Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (2 page)

With all these thanks said, I now come to one of the great conundrums of literature. How does one give full and sufficient credit to one’s wife without sounding like a mealymouthed pig or giving the readers mental images of the tambourine-playing spouse in
This Is Spinal Tap
? I’m going to go for mealymouthed pig. Tina O’Rourke has a business degree and understands the stuff in this book, which is more than its author does. She accompanied me on several of the foreign trips, or, I should say, I accompanied her. She helped with the travel arrangements and tour research. To her I owe the slogan “America—it doesn’t suck.” And Tina, supplied with
Rolling Stone
journalist credentials for the Cuba trip, was forced at one point to actually ask a pop-music star, “What’s your favorite color?” Then, as this book was being written, Tina edited, fact-checked, proofread, entered the whole manuscript into the word processor that remains a Delphic mystery to her husband, managed the household, changed diapers, and gave our infant daughter her 1
A.M
., 3
A.M
., 3:30
A.M
., 3:45
A.M
., 4
A.M
., and 5
A.M
. feedings while I…stared out my office window and picked adverbs. Thank you for not killing me, dear.

A NOTE ABOUT THE BIBLIOGRAPHY

There isn’t one. I’m too lazy. And who ever heard of humor with footnotes? But there are certain books which I found crucial to a neophyte student of economics, especially if (and I mean no insult to the texts by this) that student is uninformed, innumerate, light-minded, and a big goof-off. In other words, these are the books to read if you want to know something about economics but have never gotten further into the subject than figuring out a trifecta at Belmont:

There isn’t one. I’m too lazy. And who ever heard of humor with footnotes? But there are certain books which I found crucial to a neophyte student of economics, especially if (and I mean no insult to the texts by this) that student is uninformed, innumerate, light-minded, and a big goof-off. In other words, these are the books to read if you want to know something about economics but have never gotten further into the subject than figuring out a trifecta at Belmont:

Free to Choose
and
Capitalism and Freedom
by Milton and Rose Friedman

New Ideas from Dead Economists
by Todd G. Buchholz

The Road to Serfdom
by Friedrich A. Hayeck

Economics in One Lesson
by Henry Hazlitt

The Tyranny of Numbers
by Nicholas Eberstadt

How the West Grew Rich
by Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell Jr.

The Armchair Economist
by Steven E. Landsburg

The History of Money
by Jack Weatherford

Money, A History
edited by Jonathan Williams

There are also certain books you should avoid, such as anything with the words
Investment
and
Success
in the title and everything ever written by John Kenneth Galbraith.

A NOTE ABOUT THE NUMBERS IN THIS BOOK

How accurate are the statistics in the following pages? How long is a piece of string? All statistics are fraught with error. And I, personally, cannot add a 15 percent tip to a ten-dollar bar tab and get the same number twice. Not that I’ve ever had a bar tab as small as ten dollars. And that may be part of the problem. But, even sober, I’m no mathematician. And neither, apparently, are the other people who publish statistics. For example, I refer the reader to the debates about Cuban gross domestic product in Chapter V and Tanzanian per-capita GDP in Chapter VIII. The numbers seem as random and inadequate as the change I ended up leaving that surly bartender.

Statistics, however, can have some value for comparative purposes, and this is the way I’ve tried to use them. Unless otherwise noted, the population, GDP, vital stats, and other principal figures in
Eat the Rich
come from the 1997 edition of the CIA’s
World Factbook
and the 1997 edition of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s
Statistical Abstract of the United States
. Yes, I know, the CIA is the espionage agency that had to read about India’s nuclear tests in
The Washington Post.
And now Pakistan is making mushroom clouds, too. Pretty soon every cabdriver and 7-Eleven manager in the world will have the bomb. And I also know that the Department of Commerce is no Plato’s Academy in Athens. But the baloney in the
Factbook
and the
Statistical Abstract
is presumably all cooked from the same ground-up scraps and innards, and comes packaged in easily compared slices.

