I am not blaming “everyone”. I am blaming the American people as a whole. For letting themselves be led into this stupidity and for following a deranged man. After September 2001 the American people just went nuts. They thought it was possible to get into a confrontation with the entire world, fight wars for fun and profit and continue to spend way more than what they were taking in. Mistakes, whether individual or collectively made, carry their price. The American people went irrationally nuts for a while and now the mistake is becoming apparent.
It is a whole list of things which individually considered would not be huge but they add up. A single brick does not make a house but millions of bricks do. America’s irrational harrassment of foreigners crippled the tourism and hospitality industries at a time when the rest of the world was undergoing a boom in tourism. Spending in an unnecessary and controversial war was a stupid move but the chest-thumping masses did not understand, know or care about the monetary cost. They wanted blood and the cost did not matter. The American masses wanted to believe that you can simultaneously spend billions to beat the crap of people around the world, alienate your customers and your friends, spend more than you make, move into a bigger house, and all this would have no consequences. They were wrong but the blame lies squarely on their own shoulders. Bush was not a self-imposed dictator. He was there because the American people (as a whole - I am well aware of the opposition) put him there to implement precisely those policies.
And President Obama may correct the most blatant and obvious of the excesses but he cannot and will not correct for the main underlying problem which is that Americans will not hear the truth about the situation. They cannot bear to hear the world has changed. There is more competition from other countries and Americans need to tighten their belts. Americans do not want to hear this. They only want tho hear America is the sole and only superpower and can do whatever it pleases. Americans do not want to hear about Social Security being in a bind. About the Treasury being so far in the red. They do not want to hear the unpleasant truth and there is no way anyone saying it would get elected. The American people have no one else to blame but themselves. They choose to be ignorant and deluded and this carries consequences. If you decide to croos the road without looking you will not see the truck which is coming but it is going to hit you.
Maybe so. My commitment to democracy is not based on its efficiency, it most assuredly is not efficient. Nor is it based on any notion that democratic decision making is more wise. The people can be stampeded, they are vulnerable to manipulation by the cynical and grasping, as recent history will testify.
Democracy is more just. It is more just that a people rule themselves, however foolish they may be. As for the rest, there is no reason to believe that rulership of a foolish and self-serving elite is any improvement over rulership by a foolish and self-serving majority.
The element of faith comes in when we choose to believe that, given time, patience, and education, we can foster wisdom and probity in the people. We can improve our chances for wise leadership, we can improve ourselves and thereby, inevitably, improve our world.
Hence the notion: “progressive”. Without doubt, that faith part is the toughie. Experience beats on that faith like clubbing a baby seal. Had we a viable alternative, I might be tempted. We don’t, so I’m not.
That’s pretty much it actually. You become qualified for the best paying job you can find. You continue to build your skills and experience so that you become qualified for better paying positions with more responsibility. You find a modest home you can afford near where you work and you live within your means. It’s not particularly glamorous or exciting, but it’s how 90% of the people should be living.
People aren’t content with a modest lifestyle, however they don’t do anything particularly extraordinary that would justify their extravagence. They have this sense of entitlement and therefore want to be stimulated and subsudized and otherwise protected from ecnomic forces.
The problem is greed. And not the good kind of greed that influences companies to outsource or drive competetors out of business (which leads to cheaper products and frees up resources to be used elsewhere - ie China). The bad kind of greed where people think special provisions should be made to artificially inflate their salaries, drive up the resale value of their home or ring up all this credit card debt to accumulate a ton of crap they can’t afford. It’s also the same greed that gives CEOs multimillion dollar bonuses for doing jack shit and is turning our economy into a nation of bankers, lawyers, consultants and accountants that produce nothing but get paid a great deal to make, implement and validate rules for pushing numbers around a spreadsheet.
I can’t say if things are different now than they were 50 years ago, but here is what I’ve seen in the past 36 years that I think contributes to the fall of our economy so tell me if I am off base:
-A general attitude that kids who are exceptionally smart or industrius are “nerds”
-Being “popular” is more important than anything else
-You should go to college so you won’t have to work a “menial” job (leading to a large number of students who study nothing but are now “too good” for most entry level jobs)
-Negative conotation of the term “workaholic”
-“Who you know is more important than what you know”
-Investment bankers and lawyers are some of the highest salaried jobs
-The idea that you are “owed” a job, even if you do nothing, produce nothing and someone somewhere else can do that job cheaper
-The entire mythos of the young hot-shot executive
-The media image of the wealthy businessman as corrupt, evil and Machiavellian. (Similar to the “mad scientist” mythos)
-Your house should be your biggest source of wealth and that everyone deserves to own one
-The entire culture of “speculation” and “easy wealth”, particularly people daytrading or flipping homes who have no business doing so
-The whole culture of extravagance and lack of accountability among business execs
A friend of mine brought up a possible solution: what if government subsidies to home-owners bought the government a percentage of the house? For example, if the government gives $100k to prop up a $500k mortgage they would get 20% of the price of the house if/when it is sold.
