Ruminations on Wealth, Self-Worth

Friday, 30 October 2009

Money issues are self-esteem issues. A friend of mine walks his baby daughter on the lake shore path along Lake Michigan. He told me he was thinking about Bill Gates and all the money the man is worth. Fifty billion dollars give or take.

Then he thinks of all the people in the world who are starving. He imagines a father somewhere in Africa, for example, with a sick daughter who can not afford adequate care to make his daughter healthy.

One person has all the money in the world. The other person has nothing.

“You and I are rich,” he says, comparing us to the penniless fathers and mothers around the world.

“You and I?” he says. “We do not worry like this.”

We associate wealth with a specialized knowledge; better said, with what the market will bear. We think, for example, “He’s smart,” that becoming a medical doctor, or an accountant, or a computer programmer or manager of a hedge fund; over time, this knowledge enables him to make a lot of money, to always have health insurance, to be able to pay exorbitant tuition fees for the education of his children.

But the majority of the people in the world do not have these opportunities. And it is short-sighted to assume that the unfortunate majority in the world are less talented, less knowledgeable, less capable. Opportunities merely and simply do not knock.

Bill Gates has a foundation, for example. He puts his money to good use. What is not so evident is that it would be unenviable for him not to have a foundation.

Think about it.

“Yes,” my friend answers. “The inequitable nature of it all points to failure. It is failure of a high magnitude.”

And we all have opinions and no real solutions.

Every minute around the world someone thinks, oh, he or she has a huge amount of money. He or she must know better than the rest of us; he or she earned the opportunity to pursue this specialized knowledge, the vision and the expertise that we do not have, and therefore he or she should have this huge amount of money; because the rest of us, the society, depends on this knowledge for our greater well-being; because, if it were up to us (and thank goodness it’s not), we did not prove motivated enough somehow in the way we should have been motivated to obtain this knowledge ourselves, etc…

The logic is fundamentally flawed; indeed, immature and cyclical in its framework.

It makes you wonder what an accountant or doctor would honestly conclude in the analysis of our collective self-esteem? (Inquiring minds want to know).

People without means, without power, get crushed. Those who have-not and who rise up against all odds, in almost every case, get crushed. Fathers and Mothers struggle for their family’s survival. And the image of despair keeps the majority of us immobilized in fear.

Opportunity? The majority of us will simply go without for a lifetime.

There is failure in the system, as my friend says. Failure somewhere.

It’s not that simple, you say?

It is that simple.