Fair

I'm fighting some kind of flu bug today so I'm not going to hold forth at length but I did want to catch one thought before it escapes me--this about the great 22-year-old Barbarians at the Gate which I just now got round to reading. Specifically: a quick search discloses that the word "fair" occurs 26 times in this text. A couple are off point but most of them are bankers complaining about "fairness" or its opposite. "It just wasn't fair," Roberts recalled quietly. ... "I thought you were going to be fair. That wasn't fair at all." ... "[T]o hand the assignment to Drexel wouldn't be fair."

And so forth. As you may be able to surmise, "not fair" or its equivalent usually means "I'm not getting as much as I want." These philosophers never seem to trouble to continue what principle of fairness they are appealing to here; but in fact I suspect that "principle" has very little to do with it and they are appealing, rather, to the principle of fairness they invoked when they lost a schoolyard game of glassies.

But people! This is money we're talking about here! Moreover, it's a zero sum game! You're grownups! You are world-class masters of the culture of greed! What could you possibly care about fairness?  Or as my mother might have said: life isn't fair--deal with it!

A related insight: I'm struck over and over again at the extraordinary grumpiness of these zillionaires as they scratch and claw to add an extra zero to their swag. They're touchy, they're cranky, they're always ready to sense a slight.  These are among the richest people in the world and they go around ready to blow off like Christopher Moltisanti. People you've got everything! Or at least everything you said you wanted! Life is short! Smell the roses!

No? I thought not. Ah, well...

Afterthought: while putting this together, I idled over to my aggregator and read Glenn Greenwald's bravura account of the Koch Brothers and what he so aptly calls "billionaire self-pity." Up at that level, must be somethig in the water.   

Filthy Rich

Yahoo Finance (I guess channeling TheStreet.com) has an odd story up this week headed “Ten Traits that Make You Filthy-Rich” (link). Why odd? Well, bear with me while I scan the list: Patience … Organization … Discipline … Reflectiveness …Curiosity. You get the drift: Most (maybe not quite all?) of these qualities are qualities you’d identify as part of any mature, fulfilled and fulfilling life.

But here, at least, it seems they are defined not generally, but rather in terms of their utility in developing wealth. Patience, for example,: we are told it is “one of the most important traits when it comes to saving money.” Well, yes, but it’s also pretty helpful when you are frescoing the ceiling of a chapel. So also “reflectiveness”—“it's important to be able to look at your financial decisions and reflect on their results.” Yes, and as Socrates says, the unexamined checkbook is not worth opening.

There are a couple of traits on the list that may not present themselves as quite so universally useful. “Goal oriented,” for example. If I want to capture the world market for silk purses made out of sow’s ears, then I suspect I do have to be goal oriented. On the other hand, I suspect there are a fair number of patient, reflective, curious—even disciplined and organized—people—who really do not give a rat’s patootie about achieving some goal and are pretty much content to take life as it comes. So also “Risk taking.” I suppose anyone ought to be able to cope with risk. I would assume that entrepreneurs do need to be specially equipped to step into tense situations. OTOH, so did Harry Dean Stanton in Repo Man, and he sure didn’t look rich to me.

I’m also intrigued at what is not on the list. Kindness, for example. Compassion. Of course, the author never said these weren’t good human qualities: he just didn’t think of them as among those you need to get filthy rich.

And that, perhaps, is my point. I suspect that anybody who measures up to this list is unlikely to be getting his food out of a dumpster. But rich? (And BTW, how rich is filthy rich? Better than pig rich? Worse than rich as God?) I’m not so sure. I suspect there is one quality more than any other that determines whether you will be filthy-pig rich or not. That is: you’ve got to want to be rich. If you do, I suspect a lot else will fall into place. But then, this is an outlet pre-screened for people who care about wealth…

Fn.: Be interesting to cross check this list against the “Twelve Points” of Boy Scout Law (Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean and Reverent, etc.) (link). Evidently, whatever the Scouts want out of you, they aren’t particularly interested in making you filthy rich.

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.