A few weeks ago I decided to set aside an afternoon to reorganize my office. Well, to be honest, it wasn't a whole afternoon. And, I guess "reorganize" is a bit too strong of a characterization. In fact, it wasn't actually an advance decision. Okay. In the interest of "full disclosure," I slipped on a pile of manila folders that I put on the floor several months ago. Then I moved them to the last remaining 100-square-inch, non-- carpeted, upward-facing surface in my office. But that's not the point.

The point is that, feeling somewhat compelled to look inside the folders, I found something that caught my attention. It was a yellowed Wall Street Journal article, written by someone named Jill Bettner and dated May 4, 1981. At that time I was a young assistant professor, and the ink on my doctoral diploma was barely dry, which meant that I knew everything about theory and nothing about the real world. To broaden my knowledge base, I became an inveterate article saver, although I confess that I don't look in my files to review the articles very often.

Anyway, the opening paragraph of the article was this: "Where can you get one of the highest tax-deferred-or tax-free-- yields on your savings? Try life insurance." The author proceeded to discuss "two products that truly advance the state of the art" and were "real breakthroughs for consumers." They were called-and hold onto your hats-universal life and variable life. Yes, Virginia, there really was a time when these two staples were exciting new products.

The article provided a handy illustration of a universal life policy offered by Life of Virginia at that time. The rate of interest applied in the illustration was 10.88 percent. That's right-10.88 percent. How'd you like to have some of that? And the grizzled life insurance veterans among us will recall that that wasn't even the peak.