We are proud to feature Stewart Acuff’s Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life In Organizing
Playing Bigger Than You Are is NOT available on Amazon!
Order the limited hard cover edition from our union distributor: Do-Good.biz
Read more about this publication. Read part of Foreword by Bernie Sanders. Read a review by Wisdom Voices’ Joanne Boyer.
“Like” Playing Bigger Than You Are on Facebook.
Read our feature story about
Levins Publishing
Want to effect change? Organize
Read more about Levins Publishing
Writing in the New York Times (December 16, 2011), Yoram Bauman asked if his fellow economists were by their nature more selfish than everyone else, or if their academic training made them that way.
Bauman’s research led him to the conclusion that economists are born more selfish, and that’s what attracts them to economics in the first place. But the poor non-major who stumbles into an economics class will become more selfish, too. So it’s the worst of both worlds. Economists are born selfish and their classwork, if anything, makes it worse.
As a follow-up to his article in the Times, Bauman summarized several more studies on the same subject. Those he examined pretty much took it for granted that economists were, as a group, “less cooperative,” “significantly more corrupt than others,” and “less likely to be concerned with fairness.” Some found economists were born that way; others said that if you sit through enough economics classes you will come out selfish no matter how you went in. Even among economists, some studies found degrees of selfishness, with business majors most enthusiastically saying that greed is a good thing.
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by these findings. After all, the most well-known passage any economist has come up with in over 200 years is this one from Adam Smith:
Every individual endeavors to employ his capital so that its produce may be of greatest value. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain. And he is led in this by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more than when he really intends to promote it.
In other words, when you look at it properly, being selfish is better than being concerned for the well-being of others. Every economics student has this moral gem drummed into his or her head from Day One.
One of the studies on selfish economists asks: “Given that professional economists play a significant role in the development of both public policy and the policies of large corporations such as banks, what impact will the value priorities of economists have on such policies?”
It’s a good question, but maybe we shouldn’t worry so much. Not all of our top policy makers and business leaders are economists. Some of them are lawyers.
One of the most difficult things to understand when it comes to economic policy is this simple question: “How much does it take to be rich?” The question arises when talk turns to “taxing the rich” or “the rich are job creators” or, most simply, “I want to be rich, too!”
Much of the difficulty can be traced to books with titles like “The Millionaire Next Door.” You are reminded that there might be a millionaire somewhere in your own neighborhood. If not, I hope someday you’ll be the first. But today, the word “rich” often applies to billionaires, not millionaires. The chances of you having a billionaire living next door are zero. You’ll never see one over the back fence and, more than likely, they will never see you from their gated mansions.
The 400 richest Americans are all billionaires, some many times over. I’ve asked this question at dozens of conferences: “How would you spend $1 billion?” The responses indicate that no working person has the foggiest notion how much a billion dollars really is. To be honest, I struggle with that one myself.
When working people talk about being “rich,” they think of nice houses, three-car garages, bass boats, dream vacations, putting the kids through college without borrowing, and comfortable retirements. That’s what I think of when I hear the word “rich,” too. But when we think that way, we’re thinking of millionaires, not billionaires. We can all relate to the TV show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”; but no one is ever going to have a show called “Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?”
To see why, we need to understand the difference between being a millionaire and being a billionaire. Here are two examples I picked up in a quick Internet search:
A tightly packed stack of new $100 dollar bills totaling a billion dollars would be 4,000 feet high or about three Sears Tower buildings stacked one on top of the other.
A billion dollars is the equivalent of 10 pallets of $100 bills, or $100,000,000 on each one.
Now ask yourself: “Would $1 billion, in one hundred dollar bills, fit in your house?” A million dollars in $100 bills would fit easily in a grocery bag. But ten pallets?
The very richest Americans are billionaires many times over. The Koch brothers, for example, were reported to have the equivalent of 500 pallets of $100 bills between the two of them. Six Wal-Mart heirs have a combined wealth of 930 pallets of $100 bills.
Now let me give you some homework. Take out a pencil, some paper, and a calculator. Then write down how you would spend $1 billion. Odds are, you can’t do it, at least not if you only put things on the list you would buy for you and your family. And that’s only one billion, not 50 or 93.
Doing the homework will show you part of the problem with having so much money in so few hands. The people who have the pallets of cash can’t spend it on ordinary things, either. We lose the positive effect of money circulating through our downtown businesses.
There’s another big problem, too, one that we are seeing all too much of now that Political Season is once again upon us. A billionaire can make million dollar campaign contributions and not miss it. Could you do the same?
This reminds me of the time I was on CNN and someone asked me, “What’s the difference between giving more to working people and the super rich?” I answered, “When working people get more money, they buy cars. When billionaires get more money, they buy politicians.”
This week’s lesson? Having too much money in too few hands slows down the economy and makes it tough to maintain a true democracy.
Politicians routinely describe the decisions they face as “tough choices.” A typical “tough choice,” as told by our political leaders, is one of several hundred variations on this theme: “raise taxes on the super-rich or cut services for everyone else.” The “services for everyone else” vary among retirement, health, education, and infrastructure benefits as the situation demands.
Context is important here. Our economy, as everyone by now knows, serves only the super-rich. Even I, economic cynic that I am, was a taken aback to see the 2010 numbers: one out of every three dollars of the new income created by our economy went to the richest 15,000 households, with not quite 3 people per household. Think about it this way. We have an economy that sends one-third of its new income to a small group of folks that could barely populate Mankato, Minnesota, while the rest of us 300 million or so poor slobs scrap for the rest.
This is the economy in which the “tough choices” must be made.
What’s so “tough” about these choices? How did they ever get to be “choices” in the first place? Who could possibly see cutting health benefits to someone who needs them, when so few have so much, as a choice? Only a person who writes a check for $1 million to a political campaign promising lower taxes while Americans go hungry and without jobs. Only a politician who sees support from the Financial Elite as more important than the well-being of the other 99% of those who voted. In short, only a person who is, as they say, “without a moral compass.”
A recent University study had the say-it-all title of “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior.” Maybe that’s what’s going on here. Maybe the Bible had it right when Jesus talked about how difficult it is for the rich to get past the pearly gates. I don’t know.
But I do know this: when people hoard billions while lobbying for others to give up what they have and deserve in a civilized society, we have left the world in which decent people face tough choices. Instead, we have entered the moral Twilight Zone.