The lifestyles of the rich and the famous

In my early days of writing newspaper commentaries, rejections were in plenty.  One of the pieces that never was published was about the Rhodes Scholarship.

Yep, about some obscure scholarship that perhaps even 99% of regular newspaper readers don't know about.  It certainly failed the "will it play in Peoria?" test that editors often employ.

But, to me this was, and continues to be, an important issue that we don't talk about much.  The commentary that I wrote was not merely about the scholarship.  But, the Rhodes Scholarship was the launching point for me to question the value of ill-gotten gains.

Cecil Rhodes did not make his fortunes in any laudable manner.  And, even more worryingly, the guy was a staunch imperialist and a racist, who believed that his people were the greatest race on earth.  His dream was to bring the entire world under British rule.  World domination by his people was his ultimate goal, for which he even devoted money that he had made from other people's misfortunes.

Yet, there is Rhodes Scholarship.  And we celebrate Rhodes Scholars?

I used that launching pad in order to question the value of philanthropy.  (Much later, and in a different context, I wrote this commentary about--pecunia non olet--the stink of money.)

Anand Giridharadas has written a bestseller on this topic, and the recent news reports add more evidence for him:

We have crossed the point beyond which anyone in philanthropy can wiggle out of this problem by talking about some good examples or invoking Bill Gates. Yes. Yes. Yes. There is much good being done. But your tool has become the implement of choice for scoundrels. Face it.

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) September 10, 2019

I continue to worry about philanthropy.  Not only because of how the "philanthropists" made their fortunes but for a reason beyond that.  In a democracy, philanthropy tends to terribly undercut the ability of government to address the public interest.  As this review notes, Robert Reich--a Rhodes Scholar himself!--argues in his book that in a democracy, "philanthropy amplifies the power of the few at the expense of the many."

The rich avoid paying taxes, which makes it difficult for government to address real public policy issues like homelessness.  And meanwhile, the rich get tax deductions for their "philanthropy" that is used to pursue their favorite agendas.

The income tax deduction for charitable donations, Reich argues, is effectively a state subsidy for philanthropy. And since tax rates increase progressively on the basis of income, the rich are, in effect, being paid by the government to exert power by giving their money away.

To use Shakespeare's words, "So are they all, all honourable men."

Work Without Hope

Despite an empirical understanding of how I am in the economic elite of the world, I often wonder whether the forks in the road that I took are worth the mere pennies that I count and recount in the twilight of a mediocre career,

I was led down that path of thought when the old friend, who has moved to the other end of the neighborhood, yet again stated his understanding of the world of education and money: "If college won't help earn more money, then why go to college?" he flatly stated even as I sat across from him sipping the rich and wonderful coffee that he had brewed for me with a fancy machine that only money can buy.

"I am the perfect example of how more college does not lead to more money" I remarked.  I was reminded of the daughter's comment that I am the only one that she knows of who always decides in favor of less money, and she did not mean that as a compliment.

I recalled having read, some time, which was possible only because I always took the road leading to less money, the lines that Samuel Taylor Coleridge had written about his feelings of having been a failure.  Google helped me track it down: “And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,/ Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.”

If Coleridge, who is remembered well after his death nearly two centuries ago, thought that he was a failure, then what hope is there for lesser mortals like me?  Upon my passing, as John Updike wrote, the world will simply shrug away my death with "The wide response will be, I know, "I thought he died a while ago."

Yet, I and the rest plod along, hoping that the decisions of today will lead us to happier tomorrow--even if the happiness will be tightly circumscribed by dollars and cents.

Here is the sonnet by Coleridge:

Work without Hope
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair--
The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing--
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet, well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?

Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

You think you are stressed?

