But What Have You Done For Me Lately?

I assume bloggers all over America are assimilating the NYT front pager on the super-rich (link). I admit I have only skimmed it; my guess is that there isn’t much here (except perhaps in the way of anecdote) that isn’t already in the public domain—and if there is, my aggregator will pick it up in the next 24 hours anyway.

I admit I was fascinated by that ribbon graphic (link; page 18-19 in my print edition) showing the 30 greatest (US) fortunes in constant dollars. I asked Mrs. Buce, no dummy, to guess how many of the 30 are alive today. She guessed “18.” The correct answer is “two,” but it was an unfair question: I was pretty sure she would overestimate, as, I am sure, would have I.

One thing that would be worth our time and energy would be to sift through this 30 and figure our how many “really earned” their money—really contributed something to society, made the world a better place. It’s an unendable quarrel, I know, because it involves so many many judgments—ethical, analytical, whatever—on issues about which we are certain never to reach a consensus.

Still, I’m struck by the fact that at least three (or four or five) seem to have made their money in “real estate,” i.e, sitting on dirt. I suppose that sitting on dirt is not actively evil in the sense of selling crack to schoolchildren. But in my youth, I let my mind get tainted by reading Henry George’s Progress and Poverty and I have never since been able to see sitting on dirt as any particular moral virtue. (the dirt-sitters: #3 Astor, #8 Weyerhauser, #10 Von Rensselaer—maybe also #11 Field and #18 Weightman). I feel somewhat the same about the two silver miners (#17 Fair, #30 Flood) although I know I would get a fusillade of contradiction from all those who will tell you how socially useful it is to encourage people to go scouring the ends of the earth for some unexploited research.

The banker-investors are a much more complicated story. I’ve always had a soft spot for J. P. Morgan (#24) who seems to have worked very hard at the job of mobilizing and allocating capital. I suspect I might feel somewhat the same way about the Mellons, Andrew (#14) and Richard (#15) if I knew more about them. I’ve got a lot less respect for Jay Gould (#9) and Russell Sage (#20) whose main contribution would seem to be the identifying and exploitation of gaps and traps in an immature capital market system. Ignorance makes me less clear what to do with others like Stephen Girard (#4) and Moses Taylor (#19)—shrewd financiers? Or lucky dirt-sitters?

I admit I have always been less than fully moved by two of the most visible names on the list, whose only significant skill seems to have been sitting athwart the floodgates of enterprise and exacting a toll. That would be the greatest American monopolist, John D. Rockefeller (#1) and his modern kid brother, Bill Gates (#5). Even though the quip doesn’t quite work, I’ve always responded to the guy who said that Gates’ real skill isn’t R&D, it’s M&A.

Perhaps both (but especially Gates) personalize an issue that runs through a lot of such discussions—the distinction between solving a human problem and marketing the solution. The difficulty here is, of course, that the marketing itself may be a creative solution (instance, #12 Henry Ford, or #13 Sam Walton).

But in any event, out of this whole list of 30, I can identify only one who can fairly claim to have actually invented the item he got rich off. That would be the former coffin maker George Pullman (#27), the inventor of the eponymous railroad sleeping car.