Billionaires

In my career, I’ve met more than a few billionaires.  Without exception, they have been unpleasant people.  I mean in saying that that they are not the type of people that, as one might say, you’d “want to have a beer with” or “play a round of golf”.  In fact I played a round of golf with a billionaire – it was a charity event, my company was sponsoring it, and for various reasons it ended up that I was the executive sent out on tour – and he cheated ruthlessly.  He had a member of his entourage who giggled a lot whenever he did so, even when I glared at him, and the tournament director who shared my cart just thanked me for putting up with it.  Apparently this happened every year.

Anyway, I bring this up because I asked a friend recently what she thought of Mike Bloomberg entering the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, and she flew into a kind of texting rage.  She would, if required, grit her teeth and vote for him in the general election if the alternative was Trump, but it would not be a happy vote.  I was somewhat taken aback by the intensity of the emotion, but in general I just filed it away.

This weekend, however, I was listening to Sunday Edition, the lovely three-hour weekend morning CBC radio program hosted by Michael Enright, and he had a short five minute piece about the idea that there would soon likely be a trillionaire on earth.  He spoke about the first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, and his tight-fisted destruction of competitors, labor, and government in his quest to acquire.  He ended up doing very little with his wealth except to bequeath it – his children and grandchildren did nearly all of the giving to which the Rockefeller name is now equated – and Enright ended the piece with a question from his son: Is it moral to acquire that much wealth – a billion, a few hundred billion, a trillion?  Enright, despite implying for most of the essay that such acquisitiveness is at best somewhat squirm-inducing, left us hanging.  He did not have a response.

I’m not sure my Bloomberg-disliking friend would answer that it is, in fact, immoral to accumulate such wealth, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the question, and about the fact that the truly rich people I have met have, with extremely rare exceptions, all been assholes to a greater or lesser degree.  Now being an asshole is immoral: if you are mean, if you treat people poorly, with disrespect, then you are immoral.  One can argue about what different kinds of morality you are violating in total but at a basic level you are guilty of believing yourself to be better than others, despite all evidence to the contrary.  So one thing I was trying to work out is, are you immoral through the act of acquiring money (or the fact that you have money – noting that a few billionaires I’ve known have inherited their money), or are you just immoral and you’d be that way if you were a garden-variety millionaire or even middle class.

I think, actually, that assholes are assholes regardless of their personal wealth.  But because of the incredibly small number of people who are extremely rich and who are not bad people, I think there is some causality at work.  The decision to try and acquire wealth is an interesting one: it is a conscious choice.  And it is a choice which de-emphasizes the non-wealth value of doing any particular thing well.

Say, for example, you’re a chef.  You like making good food, so you open a restaurant – maybe it’s an Italian restaurant, we’ll call it Luigi’s, and since I’m feeling nostalgic for London these days, let’s say it’s in Greenwich, which could really use a good Italian place, especially since Jamie Oliver’s went bankrupt (not that it was that great anyway).  Because you’re a good cook and you put your heart and soul into it, and also because the market is right and people are into it and whatever, it does well, and you’re making a nice income.  You decide hey, I’d like to open another restaurant.  Now, at that moment, you’re probably thinking one of two things:

1. My current restaurant in making a good income, but I could make more if I had a second restaurant, OR…
2. My current restaurant is doing really well and making people happy, so I don’t want to pull out the rug on my customers, but I’d really like the challenge of a second restaurant.

Reason #1 is fine – there’s no reason you shouldn’t be rewarded for hard work and a good idea, even if the value is just in cloning the idea in the next town.  And Reason #2 is just fine too – say your first restaurant specializes in Italian food, but you’ve always wanted to open a Lebanese restaurant or a BBQ shack.  It’s no great effort to figure out that putting Italian and Texas brisket with traditional sides on the same menu is just going to confuse everyone, so if you want to diversify, you’ll probably open restaurant two.

Interestingly, though, both decisions will lead to reduced focus on Luigi’s.  If you’re opening restaurant two for Reason #1 – you’ll open a Pinocchio’s in Hampstead, or maybe Hackney.  You’ll focus less on Luigi’s – you’ll let it ride its own momentum for a bit – while you focus on getting the crowds of North London to see Pinocchio’s for the jewel that it is.  And since you’re really in it for the dosh, you’ll probably adjust the Luigi’s formula to get more custom in the new restaurant, just as you were subconsciously adjusting your cooking and plating and menu at Luigi’s all along in order to get the good people of Greenwich to keep coming back.  Over time, after all, the fact that you brought your love of cooking to the place lost its prominence as you sought to maximize income, eventually to the point of opening Pinocchio’s in order to double the potential profits.