This post is a continuation from yesterday, which was triggered by the interview with Hope Jahren.  Jahren says there about her current research interest:

Right now, I’m interested in stress. We’ve done a lot of experiments around stressing plants to see how they recover and how they manage stress and things like that, which is funny because they’re actually pretty sadistic experiments. I mean, you can torture a plant until it’s this close to dead and then bring it back. You can do all kinds of things you could never get permission to do to animals, and it would be horrible to even think about doing such things to people—but plants are very much fair game in terms of any experiment you want to propose. Especially little small plants and stuff; which gives a kind of scientific freedom in terms of studying life. 

In the normal course of a day, we don't think much about torturing plants, while we have all kinds of issues with torturing animals.  (Well, unless you are a Dick Cheney or a Donald Trump, in which case you don't think twice about torture!)  Plants are life forms, too.  We kill them. We routinely eliminate weeds.  As Jahren puts it, "plants are very much fair game."  

But, there is more to the plant stress than that aspect.  

The interesting thing that we’re coming to is, what is stress? How do you define stress? One thing we’ve noticed is there’s a disconnect between what I think will stress the plant and how it actually reacts. So how do you measure stress? The same life event happens to two people—two people of the same species—they’re not going to react the same. So I can say well, I won’t give these little guys water for a few days, and then I’ll measure how much they didn’t grow, and then I’ll compare the stress between them. But I’ve already projected my own assumption about what stress should be into that experiment—lack of growth. I’m having a lot of fun thinking really deeply about how subjective the experience of stress is. Subjective in terms of human subject is one thing, but subjective in terms of individual experimental plants—that’s a whole other mind box that has to open in order to go there. So that’s what I can say about what I’m really excited about now.

A friend's father, who is a big time backyard gardener, routinely stresses his tomato plants--by not watering them until the time--and the plants always produce more tomatoes than one can imagine.  The stress makes the plant more fertile?  After all, producing the fruits means producing seeds for the next generation, right?

The anthropogenic climate change could add various kinds of stress to plants.  Maybe some will be stressed more than others.    I like the way she phrases it, especially because of the reference to work, earnings, and time:

if I quadruple your salary but I don’t give you any more vacation time, you can’t take that around-the-world tour even if it seems cheap to you, because you can’t get the time off. So now it’s not money that’s limiting; it’s time. Plants have a similar thing in that nitrogen can become limiting, water can become limiting when temperatures go up. There may be less water available in very critical places. So the economy of plants can also tip based on these secondary limitations. That’s also very interesting to us. But I think we need to start wrapping our heads scientifically around some of these scenarios that nobody wants.

Interesting, right, to think about what the limiting factors are? 

Even more fascinating a thinker Jahren is--she is not merely a science person:

When I was deciding what to do with my life, I felt a need to write. I was very drawn to books in a powerful way. I wanted to study them, with a capital “S.” When I got to college I learned very quickly that if I became a writer society would let me die on the street. And if I became a scientist I would always have a roof over my head and a job, and my labor would be something that people needed. That difference has always struck me as so arbitrary, because I was willing to put my soul into all those activities but it became very clear to me that society viewed one of them as important and one of them as optional. So, let’s think about that for a minute. If you’re a scientist, if you have scientific skills, society believes on some fundamental level based on what I just said that you deserve to eat, you deserve to sleep in a dry place, you are entitled to all these things. Now, if we conceptualize science like we do art—something creative that anyone has the potential to do, maybe not everybody is great at it, but it’s this approachable thing that people write books, etc.—why should they be rewarded for that in the same way? What if we really did view science like that as this thing that anybody can do? How would we conceptualize the value of it? Would we lose that protection? Would we lose this protection that scientists have from the street? From hunger? From unemployment? From irrelevance? So it always strikes me as hypocritical that especially when we start talking about how “oh we need all these people to become scientists and we’ve got to get them interested,” as if people’s personal yearnings are at fault. As if people aren’t already yearning for meaning and discovery and things like that.

 A wonderful thought experiment all by itself to "conceptualize science like we do art."  Jahren says that the purpose of science is "to feed the soul in the same way that art is."  I tell ya, there are some wonderful thinkers out there.  The world is better off thanks to them.

