Long-Term Money
Adam Smith, the 18th century economist, wrote that it’s not uncommon to meet a mother in the Scottish highlands “who has born twenty children not to have two alive.”
That was life. And it hardly mattered whether you were rich or poor. Queen Anne of England had 18 children, not a single one of whom made it to adulthood. American president James Garfield died in 1881 in part because the best doctor in the country was not yet a believer in germs. Two weeks before his death, Franklin Roosevelt’s blood pressure was 260/150, and his doctors could hardly do a thing; basic blood pressure medicine didn’t exist.
If you could show any of these people a modern grocery store, they would faint from disbelief. They could not comprehend that the biggest challenge of grocery shopping is deciding which of the 19 brands of jelly to buy, or that in January you can buy papayas in Minnesota. But most shocking would be the pharmacy in the back, which they would find magical.
And what would their response be?
I don’t think it would be, “You are so amazing.”
It would be along the lines of, “You are so spoiled.”
They would watch us getting frustrated at having to wait in line at the pharmacy and scoff at how unappreciative we are for the magic pills that await us.
They couldn’t fathom that we complain about the price of food rather than being gobsmacked at the mere possibility of abundance.
The irony is that every generation toils and innovates to create a more prosperous world for their heirs. But when you watch those future generations interact with their world, your feelings can shift from pride to disappointment. Our kids won’t suffer in the same ways we did, and they won’t even appreciate it.
It’s a common problem. Wealthy families wonder how they can support their kids without them becoming spoiled brats. Whole societies have a long history of feeling disappointed in youngsters who look lazy and entitled relative to their elders.
I’ve been thinking about this as I contemplate money and my own children. Here’s where I’ve landed.
I had a conversation with a guy a few months ago whose immigrant parents came to America and worked tirelessly in low-wage jobs to make ends meet.
Those kids are now adults, and this guy – as I understood it – felt a sense of shame that as a college-educated white-collar worker he would not have to suffer the same way his parents did for him. His parents instilled in him the lessons of frugality and grit. Would his own children learn the same from him if they watched their father live a comparatively easy life?
He gave an example: when he was a kid, all books were borrowed from the library. Now his young daughter demands (and gets) to purchase $15 Taylor Swift books that pile up in her room.
My response was that if we talked to his immigrant parents, I would bet they would say: that was the goal.
The entire reason they worked so hard was to catapult the family’s standing to a point where one generation must grind to get food and the next can indulge in Taylor Swift books. The granddaughter’s spoiled appearance is not a side effect of wealth; it was the goal.
To put it differently: The goal of some parents is to work so hard that their kids and grandkids get to live a life that appears spoiled by the standards of previous generations.
Like wealth, there is no objective definition of what counts as spoiled – everything is just relative to someone else.
I can look at my own kids and see how spoiled they are relative to my own childhood.
But couldn’t my grandparents do the same for me? They had to worry about polio, scarlet fever, and a host of other things that never cross my mind.
And couldn’t their own grandparents do the same? Their transportation was limited to horses, and a bad crop could mean losing some of your children – a life inconceivable just a generation or two later.
What’s common to miss here is that when one generation’s life becomes comparatively easier than before, their life does not become objectively easy; they just move on to worrying about higher-order problems that were previously deemed not urgent enough to worry about.
One generation worries about how to get food and shelter.
The next doesn’t have to worry about food and shelter but frets about security.
The next has security but worries about disease.
The next tackles disease but worries about education.
The next gets education but worries about work-life balance.
On and on. It’s the classic John Adams line, which I’ll paraphrase: “I studied war so my kids will have the liberty to study engineering. They will study engineering so their kids can have the liberty to study philosophy, whose kids can have the liberty to study art.”
I hope my kids and grandkids won’t have to worry about cancer in the ways we do. I hope they have incredible technology that makes their jobs easier than ours. I hope that everyday frictions we deal with today disappear. I hope their energy is so abundant they consider it unlimited.
Is that spoiled? I suppose, but when you frame it like that you might think of a different word – perhaps “lucky,” or, “fortunate.”
Or perhaps, “beneficiaries of the accumulated hard work of those who came before them in a way that leaves them able to spend their days solving new problems.”
Which is what you and I are today.
I like to think that problems are like air and the brain is like a container. You can have different weights (analogous to difficulty of problems) of air, but that they'll end up occupying the same volume(analogous to worry).
So there will a person who at his time would have had to deal with wars and famines, but he'll also have a great-grand-son who'll worry just the same about not getting enough likes on his instagram photo.
The immigrant parent example cuts to the bone because it exposes a contradiction nobody wants to name. You grind so your children won't have to grind, then quietly resent them for not grinding.
The Adams line gets quoted a lot but people always stop at art. Nobody asks what comes after art. What does the generation that has food, shelter, security, education, balance, AND art worry about? Meaning. They worry about meaning. And that looks lazy from the outside because meaning doesn't produce anything visible.
Every generation's highest achievement is raising children who are free to solve problems their parents can't even recognise as problems yet. That's not spoiled. That's the mission working.