If you open the second restaurant for Reason #2, well, you’ll still lose some focus.  Because you’re not going to be directly competing with Luigi’s, you might open it close to Greenwich or even in the same area, only Lonesome Pete’s BBQ will obviously be attracting a different diner than someone in the mood for Luigi’s fantastic linguini al’vognole.  Your distraction level, therefore, will be a distraction based on the craft of cooking, not on the acquisition of profit as it would be in opening Pinocchio’s for Reason #1.  You will lose focus, but for a reason directly related to the craft object of running a restaurant, as opposed for a reason related to the profit object of running a business.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing inherently wrong with opening your second restaurant for Reason #1 or Reason #2.  And it might be a mix of the two as well: restaurants are inherently risky, so even if you love first and foremost the craft of cooking and serving food, if you have a successful first restaurant, you might want to open a second restaurant both to cook different food and to diversify the risk of having just one, Italian-centric restaurant in Greenwich (after all, cuisines fall in and out of fashion – who knows how long Luigi’s will capture the southeast London diners’ imaginations?).  But, I would argue, your relative balance of Reason #1 – the profit object – and Reason #2 – the craft object – is going to translate over time into a difference in your approach to being a chef and restaurateur overall.  It will translate into a different moral stance towards the world.

Let’s continue with this theoretical daisy chain: in our first universe, Pinocchio’s does very well indeed, and Luigi’s continues its run as Greenwich’s favorite spot for a bit of pasta and maybe some branzini if you’re feeling flush.  You realize you’ve got a good thing going here, and that west London – or maybe some likely high street in Royal Tunbridge Wells or Reigate or the like – could definitely use a new “upscale Italian restaurant concept.”  Maybe restaurant #3 will be also called Pinocchio’s – makes it easier to think downstream about franchising and marketing synergies – or maybe you call it Maria’s, the idea being to have diners think of each restaurant as being unique and therefore “authentic.” You’ve got more travel now, keeping tabs on each restaurant, and by definition you’re going to be ceding more on-site authority to the actual chef in each location.

You have, in reality, strapped on skis and are sliding down a slippery slope towards real wealth, and in so doing, you’ve dematerialized entirely your role as a chef or cook.  I’m sure you still impress your friends on weekends, whipping up an insanely delicious five course Saturday evening gourmand feast or a Sunday roast of truly epicurean proportions, but day to day, you’re now interested almost solely on the profit object of running a business, which happens to be that of cooking food for people who will pay to have it served to them in very nice surroundings.  Food and cooking have now become fully alienated to you, except insofar as you retain a personal, non-business connection with it in your own home.  And in the slow but inexorable conversion of customers to units, of meals to vectors of cost and price, of people actually liking your craft to a customer engagement score, you’ve dehumanized the craft that got you started in the world in the first place.

Go back, though, and look at Reason #2: Lonesome Pete’s BBQ is doing well and so is Luigi’s.  You’re getting the itch to open a third restaurant, and maybe you have the bandwidth to do it – but if you’re really devoted to the craft object of being a chef, you’ll probably start asking “well, if I open my Lebanese place that I’ve always wanted to try out, what will happen to Luigi’s?”  You know the answer: it’ll probably start that long, slow slide to mediocrity that happens when a devoted artist decides on too many new projects.  You might sell Luigi’s to a new chef who really wants to try some new ideas – Italian cuisine is pretty innovative, after all, and since you’ve been focusing on slow-cooked brisket and perfecting your tangy jalapeno slaw, you haven’t been as up on things on the Amalfi coast as you were back when Luigi’s was the only object of your chef-ly love.  Or you might close Luigi’s and reuse the space for Cedars, serving the best lamb shashlik and tabouleh in all of Greenwich.

But you’ll think of the balance primarily in terms of craft, not in terms of profit.  Again, by no means will profit be irrelevant – you still need to pay the mortgage(s), and your employees, and council tax, and you still have a right to want a nice vacation every now and again – but it’s about what is primary in your mind as you make the decision to expand, or change, or grow.