The golden handcuffs from a Faustian bargain

If I described the working conditions like this:

people [work] so hard that they will not have time for such mundane things as buying lunch or popping to the dry-cleaners

And, if the workers considered taking a vacation, then the workplace seems to tell them, “take as little as possible, and as much as you dare.”

There is a fair chance that you would think those are not the best of working conditions.   If you are committed to anything left of the political center, you would be ready to launch into a tirade against those damn corporations that suck the life out of their workers--but you would be only half-right.  If you are coming to these issues from the other side of the political spectrum, you would shrug your shoulders and mutter that these are individual's choices and they can quit if they want to--you, too, would be half right ;)

Of course it is those damn corporations.  But, these are not any iron chains holding workers as slaves. Nope, these are "golden handcuffs" that chain tech workers to their desks or futons or whatever else:

Tech firms that offer lavish perks to their staff do not do so out of the goodness of their hearts. They offer them because they expect people to work so hard that they will not have time for such mundane things as buying lunch or popping to the dry-cleaners. As Gerald Ledford of the University of Southern California’s business school puts it, they are “golden handcuffs” to keep people at their desks. Some of the most extravagant perks are illusions: “take as much holiday as you like” may really mean “take as little as possible, and as much as you dare.” Some have vaguely sinister undertones: might the option for women to freeze their eggs end up becoming the expectation?

The only exciting thing for me in that excerpt?  University of Southern California--the university where I earned my graduate degrees ;)  Everything else there is worrisome.

It is not anything new.  I have blogged about this forever, it feels like.  When people are young, they seem to find the work world all too alluring and exciting.  Soon, the reality raises its ugly head:

A survey last year of 5,000 such workers at both tech and non-tech firms, by TINYPulse, a specialist in monitoring employee satisfaction, found that many of them feel alienated, trapped, underappreciated and otherwise discombobulated. Only 19% of tech employees said they were happy in their jobs and only 17% said they felt valued in their work. In many areas they were even more discontented than non-tech workers: 36% of techies felt they had a clear career path compared with 50% of workers in areas such as marketing and finance; 28% of techies said they understand their companies’ vision compared with 43% of non-techies; and 47% of techies said they had good relations with their work colleagues compared with 56% of non-techies.

All the money and the perks don't add up to much, if money and perks are not the most important things one wants out in life.

All that is in some twisted way an ironical mirror image of sorts of the tech factory workers in China, say, at Apple's contractors:

"Reality for workers at Pegatron is working 12-hour shifts, six days a week, forced to do overtime work and unpaid labor, with very short breaks for meals ..."

It is such a strange bargain that we seem to sign off on, while in iron chains or in golden handcuffs.   I am so darn lucky to have lived a life without the iron chains or the golden handcuffs. 

Teach your children well. To code. And they'll love you!

My first day at university where I now teach, I met my fellow-newbie faculty colleagues.  One of them was a physicist, with what seemed like an intense New York way of speaking.  When talking with him, I found out that he was the physics department--there was no other physics faculty at the university.  I was shocked, of course, especially when that was my first ever love.

At small universities like ours, physics is not one that we care to educate students about.  As with many aspects of higher education, this too is something that disappoints and depresses me.  In a related context, I recently wrote in an email to a couple of colleagues, "Whatever happened to the old-fashioned notion of exploration of ideas in a liberal education setting?"

We have moved far, far away from exploration.  As this young commentator puts it, "exploration for its own sake is under siege" while writing about the assault on exploration whether it is the arts, or philosophy, or outer space:

The problem is that both space exploration (as well as all other undirected scientific inquiry) and the humanities are in danger, and the conceptual line we draw between them is obscuring the fact that it’s the same danger, and that it comes from the same source: a cleaving to market-determined value and a desire for immediate return on investment.
We could argue about whether that desire is a consequence of the instant-news environment, the Great Recession and the economic pressures of globalization, or the myopia resulting from the need for political wins.