Although even our government doesn’t always agree with itself about these things. The
FB
says the estimated mid-1997 population of the United States is 267,954,764, while the
SA
says 267,645,000—a discrepancy of almost 310,000 people. That’s as if all the residents of Wichita, Kansas, had disappeared. Check the tornado reports. Call Dorothy. Anyway, when forced to chose between numbers, I’ve picked the CIA’s for the simple reason that nobody’s ever been terminated with extreme prejudice by the Department of Commerce.

There is another problem with the statistics in this book. They’re outdated. All statistics are outdated. They are the record of a certain arbitrary moment, and by the time that record is processed and printed, it is, in effect, your senior-class picture in the high-school yearbook and you’re very embarrassed by last fall’s hairstyle. My statistics are even more outdated than usual, having been collected over a period of two and a half years. It would have been nice if I could have visited eight countries in one week, written about them over the weekend, published my work on Monday, and had an au courant book. But the thing could not be done. I went to Sweden, Cuba, and Russia in 1996. I went to Tanzania, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Wall Street in 1997. And my manuscript went to press in the spring of 1998. Things have changed in all those places. Economic conditions are somewhat better in Sweden, Albania, and Tanzania; worse in Russia and Shanghai. The pope has breezed through Cuba, to what effect I do not know. Hong Kong has suffered less at the hands of the mainland Chinese than I feared it would—so far. And what’s going to happen to the stock market remains the riddle it’s been since 1792, when twenty-four brokers gathered under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street and agreed to a set of rules by which they would sharp and cozen each other.

I ask readers to take the numbers herein with the single grain of salt that the Romans believed to be an antidote to poison. The purpose of this book is to make some broad points about economics, freedom, and responsibility. If the reader examines my work too carefully, he may discover that I’m only a journalist. This means that when it comes to knowing what I’m talking about, I’m no different than the next person; I just get paid for the talking.

I had one fundamental question about economics: Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck? It’s not a matter of brains. No part of the earth (with the possible exception of Brentwood) is dumber than Beverly Hills, and the residents are wading in gravy. In Russia, meanwhile, where chess is a spectator sport, they’re boiling stones for soup. Nor can education be the reason. Fourth graders in the American school system know what a condom is but aren’t sure about 9 × 7. Natural resources aren’t the answer. Africa has diamonds, gold, uranium, you name it. Scandinavia has little and is frozen besides. Maybe culture is the key, but wealthy regions such as the local mall are famous for lacking it.

Perhaps the good life’s secret lies in civilization. The Chinese had an ancient and sophisticated civilization when my relatives were hunkering naked in trees. (Admittedly that was last week, but they’d been drinking.) In 1000
B.C
., when Europeans were barely using metal to hit each other over the head, the Zhou dynasty Chinese were casting ornate wine vessels big enough to take a bath in—something else no contemporary European had done. Yet, today, China stinks.

Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else. And absence of government doesn’t work, either. For a million years mankind had no government at all, and
everyone’s
relatives were naked in trees. Plain hard work is not the source of plenty. The poorer people are, the plainer and harder is the work that they do. The better-off play golf. And technology provides no guarantee of creature comforts. The most wretched locales in the world are well-supplied with complex and up-to-date technology—in the form of weapons.

Why are some places wealthy and other places poor? It occurred to me, at last, that this might have something to do with money.

But I didn’t know anything about money. I didn’t know anything about money as a practical matter—did I have enough to pay the mortgage? And I didn’t know anything about money in a broad or abstract sense. I certainly didn’t know anything about economic theory. And I wasn’t alone in this.

I couldn’t answer the central question of this book because I was an economic idiot. I got to be an economic idiot by the simple and natural method of being human. Humans have trouble with economics, as you may have noticed, and not just because economic circumstances sometimes cause them to starve. Humans seem to have an innate inability to pay attention to economic principles.

Love, death, and money—these are the three main human concerns. We’re all keen students of love. We are fascinated by every aspect of the matter, in theory and in practice—from precise biological observations of thrusting this and gaping that to ethereal sentimentalities marketed in miles of aisles at Hallmark stores. No variety of love is too trivial for exegesis. No aspect of love is so ridiculous that it hasn’t been exhaustively reviewed by the great thinkers, the great artists, and the great hosts of daytime talk shows.

