shoplifting (or at least not getting caught), nor is she marrying men she’s known for three weeks. So far, she shows more sense than fellow Disney alumnae Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, and for that, Billy Ray should be relieved.

Billy Ray Cyrus says that he tried to be a friend to Miley. The standard child-rearing advice says that you have to be a parent and not a friend, as hard as it is sometimes. Still, better for a parent to be a friend than an employee. Friends can gently keep each other on track, but an employee has to do whatever the boss wants.

Our freelance, indie, do-it-yourself culture has a few major drawbacks, among them a shortage of start-up capital. It is the Great Recession, after all. Banks are happy to take cheap capital from the Federal Reserve Bank, but they haven’t been excited about lending it out to customers. Musicians and writers used to be able to rely on record companies and publishers for advances, but those are smaller and harder for mere mortals to get than in times past. And, many bands have found to their chagrin that record companies offered the most expensive form of financing when all was said and done.

And yet, the books want to be written, the music wants to be played. And even if it wants to be free, there are costs involved. When the going gets tough, creative people get creative.

That leads me to the adventures of My First Earthquake,  a New Wave influenced pop band out of San Francisco. The quartet is raising money for its second full-length recording (and fourth recording overall) via Kickstarter.com, a site created for crowd sourcing the funding of all sorts of different projects, including art, fashion, and video games. People make their case for why they deserve money, and others agree to make donations. Any funds received are considered to be gifts, not investments; the site has some nice language about ownership, but really, if Kickstarter solicited investments, then it would have a whole level of securities regulation to deal with.

A few members of My First Earthquake have tech-industry day jobs, and they are in the techy heaven of San Francisco, so they received a beta invitation to participate on Kickstarter. Not only has it helped the band raise money, says Chad Thornton, the band’s co-founder and main songwriter, but it’s also helped them connect with listeners. “It’s fun to have an inner circle of fans who are a little more dedicated.” He says that about half of the funders are existing fans and the other half are people who found the group through Kickstarter.

My First Earthquake’s  goal for Kickstarter was to raise $5000; Thornton says that the cost of a cheap but good recording is between $5000 and $10,000. The group has already lined up Anthony Molina of Mercury Rev to produce, but it needs to fly him to SF. Donors are offered a range of swag and perks including song downloads and t-shirts in exchange for their largesse. (Give $1000, and My First Earthquake will even write a song for you.) At press time, the band had received $7050 from 168 backers. “I kind of wish we had set the goal a little higher,” Thornton says.

Are there fees? Of course there are fees. In addition to the costs of the merchandise, Kickstarter charges 5 percent of the revenue on a successful project, and the payment processor takes another 5 percent or so.

This is just one approach to an interesting problem. The traditional business structure of the music industry is going away, but the business aspect of it is not. If you are not raising money, it’s great fun to watch and see how other people do it. (If you are actually trying to raise money, well, it’s not so fun, is it?)

If you’d like to hear My First Earthquake, you can get  a free a download for their EP, Crush, on their web site. That is at least as much fun as reading about finance.

What I’ve noticed in recent trips to the library and the thrift shop is the opposite of the long tail: how long the big head sticks around with us. It’s almost uncomfortable, the shelves of U2 Achtung Baby CDs and the number of copies of The Celestine Prophecy and The Bridges of Madison County. Did that many people really like The Five People You Meet in Heaven? Or did they just receive it as a present from someone who had no idea what to get but felt obliged to send something.

What you see on the library shelves understates the problem. Many libraries rent their best-sellers; they subscribe to services that send them multiple copies to use to meet short-term demand. After that initial burst of enthusiasm for Going Rogue or The Audacity of Hope, the library just doesn’t need to have all those copies on the shelves. When the lease is over and interest has waned, these books end up being sold at bargain-basement prices to used bookstores, new libraries, and institutions. They don’t go away, even if you only see one copy at your local branch when there used to be 25.

This is the big head of distribution: the big best-sellers that captivate us for a while, then go away. No matter how long the tail is, our buying is led at the top.