If there seemingly is no answer to "what job can you get with that, and how much will that pay?" then apparently it is not worth for society to fund it?  After all, we could be exploring the universe for ever, and could hunt for extra-terrestrial intelligence until we are all dead, and not being able to monetize the investment within a few years means that those are not worth exploring!  This approach is rapidly filtering down to the high school level where, for instance, even learning a foreign language is now considered to be wasteful compared to learning a programming language!  Should we wonder then that right from when they are kids, there is a push to teach them how to code!

Such a contemporary approach to education and knowing, and the push for specialization in order to "grow the economy," cannot possibly help us in the long-run.    Buckminster Fuller said it best:

Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.

We need to understand how we relate to other humans, to other life forms, to the rocks and the rivers, and to outer space.  But, we cannot expect all these to miraculously happen if we take away exploration from education.  All we will end up with, as a former colleague used to say, is a society of automatons!

I know you are not a busy person. Why? You are reading this!

Back when I was young--ah, those years that were so long ago--even when I was merely agnostic, I was convinced that there was nothing after death.  A conviction that there was, literally, only life to live.  Then, kaput. Gone. And, therefore, I didn't want to live a life that I did not want to and do something for a living that did not interest me.

I thank the cosmos (though the cosmos couldn't care whether or not I exist) for such an understanding early enough in my life.  

The way I earn my paycheck now is exactly how I would like to earn my paycheck--of course, a few more dollars will always help, but this is plenty enough.  "Plenty enough" in dollars is nothing compared to what I could/would have earned had I continued on with engineering.  But, this plenty enough provides me with a hassle-free life.  And has always provided me with an abundance of a commodity that no amount of dollars can buy--time.

Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm.

Incredibly busy many affluent people are.

A couple, who are a gazillion times wealthier than I will ever be, commented to me when we met before my Ecuador trip, "you are lucky that professors have a long summer break for such travels. We have no time."  I thought to myself that with all their wealth they could easily not work for another second in their lives and travel all they wanted to; but they choose not to because they equate not working with gazillons foregone.

When people see their time in terms of money, they often grow stingy with the former to maximise the latter.

But, unlike what we think, the problem is not entirely new either:

Writing in the first century, Seneca was startled by how little people seemed to value their lives as they were living them—how busy, terribly busy, everyone seemed to be, mortal in their fears, immortal in their desires and wasteful of their time. He noticed how even wealthy people hustled their lives along, ruing their fortune, anticipating a time in the future when they would rest. “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy,” he observed in “On the Shortness of Life”, perhaps the very first time-management self-help book. Time on Earth may be uncertain and fleeting, but nearly everyone has enough of it to take some deep breaths, think deep thoughts and smell some roses, deeply. “Life is long if you know how to use it,” he counselled.

A wise Seneca observed the rich rushing around complaining about not having enough time, and this pretentious blogger also observes the same.  Perhaps we even observe these only because we are sitting quietly not rushing around chasing money!

But, once I turn my attention away from the affluent population, which includes me, and consider, for instance, the lives of the non-traditional students in my classes, then I notice a difference--those students are also incredibly short of time because they juggle school with work and family, and barely have any leisure time.  They, unfortunately, seem to lack both money and time.

Ultimately, more people at the top are trading leisure for work because the gains of working—and the costs of shirking—are higher than ever before. Revealingly, inequalities in leisure have coincided with other measures of inequality, in wages and consumption, which have been increasing steadily since the 1980s. While the wages of most workers, and particularly uneducated workers, have either remained stagnant or grown slowly, the incomes at the top—and those at the very top most of all—have been rising at a swift rate. This makes leisure time terribly expensive.
So if leisureliness was once a badge of honour among the well-off of the 19th century, in the words of Thorsten Veblen, an American economist at the time, then busyness—and even stressful feelings of time scarcity—has become that badge now. To be pressed for time has become a sign of prosperity, an indicator of social status, and one that most people are inclined to claim.

