Equality vs. efficiency.

Twenty years ago, I was hunkered down in a classroom at Columbia University, surrounded by a half-hundred wannabe moguls intent on earning their Ivy League MBAs from the Graduate School of Business. I, on the other hand, was hiding out.

I had fled Winston-Salem, where I had been involved in an aborted effort to unionize the newsroom at the paper I worked for. My ticket to New York had been a Walter Bagehot (now Knight-Bagehot) Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism. I took perverse pride in the fact that my sojourn was underwritten by major corporations -- the anarcho-syndicalist asp cradled in the bosom of capitalism.

Of course, that kind of pudd'nhead logic, heavy on the romance without any leavening of reality, is the stuff of youth. But since I had already turned 30, I can't claim that excuse. I was never a threat to the paper -- which quite frankly didn't give a damn that I had left or, for that matter, might return from my leave of absence to cause more mischief -- much less to the free-enterprise system. But this, I knew, was a perfect opportunity to understand how the other side of the class struggle thought.

That, after a year of B-school, I went to work in management, in whose ranks I've remained (even becoming -- gasp -- an owner), doesn't mean I underwent any kind of conversion: Upper Broadway is not the Damascus road. But, as education is wont to do, the experience opened my eyes to things I had been blind to.

I recall one class -- Conceptual Foundations of Business, I believe it was called -- in which we discussed the dilemma of liberal capitalism: how to balance efficiency -- the raw, naked power exerted by market forces -- with equality -- the belief that everyone shares access, if not to the wealth the system produces, to the opportunities its provides.

As I've grown older, I've learned to put my faith in market forces. But I've never forgotten the terrible price their efficiencies can exact from human beings. Take, for example, First Union Corp., whose chief executive is our Mover and Shaker of the Year (see page 20). Thousands lost their jobs as it merged and purged itself into one of the nation's mightiest financial institutions. When its performance faltered, the market punished its stock, which plummeted, losing investors many millions of dollars.

But that, too, the market will take care of. The bank has stumbled, not fallen, and already has taken steps to correct its course. That will lead to the stock price regaining what it has lost, or the company will fall prey to a predator who will pay a premium to acquire it. If the latter happens, the real losers will be Charlotte and the state, both of which have benefited greatly from its presence and the fact that the bank, despite its reach, chooses to call this its home.

Perhaps because I'm a First Union customer and not an investor, I can afford to be generous. But I know business teaches hard lessons, and I didn't have to go to graduate school to learn these: Reward doesn't come without risk. And no pain, no gain.

David Kinney