TigerHawk is proud of making money; Andrew Sullivan ( but see update below) suggests he should be ashamed.
But it’s more complicated than that. It’s too simple to treat money as a source of praise or blame, because there are too many reasons for making money, or keeping it. Here’s a catalog, incomplete, of categories, overlapping and nonexclusive, of motivations for wealth:
Vainglory: think Rameses II, or Donald Trump. Some people just like to call attention to themselves. The Greeks were big on vainglory; they even used it as a means of taxation—get rich people to sponsor a festival or a trireme to show just how rich they were.
Vainglory may look like, but is not quite the same as
Competition: getting money is a visibile sign you’ve won a race. The trouble with competition as a reason for making money is that it never ends. There are some people who will never be satisfied with a $60,000 Mercedes if their neighbor’s Mercedes cost $100,000. So also a competitive CEO who makes $5 million a year, will go to sleep weepy if his neighbor makes $5 million and one.
At any rate, competition and vainglory both should be distinguished from
The desire to consume. “Lawyers,” they used to say, “live well, and die poor.” Point taken: I have known a fair number of lawyers who will never drink $20 Scotch if $40 Scotch is on offer. They earn a lot, they spend a lot, and they’d better hope their bookkeeper tucked away something in their retirement account. Sometimes, this desire to consume may reflect sheer brio: maybe these guys really like $40 Scotch. But often enough, I suspect it is a kind of manic insatiability that makes you just want to gobble up everything in your way. Not limited to the purely wealthy, I suppose: they say that Thomas Aquinas was fat.
Oddly, the desire to consume is remarkably close to another, seemingly rather different, motive, and that is
The desire to to good. One thing you've got to give to Aristotle: he never saw the point of poverty and innocence. Of course you want to accumulate wealth and power, Aristotle would have said--how else can you do any good in the world? So also the guy who is happy to skip his $40 Scotch and his $100,000 Mercedes so he can buy 10 million mosquito nets for the third world.
We can turn now to another motive which seems rather different from all of the above, and that is
Sadism: think “who’s your daddy?” Some people enjoy the humiliation and suffering of others. Here as elsewhere, I would concede that the quality is not solely a province of the wealthy—there are probably more poor sadists than rich ones--but wealth does allow some people to indulge a particular taste. But sadism is undoubtedly one taste that money can satisfy.
I think none of these is quite the same as a perhaps more familiar asserted motive for making money and that is
Greed: Silas Marner and Scrooge McDuck didn’t want to spend money, or even to show off. They liked to have money so they could run their fingers through it. It’s hard to guess how many wealthy people are motivated by greed because they tend not to call attention to themselves. I should add that I suspect there are more greedy people who are not wealthy and want to be, then who are wealthy per se. Greed tends to make the best the enemy of the good, and the seriously greedy often outwit themselves.
Perhaps paradoxically, I think "greed" as a motive for great wealth is close to another, superficially different, motive for making money and that is
It's fun: Warren Buffet lives in a modest house and drives to a modest office in a modest car. It isn't quite that he is a skinflint (although I guess you'd have to say "careful"), but rather that in an important sense, he is unconscious of money. He's a classic illustration of the proposition that you need to find something you love to do, and the money will follow. Best way I can tell, he has worked incredibly hard most of his life, but at something he loves. The $50 billion is just frosting on the cake.
None of these reasons is quite the same, I think, as my next reason, i.e.,But it’s more complicated than that. It’s too simple to treat money as a source of praise or blame, because there are too many reasons for making money, or keeping it. Here’s a catalog, incomplete, of categories, overlapping and nonexclusive, of motivations for wealth:
Vainglory: think Rameses II, or Donald Trump. Some people just like to call attention to themselves. The Greeks were big on vainglory; they even used it as a means of taxation—get rich people to sponsor a festival or a trireme to show just how rich they were.
Vainglory may look like, but is not quite the same as
Competition: getting money is a visibile sign you’ve won a race. The trouble with competition as a reason for making money is that it never ends. There are some people who will never be satisfied with a $60,000 Mercedes if their neighbor’s Mercedes cost $100,000. So also a competitive CEO who makes $5 million a year, will go to sleep weepy if his neighbor makes $5 million and one.