Let's see: those with gazillions are working even harder because they value their "free time" as way too much money to be lost, and those struggling for paychecks are working even harder because they cannot afford to take time off.  Isn't something seriously wrong with this picture?

Alas time, ultimately, is a strange and slippery resource, easily traded, visible only when it passes and often most highly valued when it is gone. No one has ever complained of having too much of it. Instead, most people worry over how it flies, and wonder where it goes. Cruelly, it runs away faster as people get older, as each accumulating year grows less significant, proportionally, but also less vivid. Experiences become less novel and more habitual. The years soon bleed together and end up rushing past, with the most vibrant memories tucked somewhere near the beginning. And of course the more one tries to hold on to something, the swifter it seems to go.

The faster does time fly as we age, and as we rush around.  But, it will all end; after all, as I like to say, we all come with our own expiration dates.  Perhaps there are those who will think in their death-beds,  "instead of watching the sunset, I am so glad I spent a couple of additional hours in the office in order to earn more."

I, for one, am so glad that I have the time to watch the river flow by, the birds chirp, the sun set, the children scream, the adults yak in their cellphones, the older folks shuffle along.

If you behave well, I will even spend some of that time with you ;)

Source

Pecunia non olet? Not if it is from Yale. From Chennai?

The title of this post should not, by any means, mislead a reader into thinking that I am now a Latin student at Yale.  Far from that; they would not allow the likes of me at those Ivies!

A few years ago, when I was in Boston for a conference, I went to Harvard, and walked about.  When I was in the law school buildings I decided to use the restroom instead of hunting for one later on.  As I like to joke about it, I have contributed a lot to Harvard!

Boston's Charles River, 2008

While those kind of contributions stink, we stink, therefore we are human ;)  Money, however, apparently has no smell.  Remember that earlier post on Pecunia non olet?

It is most appropriate that I continue with that smelly topic from here in Chennai.  Not because of the stink in Chennai, about which one could write doorstoppers.  But because of Chennai's connection with Yale.  With the university's namesake, that is.

Elihu Yale was more a product of the East India Co. than of any place or political jurisdiction. Descended from a Welsh family, he was born in 1649 in Boston but spent most of his childhood in London, where his father, David, sought freedom from the puritanical strictures of New England and a friendly environment for trade. Young Yale enjoyed an education from William Dugard, headmaster of the storied Merchant Taylors' School, before obtaining a job with the East India Co. in 1670. He soon shipped out to Fort St. George, the company's lucrative outpost in southern India, around which had grown the town of Madras, now Chennai, India's sixth largest city. There he remained for the next quarter-century, eventually becoming governor of the settlement. In between, he and his wife, Catherine, would become the first couple married at St. Mary's Church—India's oldest Anglican church—and Elihu would amass a fortune dealing in textiles and precious stones on his own account. After retiring to a grand estate in London, he arranged for a burial at his ancestral home in Wrexham, Wales, beneath a tomb paying homage to his peripatetic life: "Born in America, in Europe bred / In Afric travell'd and in Asia wed / Where long he liv'd and thriv'd; at London dead."

From a common puritan to a governor.

Yale had come to India with the entry-level title of a company "writer" and an annual salary of £10—about half a shilling a day at a time when an English cloth suit cost around 15 shillings. Having demonstrated a knack for negotiations with local trade partners, by 1687 he had been named governor.

Sounds like there is no reason why his money should smell, right?

His position was precarious: Opportunities for graft were extraordinary, and governors were vulnerable to accusations of improprieties. It didn't help that Yale was widely regarded as a brusque and divisive manager. After the company replaced Yale in 1692, a wide array of allegations regarding his tenure as governor emerged, keeping him on the legal defensive in Madras. But he used the time off the company's payroll in India to focus on growing his vast estate. The precise size of his fortune by the time he left India is unclear, but his assets were numerous enough that their disposal at his death required seven separate auctions.

