"Be a Damn Fool"

 A friend of mine works as a freelance instructor in the gig economy of online teaching, and one of his more memorable assignments took him to an address in the suburbs. His curiosity was piqued when he arrived at the address to find a monumental front gate. This led, upon opening, to a winding drive, then to an enormous fountain set before a palatial mansion. The wonders of this Xanadu did not cease from there. Inside were a full-time staff. There was a private helipad on the roof. And so on. 

The family within appeared, in short, to be living a life of unfathomable luxury. My friend and I of course were desperate to learn their story, so we pieced together as much as we could through research online. It turned out the father had owned a successful business in California that he had just sold for a small fortune. Some portion of it—we did not know how much—had obviously gone directly into the down payment on this castle. 

What became of their enviable lot? I'm sorry to report a perhaps unsurprising conclusion. A few months later, while my friend was still working for them, the family moved out and the house went up for sale. Perhaps the fortune from the sale of the business had been sufficient to cover the purchase price of the house. But perhaps it was not quite sufficient to cover the millions of dollars in taxes, staff costs, upkeep and maintenance expenses that came with it. Think of the task of cleaning that fountain alone!

There but for the grace of God go we all. There is a scene in William Gaddis's National Book Award-winning encyclopedic novel of 20th century American capitalism, J R, in which the eponymous character takes a school trip with his classmates to Wall Street, in order to buy their first stock certificates and thereby obtain "a share in America." When they surprise a few adult financiers in the men's room, one of their elders springs a trap on the boys to test their financial instincts:

"What would you do with a million dollars, you tell me that?"

"Me?" replies the boy (possibly JR?), in typically Gaddisian unattributed dialogue. "First I'd get this great big place with like these electric fences and..."

"Be a damn fool too wouldn't you," interrupts the executive. "You in this class of Mrs Joubert's are you? Mean she's never told you the only damn time you spend money's to make money?"

The interchange, like the rest of his visit to Wall Street, makes a big impression on J R; whether he is the one being quoted above or not. But it is the sort of financial advice that sinks in for most of us only after it is too late. The one-time owners of that palatial estate in the suburbs, for instance, only learned this truth after they had squandered a fortune on upkeep. As much as Gaddis is satirizing the bromides of American capitalism, therefore, we can't avoid the fact that the financier utters a prudential truth. 

A professor of mine recently told the class about a book I haven't read from the 'Nineties, The Millionaire Next Door, which supports the financier's intuition. Apparently, the authors found through a survey of high –net worth Americans that a statistical majority of them lived in low-cost blue-collar neighborhoods, drove cheap cars, and dressed down. Upper middle class professionals, meanwhile, were likely to have relatively less money in the bank, because a large part of their income went to luxury items. 

It would seem, then, that Weber's "worldly asceticism," which he found at the root of the capitalist order, is still alive and well. It may be hard for many of us to accept this. We tend to regard wealth as a synonym for indulgence—and indeed, as Böhm-Bawerk records in his history of credit, the theory of the ascetic capitalist was an object of much vituperative satire on the part of 19th century socialists. The rich capitalist, with their piles of gold—they are a kind of naked stylite on a pole? 

However implausible it may sound, however, the statistics bear it out. America's millionaires—at least as of the tail end of the last century—were overwhelmingly those who carried out the instructions of Gaddis's financier. They were only spending money to make money—i.e., investing—and otherwise were being scrupulously parsimonious. 

The cruel irony of it is, of course, that many of us spend ourselves into the ground on luxury items precisely because we assume they are the ones used by the rich, and therefore must be high in prestige. 

I confess that I went through a phase over the past few years, and especially during the worst of the pandemic, in which I spent more of my paycheck than I should have on expensive clothes. The fact would surprise friends and family who regard me as the unworldly and anti-materialistic one. All I can say is that I made these purchases not really because I valued the objects so much in themselves; and I was usually too embarrassed to wear them outside the house, so the motive couldn't have been to impress others either. 

Rather, this pandemic-era habit was prompted by the relentless quest for dopamine. Finding oneself for the first time in life with some disposable income, beyond one's bare needs for housing, medical insurance, and food, one casts around for what to do with it. Surely, this is why money exists, right? This is why people want it so badly: so we can buy stuff. But is there any stuff we actually want? Finding stuff worth buying is harder than one thinks. 

But I would buy things anyway, just to feel that I was treating myself, that I had some ability to reward myself when I was feeling low or had just completed a stressful project, and so as to enjoy the rush of anticipation—the sense of having something to look forward to—that comes from knowing that a package with something expensive inside is winging its way to one's door. 

Now that I am a student again, a greater degree of parsimony is becoming a necessity once more, however. And, with the help of J R's financier, I can perhaps make of it a virtue. One discovers, after all, that the same sense of suspended gratification that derives from spending money and waiting for a package to arrive can come from not spending it too. 

Human satisfaction derives from the exercise of the will. Nietzsche saw the ascetic as a kind of athlete, pursuing power in their own way as much as the hedonist is, but with one key difference: they have turned their will to power inward, to focus on the mastery of the self. If we spend in part just because we are bored, dopamine-deprived, and looking for a way to do something, therefore, then challenging ourselves to do nothing, especially when that's hard for us, can be a way to do something as well. 

And if we derive dopamine from the sense of suspended anticipation that comes from knowing that a package is on its way—think how long that gratification can be delayed by waiting decades for an incremental stock market rise!