Every year, Oxfam, the U.K. based charity that operates 686 thrift shops in that country, compiles an annual survey of both the most donated and the best-selling authors. Some of them are decidedly UK personalities, such as Jeremy Clarkson, who made both the 2010 most-donated and best-selling lists even though I have no idea who he is. But plenty of the ranking writers are global: Dan Brown, the author of the most donated in 2009 and 2010, is a global phenomenon.

People give stuff to thrift shops for all sorts of reasons. Our houses can only hold so much stuff! Nothing clears the brain like clearing out crowded shelves and cramped closets. The real measure of buyer’s remorse, then, isn’t in the donating; it’s in the repurchase. Do other people want your stuff? When they see it on the rack at the Goodwill, do they think “Score!” or “Yuck!”? Or are your cast-offs so pitiful that they are shipped off to poor people in developing countries or sent to be recycled into industrial rags or toilet paper?

The Oxfam survey has an interesting section part: the list of best-selling authors. Either everyone in England has already read The Da Vinci Code, or they cringe when they see a copy of it whether they have read it or not. The best-selling author in Oxfam’s used-book departments is Ian Rankin, a U.K. detective novelist.  Number two? Stieg Larsson, of the Lisbeth Salander series. Neither Rankin nor Larsson are among the ten most donated authors, so they are in high demand.  Are they less embarrassing to keep on the book shelf at home, or just more current than poor Dan Brown?

(Rankin, by the way, is incredibly gracious about his lost royalties. In the Oxfam press release, he said, “Just looking at the terrible scenes from Pakistan and West Africa on our TV screens at the moment it is clear how important the work of organizations like Oxfam is, and I’m really glad that my books are going some way to help this vital work.” How cool is that?)

Many things that are popular are popular for a reason; I’ve never had patience for the idea that just because a song is in the Top 10 or a book is on the New York Times bestseller list, it is automatically bad. Some popular stuff is good (the Beatles) and some is terrible (Miley Cyrus). Because we have used physical objects to transmit the ideas in books and music, we’ve been left with the discards that show us just how much or how little we were thinking once upon a time.

The shift to electronic media not only means that fewer CDs and paperbacks will end up in thrift shops, but it also means that we can forget about that crazy time when owning a Vanilla Ice CD seemed like a good idea.  I have the Stieg Larsson trilogy loaded on my Sony Reader; it can never be donated but it can be deleted.

Nothing makes clear the sorry state of civics education in the United States than all of the kerfuffle over mosques and Korans. Here’s all you need to know: If it is political or religious speech in a public forum, then it is protected.

Simple, yes? But everyone gets it mixed up. Sarah Palin defended Dr. Laura Schlesinger after her series of on-air racial slurs but “refudiated” both the construction of a mosque and the burning of the Koran. Of course, Schlesinger’s speech is not protected because it is on a commercial forum. CBS Radio is a commercial network that receives funding from commercial sponsors. Neither the network nor its sponsors are required to give Schlesinger a platform. However, she is allowed to organize her own network to say whatever the heck she wants to anyone who wants to listen. Marty Peretz can be as hateful as he wants in the magazine that he owns, but no one is obliged to subscribe.

Usually, I write about price in terms of dollars and cents. Money is the medium that makes trade happen, but not all prices are denominated in dollars. There are other costs of freedom, ranging from a soldier’s life to the irritation of seeing flags of an enemy force that attacked our government flying proudly from people’s houses and public buildings .

Everyone likes to talk about how soldiers sacrifice for our freedom, and they do, and I don’t want to ignore that. But they aren’t the only people who fight for our freedoms; the Department of Defense isn’t the ACLU with nukes. There are lawyers, teachers, bloggers, artists, and regular people out there every day reminding us that we have freedoms and that they are precious. Educating people about their freedoms and allowing them to express them is hard work.

Freedom isn’t free, as the bumper sticker says, and in many cases, the price is being offended. I think burning a Koran is disrespectful and hateful. I also think NNIN t-shirts are tacky, people who fly Confederate flags are pathetic, and Sarah Palin’s political commentary is irritating. But I also know that all of these people have a right to annoy, upset, and hurt me. I’d rather have that than a government telling people how to practice religion, what to wear in public, and not to talk about politics. It’s better to live in a state of annoyance at one’s fellow citizens than in a state of fear.