I suppose the formula is simple.
First, you plunder.
Then create universities or hospitals or scholarships and launder that money clean.
And get recorded in history as one of the greats.

Yale had ensured that his name would emerge in the centuries to come as a byword for learned privilege. Always a a shrewd trader, Yale found in his gift to the fledgling New Haven school the best deal he ever made.

Oh well ... I have other smelly problems to deal with rather urgently--like how no amount of deodorants can help me in Yale's old robbing grounds ;)

Pecunia non olet. Really? Money does not stink?

Through my early teenage years, I was impressed with the work that Mother Teresa was doing in Calcutta, as the city was known then.  So much so that during my first or second year of the undergraduate program, I wrote to the organization inquiring about volunteering there over the summer break.  I never got a reply, which, in retrospect, was a good thing.

As I systematically turned my intellectual inquiries away from engineering and attempted to understand the world around me, many of the data points about Mother Teresa that I had previously dismissed began to bother me.  Especially about the money.  Years later, it was, thus, all the more an enjoyable read when Christopher Hitchens laid it all in his usual, blunt, style, in the context of her canonization:

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan.

Apparently, MT, which was Hitchens' way of bringing her down to this terrain where the rest of us mortals walk, did not care where the money came from.  Pecunia non olet!  Which is Latin for money does not stink.

It is funny that I should learn that Latin phrase thanks to a post at the business publication, Forbes, and that too in an analysis of the now notorious Donald Sterling and his philanthropic contribution to UCLA:

Donald Sterling’s foundation pledged $3 million for kidney research at UCLA and made an initial payment of $425,000 ... Now, not surprisingly, UCLA has decided to return the money. “Mr. Sterling’s divisive and hurtful comments demonstrate that he does not share UCLA’s core values as a public university that fosters diversity, inclusion, and respect,” the university said in a press release.

The godly MT did not think that a dictator's money stank, but a secular UCLA returned a racist's money. Go figure!

Meanwhile, an export from India, which brings the country more than two billion dollars apparently does stink, according to one leading contender for the prime minister post:

Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has attacked the current government over India's position as one of the world's biggest beef exporters.
Indian exports account for about 20% of the global supply and while economically this might seem to be a good thing, in India, the cow is revered as holy by Hindus, and so the consumption and sale of beef always sparks fierce political and religious debate.

I know what you are thinking: India exports beef?  What about the holy cow?

[It] is not cows but the less revered water buffaloes that mostly make the cut for meat-processing factories.
Half of the world's buffalo population is in India, and global demand for buffalo meat has become a source of revenue and brought in a lot of money for the country.
Both buffalo meat and meat from cows are known as beef internationally.

It turns out that MT was, as they say in India, a non-veg person, if that is a relevant data for you to contemplate on Pecunia non olet.

Obama, Goldman Sachs, and David Brooks

I am not sure if I would have ever expected David Brooks to end an opinion piece of his this way:

Over the past few years, people from Goldman Sachs have assumed control over large parts of the federal government. Over the next few they might just take over the whole darn thing.

David Brooks?

Big Paycheck or Service?

Remember the article in the NY Times a week ago?  It was about Professor Howard Gardner's seminars to "encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges."

Well, the paper has published a few letters in response to that piece.  I found this to be the most interesting:

To the Editor:
After a career in public service, I regretfully say, I would not do it again.

Philosophy and point of view led me to doing good instead of doing well, so I never expected to become rich. But now that I’m in my 10th year of a frozen judicial salary — less than summer students are being paid at law firms — I have concluded that whatever I may have accomplished for the public, I have wasted 25 years of my life by serving on the bench.

Emily Jane Goodman
New York, June 23, 2008

The writer is a New York Supreme Court justice