I’m sure it could be tweaked some but that might be a way for people to keep their homes without necessarily rewarding financial incompetence.
But then you have the same problem in 10 years when these homeowners go to sell their house (say for $550,000) and now have to come up with $125,000 and can only afford a much less expensive house.
Sometimes easier said than done. A person has to find an entry level job in a career that has upward mobility. They have to then stay on long enough to gain substantial skills - if they get laid off or need to keep switching career paths this takes much longer. If you can’t manage the $60,000+ in loans to get a good college education today I guess you see that as irresponsible? For many, the choice has become: do you want to pay for student loans or a mortgage? Currently, student loans are ever closer to the same monthly payment. Catch 22 - without a college degree your chance for an economically sound career diminishes greatly.
Agreed although some people are only guilty of one of those two examples and not both. I also think that a tiny number of people really subscribe to the second example and most of them tend to be very wealthy.
There is no ‘good’ greed. It is never a virtue. This notion just canceled out your statement about people living beyond their means. It is all about living beyond your means.
Some of these, such as being popular, haven’t changed. Nor, at times, who you know not what you know. These things are just the way of the world.
As for others: some wealthy businessmen are corrupt, evil, and Machiavellian. What people were the prime movers of our economic tailspin? Yes, there are many who try to be fair and even a few who are selfless. But way up there at the top of the food chain we too often see the beast you describe. Just because they were insulated from the rest of the world didn’t mean that they weren’t smart enough to realize the possible consequences had they put their minds to it. I’d add to their description as people who often have some degree of addiction to gambling. And for those corporate types who are fair minded: their hands are often tied because the corporate system exists only to maximize profits and nothing else. Unless that changes the more successful a corporation, the more it is likely they are forced to do things that are corrupt, evil, and Machiavellian in order to keep their jobs.
I think the families of many workaholics would concur with the negative connotations. These people are not saints, they possibly have a character defect. How many wealthy executives need to be workaholics to achieve a high position? If that’s a qualification for such positions, this simply adds to the insulation that created a culture of extravagance and lack of accountability. Just because a person is an over producer does not mean they are a good human being.
The culture of speculation and easy wealth has always been sold to Americans. It will require a major cultural shift for us to begin living within our means. Once, ‘just enough, just in time’ becomes the cultural standard Americans will expect to always have the best seat at the table and leave the table scraps for others.
Oops. Last sentence should read ‘Until ‘just enough, just in time’ becomes a cultural standard, Americans will expect to always have the best seat at the table and leave the table scraps for others.’
I’m not all that concerned if they can only afford a less expensive house in 10 years. They shouldn’t have bought the $500k house to begin with.
I don’t want a solution that allows people to totally escape their poor financial choices because in the long run I think that will lead to a greater number of poor decisions.
Greed is good so long as it is tempered with rational thinking. It’s good when it drives people to succeed and companies to grow and expand and create jobs. It’s not so good when you think you deserve to live like a rich person before you put in the work. Basically people want to live the lifestyle, assuming they will become successfull in the future and that’s not realistic.
An unfortunate aspect of American Culture is the idea that bad things only happen to bad people, and good things come to good people. This is, of course, complete bullshit, but I have personally experienced a number of completely horrible excuses for human beings use this premise to excuse their own behavior and position at the expense of mine or of others.
Good people get rewarded in life = I’m in a good spot so I must be a good person.
Bad things happen to bad people = You’re not as well off, so there’s something wrong with you as a human being.
The worst and most direct example was about 15 years ago. I’d run afoul of the owner of the consulting firm I worked for because I complained that I’d been hired under false pretenses (true) and that I wasn’t being assigned any work (also true). He put me on probation and assigned a complete rat bastard to “manage” my rehabilitation.
At the meeting for this, he sat about 8’ from me on the same side of a long conference table. While looking the other direction and never looking directly at me, he told me that since I’d had some bad things happen to me lately (the biggest being a minor traffic accident that wasn’t my fault), “There must be something seriously wrong with you as a human being. Because things like that only happen to people who deserve it” (Direct quote)
Of course, I got my Karmic Justice out of that one. I got another job and quit. One year later I got a call from a guy who’d been hired to turn that place around. Seemed asshat owner had put the rat bastard manager in charge of all the consultants and in less than a year, every last one of them had quit. He asked if I’d come back. I laughed and told him the story. He ended up telling me that mine wasn’t the first story of that kind he’d heard from former employees and that he was starting to think the company wasn’t salvagable.