As for death, such is the public appetite for investigation of the subject that the highest-rated television program in America is about an emergency room. The most hardheaded and unspeculative of persons has his notions of eschatology. The dullest mind can reason extensively about what causes kicking the bucket. Dying sparks our intellectual curiosity.

But money does not. All we care about is the thing itself, preferably in large amounts. We care a very great deal about that. But here our brain work stops. We don’t seem to mind where our money comes from. And, in an affluent society, we don’t even seem to mind where our money goes. As for larger questions about money, we shrug our shoulders and say, “I wish I had more.”

Why is it that we are earnest scholars of amorosity and necrosis but turn as vague and fidgety as a study hall in June when the topic is economics? I have several hypotheses, none of them very good.

Love and death are limited and personal. Even when free love was in vogue, only a certain number of people would allow us to practice that freedom upon them. A pious man in the throes of Christian agape may love every creature in the world, but he’s unlikely to meet them all. And death is as finite as it gets. It has closure. Plus the death ratio is low, only 1:1 in occurrences per person.

Economics happens a lot more often and involves multitudes of people and uncountable goods and services. Economics is just too complicated. It makes our heads ache. So when anything economic goes awry, we respond in a limited and personal way by searching our suit-coat pockets to see if there are any wadded up fives inside. Then we either pray or vote for Democrats, depending on our personal convictions of faith.

Or maybe economics is so ever present, so pervasive in every aspect of our lives that we don’t really perceive it. We fail to identify economics as a distinct entity. We can watch a man slip and fall and almost never hear him say, “God-damned gravity!” And we can watch a man fall ten times and not see him become interested in how gravity works. Almost never does he arise from the eleventh tumble saying, “I went down at a rate of 32ft./sec.
²
—the force being directly proportional to the product of the earth’s mass times my weight and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between that patch of ice on the front steps and my butt.” And so it is with economics. No amount of losing our jobs or our nest eggs sends us to the library for a copy of John Maynard Keynes’s
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

The very pervasiveness of economics keeps us from getting intellectual distance on the subject. We can view death from afar for an average of 72.7 years if we’re a male American, and 79.5 years if we’re a female. Although love is notorious for fuddling the brain, there is matrimony to cool the passions or, failing that, sexual climax will work in the short term. But there is no such thing as a dollargasm. Money is always with us. What am I going to do to take my mind off money? Go shopping? Drink and drugs will cost me. I suppose I can play with the kids. They need new shoes.

Constant money worries have a bad effect on human psychology. I’d argue that there is more unbalanced thinking about finance than about anything else. Death and sex may be the mainstays of psychoanalysis, but note that few shrinks ask to be paid in murders or marriages. People will do some odd things for political or religious reasons, but that’s nothing compared to what people will do for a buck. And if you consider how people spend their dough,
insane
hardly covers it.

Our reactions to cash are nutty even when the cash is half a world away and belongs to perfect strangers. We don’t ridicule people for dying. Or, in our hearts, despise them for fooling around. But let a man get rich—especially if it happens quickly and we don’t understand how he did it—and we can work ourselves into a fit of psychotic rage. We aren’t rational and intelligent about economics because thinking about money has driven us crazy.

I’m as much of a mooncalf as anyone. I certainly had no interest in economics as a kid, as kids don’t. Children—lucky children at least—live in that ideal state postulated by Marx, where the rule is, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Getting grounded equals being sent to a gulag. Dad in high dudgeon is confused with Joseph Stalin. Then we wonder why so many young people are leftists.

I had no interest in economics at college, either. I belonged to that great tradition of academic bohemia which stretches from the fifteenth-century riots of François Villon’s to the Phish tours of the present day. For university hipsters, there is (no doubt Villon mentions this in his
Petit Testament
) nothing more pathetic than taking business courses.