At any rate, competition and vainglory both should be distinguished from
The desire to consume. “Lawyers,” they used to say, “live well, and die poor.” Point taken: I have known a fair number of lawyers who will never drink $20 Scotch if $40 Scotch is on offer. They earn a lot, they spend a lot, and they’d better hope their bookkeeper tucked away something in their retirement account. Sometimes, this desire to consume may reflect sheer brio: maybe these guys really like $40 Scotch. But often enough, I suspect it is a kind of manic insatiability that makes you just want to gobble up everything in your way. Not limited to the purely wealthy, I suppose: they say that Thomas Aquinas was fat.
Oddly, the desire to consume is remarkably close to another, seemingly rather different, motive, and that is
The desire to to good. One thing you've got to give to Aristotle: he never saw the point of poverty and innocence. Of course you want to accumulate wealth and power, Aristotle would have said--how else can you do any good in the world? So also the guy who is happy to skip his $40 Scotch and his $100,000 Mercedes so he can buy 10 million mosquito nets for the third world.
We can turn now to another motive which seems rather different from all of the above, and that is
Sadism: think “who’s your daddy?” Some people enjoy the humiliation and suffering of others. Here as elsewhere, I would concede that the quality is not solely a province of the wealthy—there are probably more poor sadists than rich ones--but wealth does allow some people to indulge a particular taste. But sadism is undoubtedly one taste that money can satisfy.
I think none of these is quite the same as a perhaps more familiar asserted motive for making money and that is
Greed: Silas Marner and Scrooge McDuck didn’t want to spend money, or even to show off. They liked to have money so they could run their fingers through it. It’s hard to guess how many wealthy people are motivated by greed because they tend not to call attention to themselves. I should add that I suspect there are more greedy people who are not wealthy and want to be, then who are wealthy per se. Greed tends to make the best the enemy of the good, and the seriously greedy often outwit themselves.
Perhaps paradoxically, I think "greed" as a motive for great wealth is close to another, superficially different, motive for making money and that is
It's fun: Warren Buffet lives in a modest house and drives to a modest office in a modest car. It isn't quite that he is a skinflint (although I guess you'd have to say "careful"), but rather that in an important sense, he is unconscious of money. He's a classic illustration of the proposition that you need to find something you love to do, and the money will follow. Best way I can tell, he has worked incredibly hard most of his life, but at something he loves. The $50 billion is just frosting on the cake.
Security: some people just fear growing old and sick and poor. As with competiton or consumption, the trouble with security is that the search never ends. Build yourself a nice little farm and the Barbarians from over the border will trample your fields and set fire to your barn. Tuck away a nice 401k and some lunatic in the White House destroys the value of the dollar.
Security in this sense is close to
There is yet one more motivation for getting money; it is central to our inquiry, which is why I have saved it to the end. And that is
As an index of achievement: money may be proof that you are a good fellow who adds value to society. Her, at last, I suspect we come to what TigerHawk had in mind when he showed his pride in his money. And indeed it is possible that constructive achievement may bring wealth.
But I see two problems with wealth as an index of achievement. One, plenty of achievement does not bring wealth. And two--the point of this entire exercise--it appears that there are so many motives for wealth that we can't begin to focus on just one. So wealth as an index is almost no help at all.
Reviewing, I think it may help to try to restate the terms of debate. TigerHawk seems to be saying that if you have achieved wealth, you probably did something to deserve it. Andrew seems to be saying that if you have achieved wealth, you probably have done something of which you should be ashamed (he may be channeling Balzac, who said that every great fortune is founded on a great crime).
But I like to think that I've got the true handle on the problem, which is to say I think they both miss the point. I argued earlier (link) that the main prerequisite for achieving great wealth is that you've got to want to achieve great wealth. Is the desire for wealth a bad thing? For myself I will concede (scandal of scandals?)I’m un-Christian enough to be an agnostic on the point: as far as I’m concerned the desire for great wealth is a matter of taste, like broccoli versus tomatoes. My point here is that there are a thousand roads to riches, and maybe both TigerHawk and Andrew fall short in imagination as they try to consider how one gets there. And, I might add, an issue far too rich and complicated to be captured in crude categories of "left" and "right."
Update: Okay, so Sullivan didn't say it. But he smiled while somebody else said it.
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