People who want to build things, make things, build empires, use the power of capitalism to solve a problem, and in general embody the nobler aspect of the entrepreneurial spirit, they are good. Fantastic, even.
People whose entire goal in life is to grab as much money as possible, as fast as possible, and are perfectly willing to bend, break, or mutilate the rules, laws, and morality of the whole world to do it, they are bad. Horrible, even.
But what motivates ambition? Some people are motivated by greed - and sometimes they are motivated by greed to solve problems, add productivity. Some people are motivated to help mankind. Some want to be famous. Some want admiration. Some people just want to be busy. Some take great satisfaction in a job well done. Ambition is not a root cause. People generally are not motivated to “be ambitious.”
Actually, I think material greed is fairly low on the list of root causes of ambition. Most people are not just in it for the money. They want the things you’ve mentioned… admiration, respect, status, challenge, whatever.
Money is just one of the primary ways in which people get these things in our society as currently configured.
To try to draw a frame around this discussion, then, I will define :
“Greed” is the desire for money for its own sake. You just want moneymoneymoneymoneymoney. This, to me, is shallow and decadent and lazy and does not stand a great chance of contributing much to society. These people just want to play with the system and get rich. If they can do that by just moving meaningless numbers around on a screen to make it look like they have something when they don’t, that’s just fine.
This is not capitalism. They’re not generating jobs, products, or innovation. It is merely corruption and crime, parasites working their way into the cracks in the system and draining its blood.
Sure, some people serve their grred by being genuine entrepreneurs. But if money is all you’re after, it’s much easier to get your MBA and become a parasite. Less work, more money, and you don’t have to produce anything.
The age of greed is over. And it’s about bloody time.
You know different people than I do. I would say that money is a prime motivator for most people I know operating at a high level of output. At a certain level “money is how you keep score.”
As a value judgment, I agree with you - greed is shallow and decadent (but I disagree that its lazy or necessarily encourages lazy behavior). But as a “way the world works” greed is a prime motivator for productivity gains. Its also a prime motivator for Enron/Arthur Anderson type scams and tulip bulb bubbles.
True, but the word is an alternate to greed. I believe that there should be an alternative word to greed - which is wanting far more than one needs, - especially if it hurts others. Of course there is a question of where the line is drawn on wants and needs and can be relatively subjective. But at least ambition and the motivators that you listed above can be defined as something different than greed. Perhaps there is a better word, but ambition isn’t a bad one.
My take is that when people get the idea that greed is good it takes a smaller step to rationalize doing whatever it takes to get what you want. At least ambition can be seen as doing something for a greater good and keep one focused mostly on doing something worthwhile rather than simply adding more stuff on to one’s personal pile.
Full disclosure: At times I believe a person can never have enough guitars. My collection is quite small but I’m as susceptible to greed as anyone. Though I could ‘explain’ how a couple dozen guitars could all bring something sonically unique to the player’s pallet of sounds I realize that that my needs are mostly satisfied and not to confuse them with what I want. I could own more but I don’t and have also given 2 or 3 away over the years to the artistically needy
The American people as a whole is a good approximation of everyone.
Most of this I agree with. Even if you assign responsibility to those who voted for Bush in 2004, that is hardly the entire American public. Let’s assign the major responsibility to the first President who thought you can finance a war with a tax cut. That’s stupid even if Iraq were justified.
People are people, and we understand to a great extent how they work. An economic policy ignoring that is broken, and you can’t blame the people for it. People will overestimate their creditworthiness, and making loans without checking is as stupid as assuming that Nigerian prince is on the up and up.
First, I think a lot of people got the message, which is one of the reasons why McCain’s solve it all with another tax cut didn’t go very far. But most people don’t have the time to see the big picture, and think they don’t have to deal with the consequences. In California an interesting study by the Mercury News last Saturday showed that a lot of the budget problem, where spending grew faster than inflation, is directly attributable to voter passed propositions, not the legislature. We have met the enemy and he is us. It is not surprising that most voters don’t think about tradeoffs when they see a nice looking proposition on the ballot. You don’t take a kid to ToysRUs, tell him he can buy anything, and then expect him to be responsible because you don’t have a lot in your checkbook. Let’s stop letting government abdicate its responsibility to check the urges of the masses and of companies.
