In This Together
This is the fourteenth short story from my book, You Can Change the World, Even if You’re A Nobody which is based on people’s responses to the question, “If you could be God, how would you change the world.” I chose this story now because it feels timely in this Covid19 era.
***
Hank is a successful, independent financial manager. I have watched him start and grow his business over the past thirty years. His story is about hard work, the nature of success, and the luck of the draw.
Hank began his business career following his dad in the banking business. After ten years working as a loan officer, then a vice president, he struck out on his own to become a private money manager. Getting started wasn’t easy. Many times he wondered if he had done the right thing quitting his steady job. Now, by himself, Hank manages an impressive amount of his clients’ money and produces exceptional returns.
You might expect him to be a conservative thinker, and he is when it comes to managing money. In his personal life, however, he is a passionate progressive.
I told him about my book and explained my theory about dreaming the impossible to discover the less-impossible. Then I asked him what he would do if he could be God. He took a few days to think about it, then we got together over lunch and he told me his ideas.
“What concerns me is the same thing that worries a lot of economists,” he began. “It’s the growing gap between rich and poor. Most of my clients come from stable families, a few from old money. They are intelligent, educated, and able to imagine their futures. Many also had a lot of help achieving those futures. Contrast that with being born as a minority in the inner city or rural America or trying to find work as a migrant laborer coming from Mexico or Central America.”
“So, if you could be God, what would you do about it?”
“I know this will sound naive to some, but you asked me to step outside my box. So this is what I would do if I could be God. I’d take all of the people who have had the breaks in life and support to help them succeed, and I would swap their lives with people who never had opportunities or help, but who work their asses off just to stay afloat.”
“What would that achieve?”
“Empathy. It would teach the wealthy how hard it is to succeed in this world when you are born poor. People who live in gated communities are cloistered, disconnected from the poor. They have no way to feel the desperation of not being able to pay the rent or buy new tires for their 15-year-old car. Most people have no idea what it’s like to live on the streets, or in a shelter. The wealthy don’t ride the bus to work or walk to work or even worry about work.”
“What do they worry about?”
“They worry about losing their wealth. They don’t want to be poor. Nobody does, and that fear says a lot. The definition of success for people who live at the poverty level — and that includes forty million people according to the latest census numbers — is a highschool education. Very few can afford anything beyond that, including a community college education. Poor people don’t have the connections to get into an Ivy League school or even afford the cost of a state university. Sure, there are exceptions, but I’m talking about the masses of poor people, not the few dozens who get into Princeton on a Gates scholarship.”
“Would this life switch be permanent?”
“No, but I would make them believe it was, otherwise it wouldn’t have much effect. I’m not inclined to punish people. I just want people of means, those who have always had means, or been poor to know what it’s like to struggle. You can learn empathy by walking a mile in someone’s shoes, but all that means to some people is that you are now a mile away and have a new pair of shoes. Becoming suddenly poor is only instructive if you feel trapped.”
“You said there are exceptions. What about people who succeeded from nothing? I know a lot of people who believe that success is possible for anyone willing to work hard enough. What do you think about that?”
“Let’s say I become the mayor of my city. A mayor’s term is four years. In a hundred years only twenty-five people can be mayor. Anyone with a brain can see how absurd it is to say anyone can be the mayor of their city. It’s equally absurd to say anyone can succeed if they work hard enough. Barack Obama became president. That doesn’t mean every black man has the potential to become president. In the history of this country, that office has been held by a tiny number of people. When we say anyone can succeed if they work hard enough — that’s also relative.
How often do you hear a poor person say anyone can succeed? Most can’t imagine such a thing.
And for others, success may be going to college or buying a modest home, which is also becoming unaffordable.”
“You said you aren’t out to punish the rich for their success. What do you want them to learn.”
“I want to alter their belief system, to discover that success has a lot to do with the luck of the draw, not just hard work. Much wealth in this country has been passed down through generations. And it is highly concentrated. We have four hundred billionaires in this country. Did you know that?”
“I didn’t.”
“Eighty percent of the stock market value is owned by twenty percent of all investors. That concentration of wealth is dangerous to the future of this country.”
“How so?”
“Too much power controlled by too few. You know the Golden Rule.”
“He who owns the gold makes the rules.”
“Forget about ‘power to the people’. Have you seen Les Misérables the play or the film? Or read Victor Hugo’s book?”
“I’ve seen the play and the film. I haven’t read the book.”
“Hugo’s book was not intended to be a musical. It’s about the dangers posed by a concentration of wealth and power.”
“Wasn’t the book published after the French Revolution?”
“Yes, about ten years after, in 1862, but Hugo began writing it years earlier around 1832 because he deplored the trend he saw in France. The French Revolution happened in 1848, and the chaos opened the door for Napoleon to rise to power in 1852. Hugo lived in self-exile for seventeen years after Napoleon came to power. The French Revolution was caused in part by the disenfranchisement of the middle and lower classes. Only landholders were permitted to vote. The country was ruled by the financial aristocracy including bankers, stock exchange magnates, railroad barons, and landowners. Does that sound familiar?”
