Martin Venezky
THESPIAN friends perform “The Seagull” in their garden. Only minutes into the first act, a lovely young woman named Masha, sick of hearing the lovesick schoolteacher Medvedenko whine about his penury, blurts out, “All you ever do is talk and talk about money.” That’s when it dawns on me: I’m sick of the subject, too. For the rest of Act I, I find myself ruminating about the glut of financial data that daily clogs the news: Libor and MF Global Holdings; HSBC’s money-laundering of Mexican drug-cartel money; “the London Whale” whose huge trades cost J.P. Morgan Chase billions; leveraged buyouts and mortgage-backed securities and derivatives and stimulus packages, Bain Capital and the tottering euro and the Greek bailout. Saul Bellow referred to this quotidian fretting about world affairs as “crisis chatter.” Today’s crises are all about what is euphemistically called “the financial services industry” — that is to say, they’re all about money.
Call it Wall Street porn. Not only do we know more than most of us wish to know about how the rich live — we even know, thanks to the deep-digging efforts of the business reporters over at Bloomberg, how much they have. But there is such a thing as knowing too much: Did Larry Ellison buy a Hawaiian island for $600 million? And did that include the hotels? Is George Soros’s net worth $18 billion? $20 billion? (Anyway, why begrudge him? He’s probably given half of it away.) And when we talk about the 99 percent who aren’t rich, shouldn’t that leave just 1 percent who are? Then why are we always hearing about the 0.1 percent and the .01 percent? Valiant fact-checkers are off the hook on this one: my point is that the exact numbers don’t matter.
We’re all aware of the vast and still growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, we all know the global economy is a mess. But do we have to hear about it every waking minute of every day? We’re in trouble when the earnestly liberal NPR begins its morning broadcast with a program called “Planet Money.”
I can’t even go for a bike ride without being reminded that we all share it now. My admirable neighbor Nathan, who makes a living doing odd jobs and is a militant nonparticipant in the global economy, has staked a cardboard poster on his lawn that reads, in blue letters, We are the 99 percent.
Why is it that the richer the rich get, the more their doings preoccupy the rest of us? What happened to the tacit social prohibition against talking about money? In part, it’s the fault of the media (as usual). “Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out”: King Lear’s shrewd assessment of the human tendency to keep score is especially suited to our own historical moment, when everything is done in public. I didn’t ask for a peek at Warren Buffett’s portfolio: in order not to know how much preferred stock he acquired in Goldman Sachs I would have to confine my periodical reading to National Geographic.
The problem is: I need to know about money. Like most everyone else in the middle class, I’m scared. Reverberations from the largely bank-induced financial debacle of 2008 still ripple outward, lapping at our retirement plans and hard-earned savings. It never occurred to me that I would have to learn about I-bonds and TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities) at an age when I would have thought I was finally safe from the tortures of high school math — worse, would have to learn higher math just to avoid getting swallowed by the London Whale and his pod. I would love to catch up on the first four seasons of “Breaking Bad”; instead I sit up late at night with a calculator trying to figure out if I have enough for retirement.
In his ominously titled book, “Are We Rome?” Cullen Murphy noted that the senatorial aristocracy of the ancient world — “by one estimate two thousandths of one percent of the population” — was fine with a lopsided household income. “The very tiny Roman elite accepted the chasm between themselves and everyone else as the divinely ordained natural order and an affirmation of their own virtue.” I suspect that few in our own tiny elite feel that way. “Most Americans don’t want our society to be like this, and we remain at heart a middle-class nation,” Mr. Murphy suggests.
So why don’t we do something about it — close a few tax loopholes, regulate the banks — instead of gazing at the glossy real estate brochures that come in the mail? Is it possible that our fascination with the rich reflects some flaw in the nation’s value structure that cuts across class lines? Does subscribing to Architectural Digest make us unwittingly collusive in the perpetuation of wealth inequity? Is the middle class enabling the upper class?
None of this has been lost on the great Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky, whose new book, “How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life,” co-written with his son Edward, identifies an “ethic of acquisitiveness” in the air. To explain this trend, the Skidelskys invoke the phenomenon of what sociologists refer to as “bandwagon goods” — “goods that are desired because others already have them.” This insatiable, competition-fueled appetite for stuff we don’t need shackles us to “continuous, objectless wealth-creation — something that did not exist in earlier times, and that remains, in some sense, peculiar to capitalism.”
As I read their book, I was reminded of “The Gift,” Lewis Hyde’s classic study of exchange systems in so-called “primitive” cultures. Published in 1983, this haunting anthropological elegy to lost civilizations was prescient. Mr. Hyde made the case that advanced capitalist nations, blinded by “market triumphalism,” had lost any sense of the rituals and beliefs that once defined us as a society, the institutions that bound us together: “We’ve witnessed the steady conversion into private property of the art and ideas that earlier generations thought belonged to their cultural commons, and we’ve seen the commodification of things that a few years ago would have seemed beyond the reach of any market.” We now inhabited a world in which everything was for sale.
Nearly three decades later, Michael Sandel, a professor of government at Harvard, has confirmed Mr. Hyde’s premonitions in his new book, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.” Mr. Sandel’s argument is that in our zeal for growth we have “monetized” goods and services — education, medical care, access to national parks, clean air, even the right to immigrate — once available free. We’ve made the country itself a corporation. (In a recent speech, Mitt Romney, apparently referring to the United States, promised “to make sure this company deals with its challenges.”)
“The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed,” Mr. Sandel observes. “It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.” Gone is the time when art was appreciated as art, not as an investment; when a nest egg was for security, not to be shown off like a Fabergé; when politics was about issues, not war chests. The idea of producing something for fun or pleasure or the creation of beauty has become obsolete.
In a society in which money is the measure of all things, it becomes hard to assess your achievements in other terms. The breakdown of community — of church and neighborhood and work that provides a firm identify — has forced us to find alternative ways of determining our place in the social order. It makes no more sense to ask the derivatives salesman to monitor himself, to pull back from the pursuit of maximum profit, than to ask A-Rod to go easy on the home runs. It’s their job; it’s what they do.
The same week that I saw “The Seagull,” I attended a performance of “The Magic Flute” in a small, 19th-century town hall that seated 90 (and, I’m glad to say, was filled to capacity). Tickets were $30. I’ve seen Mozart’s joyous opera many times, and this was the best by far. The singers were superb; the mini-orchestra played with gusto; the makeshift costumes were touchingly inventive. How did the cast members get paid? Or did they? The production was instructive: there was a soprano from a local conservatory, an itinerant freelance tenor, a baritone working toward his M.A. in musicology. Some of the staff worked pro bono (as did the actors in our local production of “The Seagull,” who donated two weeks of their summer vacation in return for free meals and a sojourn in the country). It was an exhilarating event. You couldn’t monetize it; you couldn’t commodify it; you couldn’t load it up on your bandwagon of goods. You could only experience it.
Money is a kind of poetry, declared Wallace Stevens, who worked for a Hartford insurance company and knew what he was talking about. But isn’t it also true that poetry is a kind of money?
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