I’m convinced that billionaires become billionaires – and stay billionaires – primarily by having little to no interest in the craft objects in life.  If we speak in terms of ethics first, then this is clearly unethical in a classical, Aristotelean sense: ethical individuals make a balanced choice between extremal choice boundaries.  Here we have that kind of a boundary: pure craft object choice would lead towards a rejection of the tangible world outside of one’s craft, while pure profit object choice would degrade everything and everyone in pursuit of profit.

For our chef, a pure craft object would mean running the “pure” restaurant of his ideal regardless of whether anyone showed up and paid or not.  It might be that that would create a kind of a cult and profit would come along with it, but experience tells us that no, 98% of the time, it just leads to a bankrupt restaurant.  The pure profit object devolves into, well, Applebee’s: restaurant as franchise, with ingredients sourced solely with respect to cost and with service driven by turnover, the only nod to quality being the bare minimum required to not drive people away at what is already the lowest price point possible.

An ethical individual would balance the two – like the owner of Luigi’s opening Lonesome Pete’s.  He (let’s face it, I’m imagining myself here, so I’ll use the male gender referent) wants to have a decent income and not feel constant fear of creeping bankruptcy, so he’s going to make some compromises to his recipes, his decor, whatever, to make sure there’s a decent margin.  But he’s also not going to just try to carbon copy his first idea and drive towards an upscale Italian dining concept.  And the ethical restaurateur would have to make a decision: do I open Cedars and close one of either Luigi’s or Lonesome Pete’s?  Or do I hold off for awhile on Cedars, saving up some money, and maybe selling one of the two restaurants to free up my focus on those yummy lamb kebabs and buying that wood-fired oven for flatbread?

The billionaire in shadow, however, is already cutting corners.  Food is yummy but money is better.  Over time the flat taste of the food coming out of her kitchens won’t matter, because she’ll be paying others, who are still trying to hold dear to craft, to cook for her.  Meanwhile, the world will compress towards mediocrity.

So the ethical individual will balance craft and profit objects: but is there a morality here?  And here it requires that we define what we mean by morality.  For me, the moral choice is the one that seeks to balance not just the single dimension of the ethic in question, akin to how Aristotle defines things in the Nichomachean Ethics, but also seeks to balance the outcomes several levels removed from the impact on ourselves.  Morality, in other words, is a public act: it acknowledges that even private actions have public implications, and thus requires us to ask what impact we will have on the polis, either by direct impact or by the subtle influence that our actions create in others.

The morality of the billionaire is destructive to the polis, because it signals that the objectification of craft into profit is somehow acceptable.  It signals that craft is, in fact, not important at all – and goes further in that it trends inexorably towards the creation of mediocrity in craft, towards the least common denominator in craft.

Now, lots of billionaires do not traffic at all in craft: Enright’s Rockefeller, for example, made his money in oil, a commodity, and there is no craft in commodities.  But those are rare, and if anything, their rarity focuses us on the fact that billionaire fortunes made in commodities are just as immoral as those made in fast casual franchising.  It argues, if anything, for a wealth tax – because these fortunes are never made in a moral way, let alone an ethical way, and thus, why should they be privileged by being treated as though they were the same as the nest egg of a school teacher?

I think my friend is right to be somewhat revolted by Bloomberg – and it’s why I’m rather pleased that Amtrak Joe wiped him clean this past Tuesday.  For there is craft in politics as well, there is craft in the difficult engagement in compromise and debate and policy that creates a democratic society with governance better than that of Rome.  It is not about a focus on profit, on the end point of power, but on the subtle appreciation of doing what one can to further the polis, and the people, without significant regard for what may come.  It’s harder to identify the craftspeople in politics, partially because I think they aren’t attracted to it, but also because the temptations of power are so great.  It’s a lot like finding the craftspeople in banking – and actually, it’s even harder there.

But we exist.  Seriously, we do.

In any event, yes, the act of creating a billion dollar (or euro or pound, maybe less so loonie) fortune almost without exception involves at some point a conscious, immoral decision to favor the profit object for oneself over both the craft object personally and over its broader positive implications across society.  I don’t necessarily have any ideas today on how to prevent it, but that shouldn’t stop us from identifying and calling out an evil.  J’accuse, Monsieur Bloomberg, and to all of your ilk.  And tonight I’m having sushi at Kisaku in Wallingford.  They get the joke.