“It does. Didn’t de Tocqueville also write about the growing problem of inequality in France? I recall he said the French were sleeping together in a volcano.”
That’s right. He predicted that the lower classes would erupt in revolt.”
“ Are you worried about that happening here?”
“It happens in every society that is out of economic balance. A few years ago we called it the Arab Spring. The desire for economic equality is burning around the world. Natural ecosystems seek balance and so do human societies. Russia is dominated by oligarchs who bought up that nation’s resources for pennies on the dollar from the peasants when the Soviet Union was broken up and the assets supposedly divided. Now, the average Russian owns next to nothing. Read Red Notice to learn how that happened.”
“I’ll check it out. First, I’d like you to go back to what you said about wealth being the luck of the draw.”
“Most wealth is about being in the right place at the right time. It’s about where you were born, the parents you got or maybe a lucky investment your parents made. Your success could also result from a chance meeting with someone who knows someone with influence who can help you. Friends take care of friends. But what if you don’t have any influential friends?”
“You must have some clients who came from meager beginnings. Were they just lucky?”
“Many of my clients are doctors and other professionals, and some with trust funds. The professionals made their money from hard work, but very few came from nothing. It takes money to pay for medical school or law school or to get any kind of college degree. I am willing to bet that luck was even more important for the ones that did raise themselves out of poverty.”
“What kind of luck?”
“Exceptional intelligence or talent — or sitting on land that was worthless until a petroleum engineer invented fracking. If you were lucky enough to own land in the Bakken Formation in North Dakota, you receive royalties from the oil companies drilling for oil and gas on your otherwise worthless property. Who could have imagined that? If you own farmland and grow corn, who could have dreamed you would receive a government subsidy to produce corn to power cars? These things have nothing to do with your talents or hard work. It’s the luck of the draw.”
“But you started with nothing and now you’re successful. That wasn’t luck.”
“Sure it was. I had great parents and a father who educated me about money. I was lucky to be born with a good mind, but I didn’t earn my intelligence. I’m naturally curious. I didn’t choose curiosity. Maybe I was born with a curiosity gene. My parents encouraged me to explore. We know that some people are better equipped to succeed. We’re not all playing on a level field with the same equipment. IQ is not a function of hard work.”
“What about people with average IQs? Won’t hard work help them succeed?”
“Of course. Bill Clinton reportedly has an IQ of about 140, and George Bush has an IQ of about 125. I don’t know if these numbers are factual, but assuming they are true, it shows that IQ is not the only factor determining success. Whatever you think of their politics or their character, both men had to work hard to reach the presidency, but one had a substantial head start. I’ll let you decide which one.
“The average IQ in the U.S. is 100. Imagine how many folks are below 100 to make 100 the average. How does someone with an IQ of 70 compete with a 130? Nature is not fair. That’s why we need to feel empathy for people who are entering the human race fifty yards behind the starting line.”
“How important is liking what you do? Being passionate?”
“Liking what you do is a huge factor in success. You and I may feel that we work hard, but would you trade what you do for working on a numbing assembly line or bent over on hands and knees thinning sugar beets or picking lettuce or stacking hay in a dusty barn or unloading railroad cars by hand? Or coding? It’s very difficult for a poor person to make enough money to reach escape velocity to transcend their circumstances and enjoy the luxury of doing what they love. It’s one of the reasons middle America is turning to drugs — to numb the lost sense of purpose.”
“What about supply and demand? Isn’t that how the marketplace works?”
“Sure, and there is a lot of luck involved in beating the market. Why should you get more of the pie because you’re inordinately lucky? The ‘strong survive’ is a philosophy that works in the jungle, but we are supposed to be an evolved species.”
“What about lottery winners? Should they have to share their winnings with the rest of us? Didn’t they take a risk that paid off?”
“Sure, and the government does take half of the lottery winnings in taxes to share with the rest of us. But, how tax money is spent is also decided by rich people, many of whom resent giving it to poor people. I have to laugh every time I hear rich people complain about income redistribution. The greatest income redistribution goes to the wealthy through low long-term capital gains tax rates.”
I said, “The lottery winner also shares his good fortune by buying things that other people make and need to sell. The money gets spread around naturally.”
“Of course,” Hank answered, “and the lottery winner is more proof that luck plays a role in success. Some neuroscientists also think ambition may be a function of hormones and brain chemistry. That’s luck, too. But what if you are born without ambition, or have parents who never cared about you? When all is said and done, people do what they want, and some will make bad choices regardless of their opportunities.
But if I were God, I would make sure that everyone had enough opportunity to overcome the bad luck of being born in the wrong place, at the wrong time to the wrong parents.”
“That sounds like social engineering,” I said. “I thought you were a libertarian.”
“I know my plan of swapping lives is an impossible idea. It just makes me feel better to think I’d be doing something to decrease the indifference some rich people feel for the poor. You’re always talking about using the impossible to discover the less-impossible.”