And, of course, another price of freedom is paid by the people who express their opinions. They are often may be criticized, not congratulated – and rightly so, no matter how much they whine that they were only exercising their right to free speech. The ongoing conversation makes us greater in the long run than if we just accepted what someone on any side of a debate said.

The Nazis had the right to march in Skokie, and instead of causing Jewish people in Chicago’s northern suburbs to cower in fear or move far away, the marchers instead became the butt of The Blues Brothers. University of Chicago professor Todd Henderson whined about how hard it is to get by on more than $250,000 in an expensive neighborhood with kids in private school, a nanny, and a yard service, and he’s become the joke of the Internet. (I’m torn between feeling sorry for him and wanting to sentence him to six months hard labor in a soup kitchen.) Dr. Schlesinger may have lost her show, but she didn’t get thrown in jail or permanently lose her livelihood for preaching hate. In some circles, her willingness to offend her fellow Americans only makes her more marketable.

So that’s my civics lecture for today. We can’t all get along, as much as it would be nice to. Instead, we have to let people do their talking.

But I will say this: Phair’s career shows what happens when an artist doesn’t have an editor. As a writer, I find that editors often make my crabby. But most of the editors I’ve worked with have made my work a lot better. They save me from stupid mistakes, suggest words and phrases that make a story stronger, and point me in directions that I had overlooked.

Liz Phair has been working more or less alone for years, without a regular band or consistent record label. She thinks “Bollywood” is a great song, and she won’t listen to those who tell her otherwise. She doesn’t need to convince anyone but the buyers. Phair does not have to worry about manufacturing, distribution, and publicity, because she can do it all by herself on the Internet. I’d like to think that a long-time collaborator would have told Liz Phair that maybe Bollywood should be saved for a some sort of mega boxed-set of rarities and demos to be released only after she’s had a long career as an influential chart topper, a la Miles Davis. But it does not matter what I think, except that I’m not buying her download.

Music has been on the front lines of the media industry’s changes, mostly because it was distributed in manageable electronic formats before other genres of work were. Recording artists have been coming to grips with who adds value to their careers (bookers at influential clubs) and who doesn’t (record stores).

I’m a lot more familiar with book publishing than with music recording, having done six books now under my name and as a ghostwriter. (Number seven is underway, which is why I haven’t been posting regularly.) The books under my name are for Wiley’s  . . .  For Dummies series, and people buy those books for the brand and not the author. With the ghostwritten books, though, I have a harder time determining what value the publishers have added. The editors have been great, but then what about all of the rest of the people who take a big cut of the profits?  (Authors generally receive about 10 to 20% of the cover price of a book, and they have to split that with their agents.)

Self-publishing isn’t a new business, but it’s been a scruffy sector because so many self-published books are dreck. For that matter, many books by traditional publishers are terrible, too; a system of agents, acquisition editors, development editors, and bookstore purchasing managers hasn’t kept trash out of the system. But if everyone goes to self-publishing, what happens?

Here’s the reality: almost every adult in America can read and write. Hence, they all think they can write a book. Musical education is not nearly as widespread; few people can play an instrument, and even fewer can read and write music. That alone serves as a quality filter. Then, consider that music is collaborative while writing is solitary. Most musicians play with others who can give them feedback or suggest ways of doing things better. Most writers work alone, which makes them a bit weird after a while. And it means that they don’t get feedback in the course of their work. Some writers belong to critique groups or have agents who give them advice, but not all of them do. I’m pretty good at editing my own work, and yet, I’ve often been appalled at some of the mistakes I’ve made that were caught by an editor.

Self-publishing would allow many authors to make a lot more money. But it won’t shift power from bookstores or publishing companies to authors. Instead, it will shift the power to those who are willing to critique and evaluate the work. That’s the only way buyers will know who deserves their $9.95 and who does not.

The Chicago Blackhawks are one of the great sports turnaround stories. Yeah, they won the Stanley Cup, and we’re all happy about that here in Chicago, but the big story is how the team went from almost no fan base to a huge one. I was at the home opener in 2006 as a guest of the team’s old ad agency. There was hardly anyone at the United Center that evening. Three years later, the Hawks sold out every game.