My friends and I were above that. In our classes we studied literature, anthropology, and how to make ceramics. We were seeking, questing, growing. Specifically, we were growing sideburns and leg hair, according to gender. It did not occur to us that the frat-pack dolts and Tri-Delt tweeties, hurrying to get to Econ 101 on time (in their square fashion), were the real intellectuals. We never realized that grappling with the concept of aggregate supply and demand was more challenging than writing a paper about “The Effects of Cool Jazz on the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.” What the L-7’s were being quizzed on was not only harder to understand than Margaret Mead’s theories about necking in Samoa, it was also more important. The engine of existence is fueled by just a few things. Unglazed pottery is not among them.

If the Rah-Rah Bobs and Pin-Me Sallys had been taking Love or Death courses, we would have been right there with them. But money was a different matter. We weren’t interested in money. Actually—what we weren’t interested in was work. Maybe we guessed that it would be a lot of work to b.s. our way out of memorizing such formulae as:

Not that we weren’t up to the task: “Like, price—that equals wasting natural resources and the pollution thing, if you’re into the whole capitalist, monopoly rip-off, man.”

And, of course, we
were
interested in money. I remember we’d get excited whenever we had any. It’s just that we were determined not to earn it. We would never go in search of money. Money was something that would come looking for us after we’d choreographed our world-shattering modern-dance recital or mounted our famous empty-gallery show of preconceptual post-objectivist paintings or when our folk-rock group, Exiles of Dayton, learned to play “Kum Ba Ya.” And we weren’t going to “sell out” no matter how much money was lavished upon us.

Business majors intended to (it was a loaded phrase in those days) “make money,” and they were going to do this even if it involved some activity that wasn’t a bit artistic, such as running IBM. We artsy types would have been shocked if anyone had told us (and no one had the nerve) that making money was creative. And we would have been truly shocked to learn that a fundamental principle of economics—“Wealth is created when assets are moved from lower- to higher-valued uses”—is the root of all creativity, be it artsy, IBMsy, or whatever.

“Putting money first” was crass. It was as if you’d gone to a party with dozens of wild, swinging chicks and, instead of drinking Mateus and making small talk about Jean-Paul Sartre, you just whipped out your unit. Except we would have thought that was a blast. But go into business? Never.

If you don’t count selling drugs. Which we were all doing. We knew everything about price elasticity when it came to pot, not to mention aggregate supply and demand. In point of fact, we hirsute weirdos probably had more real business experience than any business major on campus. And one more thing—we all fancied ourselves to be marxists. As a philosophic recipe, marxism is a cannelloni of the economical, stuffed with economics, and cooked in economic sauce.

Still, we were not interested in economic ideas. And, to be fair, the business majors weren’t, either. Econ was not something they took because they were fascinated by the elegant complexities of economic relationships or because mankind cannot survive without economic activity. They took Econ and forgot everything in the text so they could get a job from somebody else who took Econ and forgot everything in the text.

I turned into a square myself, of course, as everyone who lives long enough does. I got a job as a journalist—but without ever considering that journalism was a business. (Although I would have been unpleasantly surprised to get a hug instead of a paycheck at the end of the week.) And I continued to ignore economic issues even though I had a press pass to the most spectacular extravaganza of economics in this century.

It was the 1970s, and the economy was changing almost as often as bed partners. The Great Depression may have been more dramatic, but it was a one-trick pony. In the ’70s, globalization suddenly included the other three-quarters of the globe. The places that used to make our windup toys were making our automobiles. Everything was being imported—except oil, which had hitherto been given away free with a windshield wash and a set of highball glasses at most brand-name gas stations. Then, one day, you couldn’t buy oil for money. Not that there wasn’t plenty of money around in the ’70s. It just didn’t happen to be worth anything. We had a previously unimaginable combination of fever inflation and hypothermia business slump. You could make more money buying Treasury bills than you could make breaking into the Treasury. The gold standard disappeared from the scene. Maybe it joined a cult. International currency-exchange rates were determined with mood rings. The most powerful nations in the world had, at their helms, an amazing collection of economic nincompoops—Nixon, Carter, Mao, Harold Wilson, Georges Pompidou, Leonid Brezhnev. And the electronic-media revolution was under way so that bad ideas about economics were spreading around the world at neural speed.