A bit about money, plus Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life
I have a new personal finance advice column in Vox today: I plan to retire in 2025. Am I financially prepared?
Nicole Dieker Finley
We're also taking questions for next month's advice column, and we're specifically looking for questions on debt and/or housing, so please submit any questions you might have.
I've been writing about personal finance for well over a decade, and much of what I practice hasn't changed. I'm still frugal; I spent part of yesterday afternoon mending a few flannel shirts that had worn out their seams (these are the same flannel shirts that were featured in this 2015 Billfold post "What I wore to work from home," in case you're curious), and I still track every penny that comes in and out of the household. I pulled my money out of the stock market in 2022; Larry pulled his money out years ago, and now we do CD ladders.
As far as we're concerned, we're financially independent. We can take the gigs we like and go after the work we want, and if there's one thing I'd like to help other people figure out, it's how they can achieve the same level of baseline financial stability.
So –
you know –
ask me questions, and I'll do my best to answer them.
This is as good a point as any to begin our discussion of Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life, and I'm going to go ahead and start with his conclusion because it appears to be applicable whether or not you agree with his politics:
Such being the situation in general, how can the duty and the opportunity of the individual at the present time best be defined? Is he obliged to sit down and wait until the edifying, economic, political, and social transformation has taken place? Or can he by his own immediate behavior do something effectual both to obtain individual emancipation and to accelerate the desirable process of social reconstruction? This question has already been partially answered by the better American individual; and it is, I believe, being answered in the right way. The means which he is taking to reach a more desirable condition of individual independence, and inferentially to add a little something to the process of national fulfillment, consist primarily and chiefly in a thoroughly zealous and competent performance of his own particular job; and in taking this means of emancipation and fulfillment he is both building better and destroying better than he knows.
Croly, like the other objective atheists we've been reading, understands that a functional society needs both producers and workers (those who invent and those who execute, in other words). He also understands that a dysfunctional society derives directly from one or both of these groups attempting to extract unearned value.
He echoes Rand (or, rather, precedes her) by noting that the Founding Fathers' decision to allow slavery was in fact the nation's original sin. Some men acted against their conscience to please or appease others, and now we have a country and culture in which unearned value is taken for granted.
His solution for solving the problem is as straightforward as the solution presented in Atlas Shrugged, although Croly comes at it from a completely different perspective. He proposes a strong central government that can effectively regulate the trades made between producers and workers, ensuring fair value on both sides (this, by the way, could be read as similar to Rand's proposal that the government adjudicate contracts, although Croly's version implies that the government may have a hand in drawing up the contracts). The reason for this regulation can be summed up as follows:
The only way in which work can be made entirely disinterested is to adjust its compensation to the needs of a normal and wholesome human life.
Croly uses the word disinterested repeatedly, and he uses it to mean work that is focused entirely on the result. He notes that American capitalism is, in most cases, the opposite of disinterested; it invites people to play status games based on faddish and nonsensical acquisitions, and it encourages both producers and workers to make unfair trades. It also invites the presence of the middleman who is there to negotiate unfair trades, seduce both sides into compliance, and claim a bit of the transaction for himself.
Therefore – and here's where you're going to say "that's an awfully big therefore" – all workers must earn the equivalent of not only a living wage but a comfortable living wage, so that neither worker nor employer will be tempted to cheat to get ahead. This has the added benefit of eliminating conspicuous consumption, since nobody will be required to perform premium mediocrity (as Venkatesh Rao puts it) and nobody will have an incentive to flaunt excess wealth. Instead, we'll all work together towards excellence.
That's it, by the way.
That's the whole thing.
There's a bit about Hamilton vs. Jefferson that's worth reading (he's Team Hamilton) and an analysis of how populism develops (when a group of men who have moderate competency in many things but no great skill in any one thing get together, etc.) and an argument that there should be as few elections as possible, with the majority of government made up of public servants hired and retained on their ability to complete excellent work. There are also some interesting ideas on how unions could function more effectively, if you're interested in that kind of thing – which brings me to one of the other more interesting quotes in the book:
Like all good Americans, while verbally asking for nothing but equal rights, they interpret the phrase so that equal rights become equivalent to special rights.
Those two words – "special rights" – are what psychologist Alfred Adler considers the source of all neurosis, which is to say the source of all that disconnects us with both our abilities and the people around us. The Adlerian philosophy, which I still consider one of the best systems around which to orient one's mind, is as follows:
- I have the ability to work towards life.
- Other people are neither above me nor below me.
But to understand that you may want to read Adler's The Science of Living (and, for a more contemporary interpretation, Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi's The Courage to Be Disliked and The Courage to Be Happy).
Tomorrow I'll give you a bit more MELISANDE.