What changed? It wasn’t just a winning team, as loyal fans will come out to see a team lose. Chicagoans are not fair-weather fans. The problem is that Bill Wirtz, the owner of the team, believed that his target customer was the season-ticket holder. He did not allow home games to be broadcast, because then why would people buy season tickets? (Eventually, the ratings were so low on the away games that the stations dropped the Hawks entirely.) He did not run many single-ticket discounts, because that would insult the season-ticket holder who had paid full price. If the stadium was empty except for a handful of season-ticket holders and a group paid for by the team’s ad agency, well, so be it.

His short-sightedness was especially glaring given the change in media. There are about six million people in the Chicago area, and the United Center seats about 20,000. Even if every seat was held by a season-ticket holder, it would seem possible that there were more than 20,000 potential hockey fans in Chicago who might watch games on TV and buy throwback Bobby Hull sweaters. In sports, you can make a lot of money from people who never once go to the stadium. Your target market is huge!

Businesses need to know their target customers, obviously, but some define that too narrowly. I try to shop at locally owned businesses, but I’ve had terrible service at some of them. I think that the owners have a clear idea of who their target customer is, and they aren’t prepared to deal with someone who doesn’t fit. Jack Black’s character in High Fidelity is a perfect example of someone whose taste interferes with his ability to make a living.  But are there enough connoisseurs out there to support any business? I have often had better service at chain stores than at independent stores simply because a mass retailer strategy acknowledges that anyone walking in the door is a potential customer, no matter how badly dressed or how interested in top-ten hits.

And trust me, I want to love small businesses. My family eats at the same local restaurant almost every Friday night because the food is good and the service is better. And I can name some restaurants that I will never enter again because the staff pulled a lot of attitude. (Of course, I find that these places do not stay in business long.)

For all of the mixed emotions that Cubs fans have for the Tribune Company era, Tribune realized that Chicago Cubs games would fill airtime on WGN, both the local television and radio stations and the cable superstation. Farmers in Iowa could listen to games from the cabs of their combines while retirees in Florida could watch games on TV. Both would spend money on ball caps even if they never bought a ticket at Wrigley Field. And even if they did not have season tickets, they would still be welcome in the stands – especially if they bought beer and scorecards.

The Blackhawks lost fans during the Bill Wirtz era. No one fell in love with the team enough to buy their first season ticket package, and a lot of old fans became disgusted and let their subscriptions lapse. No one followed the team on television and took their kids to the stadium on a bargain ticket day. The Hawks played to an empty arena, which had to be depressing for the players.

Bill Wirtz died, and his son took over. Almost immediately, he started advertising, looked for a television partner, and held some promo nights. And almost immediately, the Hawks became part of the city again.

And no, the Wirtz family didn’t sell out. They brought in good coaches and scouts to pull together a great team. The team is popular with the masses, but that doesn’t make it bad. The lesson? You can care about what you do and have high standards without alienating people who have less passion.

Parenthood changes many people for the better. It makes them more responsible and more mature, gives them a sense of perspective, and gets them engaged in their communities in new ways. Parenthood does not change everyone for the better, though, and many people who change for the better over time manage to do it without procreating. Here’s the reality:  there are 6.7 billion people in the world. With no offense intended to those who have struggled with infertility, becoming a parent is pretty easy. Put a penis in a vagina, and nine months later, you have a baby! It’s much easier than going to college, holding down a job, or training for a 5K race.

Why, many men become parents and don’t even know it, the whole thing is so easy.

Parenthood isn’t a special credential that shows that people have secret superpowers that make them better at whatever it they want to do. The U.S. Census department reports that 68.7 million children under age 18 live with a mother. That’s 92.6 percent of all children, so it doesn’t seem like mothers are exactly rare, either.

The latest person to use “Mom” as a job qualification is Sarah Palin. She has a spiffy new video out claiming that “Moms just know when something’s wrong.” I can’t stand Sarah Palin, but I don’t think it’s wise for her or any other candidate to put “Mom” on a resume. That’s because then you can be judged on your performance as a parent, which I’m not sure is fair to parent or child. How can I trust that Sarah Palin’s Amazing Mama Grizzly are strong enough to navigate difficult economic and foreign policy issues if she did not “just know” that something was wrong with her children’s behavior?

