The Ken Griffin interview got me to think about some earlier contributions about his thinking.
A Pennsylvania businessman wrote a book with a revealing title.
Farquhar, A. B. in collaboration with Samuel Crowther. 1922. The First Million is the Hardest: An Autobiography (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday): p. 19.
Andrew Carnegie's rumination throws light on this subject:
2 & 15: "wealth has been produced as if by magic, and fallen largely to the captains of industry, greatly to their own surprise ....The community created the millionaire's wealth. While he slept it grew as fast as when he was awake."
Carnegie, Andrew. 1906. "Wealth." in Problems of To-day: Wealth, Labor, Socialism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1933): pp. 1-39.
..Educators, trying in desperation to rally popular support for education and mulling over statistics, like to point out to rugged philistines that on the average educated people earn more than the meagrely educated. And this is true when it comes to offering marketable skills and personalities at modest salaries in an existing Establishment that requires ever-increasing skilled personnel for its complex operations. But it has never been true where really big money is concerned. An education can be a severe handicap when it comes to making money.
ReplyDeleteThe reason for this is that in the process of being educated there is always the danger that the individual will acquire scruples, a fact dimly sensed by some of the neo-conservatives who rail against the school system as "Communistic"...
If [a well-educated person] enters upon money-making in a world bazaar where approximate truths, vague deceptions, sneak manoevres, half promises and even bald falsehoods are the widely admired and heavily-rewarded order of the day he must make casuistic adjustments of his standards. The very process of laboriously making the adjustment, even if he succeeds, puts him at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the unschooled, who need waste no energy on such adjustments, who pick up anything lying around loose as easily as they breath. Some educated people can't make even a partial adjustment to the market bazaar, and their disgraceful bank account shows it...
I dunno. Perhaps the difference between 'well-schooled' and 'well-educated' needs to be defined??
Reference for above:
ReplyDelete'The Rich & the Super Rich - a study in the power of wealth today' By Ferdinand Lundberg. 1969. Page 83
The thing left out is the additional place of power, which goes above and beyond simple wealth. The example would be that a business owner gains other things by employing people with the cash coming into his business, rather than simply keeping it all.
ReplyDeleteA related topic would be the way politicians would rather gain your loyalty by getting a contributor to give you a job, rather than simply taking some cash from the contributor.
No, the rich and super rich have rarely been uneducated. All of those dysfunctional characteristics noted above are simply those behavioral and personality traits that may be required of the educated person to succeed at the expense of the rest of us.
ReplyDeleteWell it all reminds me of a Willie and Ernie cartoon from a couple of decades ago (BR I'll explain W &E later)
ReplyDeleteWillie tells Ernie that "I know the secret to getting rich. It takes money to make money."
Ernie to Willie "So why aren't you rich?"
Willie to Ernie "I can't afford it"
Henry CK Liu has an interesting article that describes the historical period relating to Carnegie's statement.
ReplyDeleteMy summary: In 1906, Rockefeller interests in Amalgamated Copper executed a plan to destroy the Heinze combination, which owned Union Copper Co. By manipulating the stock market. This forced down the stock and (along with deliberately planted rumours) led the public to believe that the Heinz banks were failing. JP Morgan joined the Rockefeller enclave. This led to a run on Heinz banks and then to the whole banking world leading to the crash of 1907. J P Morgan offered to salvage the last operating Heinze bank (Trust Co of America) on condition of a fire sale of the valuable Tennessee Coal and Iron Co in Birmingham to add to the monopolistic US Steel Co, which he had earlier purchased from Andrew Carnegie. Morgan then persuaded Congress to allow him to print money to revive the stalled economy. Woodrow Wilson wrote: "All this trouble [the 1907 depression] could be averted if we appointed a committee of six or seven public-spirited men like J P Morgan to handle the affairs of our country." The House of Morgan then held the power of deciding which banks should survive and which ones should fail and, by extension, deciding which sector of the economy should prosper and which should shrink.
(The US Federal Reserve established as a result in 1913)
THE ROAD TO HYPERINFLATION, Part 2
A failure of central banking By Henry C K Liu
http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JA30Dj03.html