“What is your less-impossible?”
“Empathy. I know it’s impossible to swap lives. It’s less-impossible to choose to support fair tax rates. If we can empathize with the poor and especially the homeless, we’ll have a better chance of understanding their needs the next time someone brings up increasing the minimum wage or expanding Medicaid.”
I countered, “I don’t know many wealthy people who feel superior to the poor.”
“But you know people who think people are poor because they’re lazy or believe unemployment compensation discourages people from finding work. I’m sure in some cases it does, but some people make it sound like being out of work and collecting an unemployment check is a vacation. In most states, these payments amount to less than half of what recipients were making in their jobs. Could you live on that? If you’re working for minimum wage and you get laid off because a company is cutting back, you collect half of your minimum wage. Would you willingly take a fifty percent pay cut? Would you trade places with somebody who couldn’t find a job? What about health insurance? How would you pay the rent? What if your child needs a tooth filled or glasses or expensive medicine? The things we take for granted are monumental problems for poor people.”
“I understand.”
“I can’t even imagine what twenty million unemployed people would do if they had no safety net. How would they live? Can you see the legions of beggars hanging out at freeways on the off-ramps? When we are hit with weather disasters, the victims need help, and we understand that. We don’t blame them for the storms. But many people blame the poor because they think poverty is their fault. In many, if not most cases, it’s the luck of the draw, but people quote the exceptions to make a case that poor people just made bad choices, and that’s absurd.”
“What about people who abuse the system? They could work, but would rather scam the welfare programs.”
“The people who scam the welfare system are not your average poor people struggling to make ends meet. These scams are perpetrated by professional thieves and medical personnel that know how to cheat on a massive scale. These criminals exist among the poor and the rich alike. Scam artists like Bernard Madoff and Charles Ponzi exist at every level of society.”
“What about the two Boston Marathon bombers? Their family received all sorts of government assistance. Was that right?”
“That is such an isolated case, such an anomaly, it isn’t worth discussing. It’s a sound bite used to stir up resentment for immigration policy and to tarnish programs that help immigrants settle in this country. Besides, who do you think profits most from that government assistance?”
“Who?”
“The supermarkets and merchants like Walmart and all the various dollar stores that provide goods and services to immigrants.”
“So, you’re saying we are okay compensating victims of disasters, or investors who lose money, so why not the poor and immigrants?”
“The only real difference is that we feel justified compensating victims of natural disasters because we feel empathy for them. They own houses. We own houses. We belong to the same economic tribe. We can imagine ourselves needing similar support at some point. But we also pick and choose who receives aid based on their guilt or innocence.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone who buys a house on a hill may not readily empathize with someone who buys on the banks of a river, where there is a risk of flooding. Some people believe if you lose your job because of a bank meltdown or a merger, you should have been more careful about where you worked, or you should have seen a disaster coming and stepped out of the way. If a tornado cuts a swath through your living room, you should have lived somewhere else. But the fact is, we are a society reliant on one another. We are all in this together, dependent on one another.”
“How do you feel about paying higher taxes because of your empathy?”
“I hate taxes, but given the choice between landing in the highest tax bracket or the lowest, I’ll take the highest.”
“You care to explain that?”
“If I’m paying a lot of taxes, it means I’m making a lot of money.”
“You earned that money, too. You worked hard, educated yourself, took a risk leaving a safe job. You sacrificed to get where you are. You’re a self-made man.”
“Self-made? No such thing. ‘The cream rises to the top,’ is another silly cliché. Where would the cream be without the milk to support it? Don’t let anyone kid you. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us and struggle beside us. We’re all in this together. The wider the divide between rich and poor, the harder it is for the poor to feel life is fair. In the same way, inequality between partners can destroy a marriage. If one partner feels the other isn’t doing their fair share of caring for the home and the children, what happens to the marriage?”
“Either they work it out so everyone is happy or they divorce.”
“Exactly my point.”
***
Talking with Hank is always interesting. He makes connections I don’t always think about. He’s a devout capitalist, but that doesn’t make him heartless. In a world of seven billion people, he is a nobody, like you and me. But in his community, among the people he serves, he is a celebrity. His clients depend on him for their futures.
We talked a little about what is called rampant consumerism, the need to buy things that we don’t necessarily need, but want. He asked what would happen if people stopped buying stuff? The result is, people would stop making stuff, so a lot of people would be out of work. Who pays for their food and housing and education then?
He said we are stuck in this merry-go-round of making and buying because we don’t have a desirable alternative. Yes, if we stop making cars we can all ride bicycles to work or the park, but what about the people who used to make cars? Where do they work? When the merry-go-round stops, everyone will have to get off.
Hank is a pragmatist who thinks like an idealist. He knows it’s impossible to change a person’s point of view by artificially flipping their station in life. His less-impossible vision of the world is easier to comprehend. In Hank’s world, we would all get equal helpings of success and compassion. He says not everyone will have the ambition, the connections or the resources to achieve their dream of success, but compassion is a choice open and free to all of us.