The mere fact that therapists have such a good gig shows that mothers and fathers, or Moms and Dads, or Mama and Papas, don’t always “just know” when something is wrong (and not all of those who “just know” “just care”).

The underlying sexism bothers me, too. To my knowledge, no one ever talks about the special insights of fatherhood. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee have children, why don’t they ever talk about the things they can do better than other because they are dads? I haven’t seen Bobby Jindal saying that being a dad makes it easier for him to negotiate with BP. Women with children who start businesses are called Mompreneurs; does that make Steve Jobs a Dadpreneur? Women should be talked about on equal terms as men, and that means we need to do away with cutesy nicknames.

I don’t think that Rod and Patti Blagojevich kept careful track of their spending, but the IRS audited them in order to help establish a motive for Rod’s alleged crimes as governor of Illinois, specifically trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat. The idea was to head off a defense that would argue that the governor really didn’t make that much money, not with his legal bills and a mortgage in a nice Chicago neighborhood. Unfortunately for the defense, the audit showed that Mr. and Mrs. B spent $400,000 on clothes over seven years, more than they spent on house payments and private-school tuition.  That works out to $57,000 per year.

The Illinois governor receives a base salary of $150,700 per year, and the job comes with free housing and transportation. Not bad, especially when you consider that the median household income in Illinois is $56,230 – less than the Blagojevich clothing budget.  But it’s also not that much, especially because the Blagojeviches never moved to Springfield. They live in an affluent but unassuming neighborhood, filled with professionals who shun ostentation but still want to live in a nice house. Their daughters’ school is the type of private school popular with people who don’t trust the Chicago Public Schools but aren’t looking to show off or groom their offspring for boarding school. In other words, they had a lifestyle that should have been affordable but not cushy at $150,700 per year.

In this prolonged recession, a lot of people with income similar to the Illinois governor’s feel the pain of paying for their mortgages and their children’s education. They certainly aren’t poor, but they aren’t rich enough to buy everything they want. Wouldn’t everyone like a raise? Families in similar straits to the Blagojeviches are coping by making do with an old suit, buying new clothes on sale, and avoiding the types of complex legal problems that lead to keeping high-priced defense attorneys on retainer.  And, most of them have the perspective to know that they are better off than most people.

Money should be nothing but a tool – a darned important tool, but nothing more. Instead of using it to buy the things they need, too many use it to exercise power or ease various psychic pains. I’m certainly guilty of indulging in a little retail therapy now and again, but it tends to involve the Boden season clearance catalogue more than a trip to Saks Fifth Avenue, and my child has a college fund. It may not be enough to cover all the costs when his matriculation rolls around, but I’m not in so much panic that I would try to break several state and federal laws in order to try to get money for college and a fancy wardrobe.

The big differences between the finance gurus are in their personalities and approaches. Suze Orman, Oprah Winfrey’s goddess of money, talks about money as a psychologist would, encouraging people to honor their wealth and respect their cash. I would love to see Suze Orman meet with the Blagojeviches and figure out the pain that caused them to overspend and the tragedy that it led to. Unfortunately, the Blagojeviches weren’t content damaging their own family — they have also damaged the state of Illinois.

I was a happy Washington Mutual customer for years, both in San Francisco and Chicago. The people who worked in the branches were really nice and efficient, and their service charges were the lowest around. I was sad when the bank failed, although I was thrilled that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation existed so that the bank’s failure wasn’t a hardship for me.

But the Feds never like bailing out banks, even though they have done it quite a bit in the last few years. Hence, a bank bailout is followed by lots of subpoenas and hearings, and that is why we now know: Karen and the Kauai Krewe like big bucks and they cannot lie.

Yes, her homegirls tried to warn her that rapping big bucks make her look corny. But she did it anyway, and now it is entered into the public record. Billy Bragg could not have skewered the banking business better.

Karen and her Krewe were attending Washington Mutual’s sales meeting in Hawaii, an incentive for its top performers. Of course, we now know that they brought in such big revenues because many of the mortgages were bad. The players who liked to make big bucks probably knew that a lot of the mortgages were bad when they made them. So why did they? Well, they gotta have that big new Benz. They were paid to write mortgages, not to write good ones.

And they were not paid to write good songs, either.

Corporate types always like to fancy themselves are rock-and-roll rebels. The problem is when they make enough money to start living out the fantasy. A friend of mine who was a successful mutual fund manager for many years always said that the time to sell a stock was when the CEO got a new wife, a new airplane, or a new headquarters. I’d add “formed a vanity rock band” to the list.

The rock-star-wannabe CEO is not interested in schlepping gear in a van and driving among eight mid-sized towns in the Midwest, crashing on the couches of relative strangers and strange relatives, in the hopes of hitting it big. No, he did his own schlepping through business school and up the corporate ranks, and now he wants the champagne and the chicks that go with being a rock star. Richard Scrushy, the CEO of HealthSouth Corporation who was charged with a wide range of fraud-related crimes and eventually found guilty of bribery, was in two bands: a rock band called Proxy and a country band called Dallas County Line. Scrushy also had a few ex-wives and an airplane or two to warn investors long before the Feds arrived.

Goldman Sachs is probably too tony to have a bad song lurking in its past, but we won’t know that until discovery in its fraud suit is completed. But good luck trying to hide it. KPMG commissioned a soaring anthem about its vision of global strategy back in the dot com bubble days. It quickly became an Internet joke, so the company sued arguing that website addresses were protected by copyright and could only be linked to with permission. And they lost.

Bad corporate rock is not a new phenomenon. A friend tells me that when he was at his fancy Ivy League college in the mid-1980s, Drexel Burnham Lambert (of junk bond and insider trade fame) came to campus to recruit some fancy Ivy League graduates. My friend swears that he attended a presentation that had a video with a soundtrack by Jefferson Starship, or Starship, or Tap, in which they sang “We Built This City on High Yield Bonds.” I have never been able to find that song or even a corroborating witness, but I am looking.

As strange as the Polish plane crash was, an accident that wipes out a layer of executive power had been imagined before. Plane crashes that kill high-ranking government officials have happened, too, such as the one that killed Commerce Secretary Ron Brown in Croatia in 1996. That’s why these events are risky, not uncertain.

Mathematically, there is a difference between risk and uncertainty, and it matters. Risk is an adverse event that you can quantify. One out of every two million people will die in a plane crash every year, or 1.9 deaths for every 100 million miles flown.  So there’s risk, and we all share in it.

Uncertainty reflects things that might happen but that we have no way of quantifying, such as aliens invading from outer space. If you look through the fine print of your car or homeowner’s insurance, you’ll find a list of excluded events such as war and civil insurrection that veer close to uncertain territory. The line between risk and uncertainty gets really blurry at the far end of the list of all the things that could possibly happen. For example, is the U.S. really likely to have a civil war once every 46 years? We waged a civil war for four of our 234 years as a nation, so maybe we are overdue. Or maybe the risk of civil war is so far out that it’s really uncertain.

Once you have a calculated level of risk, you can include it in the price. If you have bad credit, you will pay a higher interest rate because the lender is taking on the risk that you won’t repay. This is true if you are a musician with too much credit card debt or the government of Greece. This week, for example, the Greek government issued 12-month bonds at an interest rate of 4.58%. Back in the United States, a 12-month Treasury security has a rate of 0.854%. We have nuclear bonds, and we have the ability to print money. Greece has neither of those, so it has to pay more to borrow.

Some countries have very different risks than others, but every country has the risk of its leader dying in a plane crash. I would imagine that Air Force One has greater safety features than a 20-year-old Russian-made plane, and I would imagine that the pilots for it are among the Air Force’s best, but stuff happens and planes crash sometimes.

Europe is in a state of uncertainty right now, so Poland’s sorrow adds to the stresses on the continent. A unified currency is a new experiment in the world, and we don’t know how it will work out. The Euro zone, which is those nations that use the euro, agreed to a €30 billion bailout of Greece last week. Poland is not on the euro yet, so it is not participating in the bailout. The plane crash and the Greek crash may delay Poland’s currency conversion, but if the euro is still around in a few years, then Poland will be on it.

The America that Irving Wallace imagined survived its black president; in fact, Fictional America accepted a dark-skinned person in higher office long before the real America did. I suspect that Poland will survive, too. Its risk hasn’t changed because the risk of losing so many of its leaders was always there.