Since then, Americans have become far less friendly to Israel. This is demonstrated by polls 1 and the election of fierce Israel hater Zohran Mamdani as mayor of NYC. 2

And now the New York Times has reported that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu bamboozled Trump into the war against Iran.3 That dismayed me.

People will argue that their hatred of Netanyahu or of Israel will not spill over into antisemitism. I don’t buy it.

As I wrote back then:

James Baldwin, possessed of a magnificent intellect marked by great subtlety and nuance, struggled and ultimately failed to keep his hatred of Israel separate from his resentment of Jews. In the end he became antisemitic.

So if Baldwin failed, I will not credit the current crop of Israel haters with avoiding antisemitism. I’m convinced that one hate follows the other as day follows night.

This is a wicked problem for American Jews. On the one hand, abandoning Israel is absolute anathema to most Jews, including me. On the other hand, criticism of the Netanyahu government is not only fair game but I believe well deserved.

Yet the loudest voices are on the extremes. They either want America to abandon Israel or will defend the actions of Israel no matter what Israel does.

Here is the original essay:

In 1971, sometime near my ninth birthday, I was approached on Madison Avenue between 74^th and 75^th street by a white man raising money for the defense of Angela Davis. The man explained to me that Angela, a black revolutionary, had been arrested solely because she was black, and that if enough money was not raised, she would surely be executed in the California gas chamber.

About such matters my mind was a blank slate and so what the man told me etched a deep impression. It became the Truth.

I gave him what coins I had from my allowance, sacrificing a purchase of comics and candy at the stationery store, the only place I could walk to on my own. I returned home, proud of my unexpected connection with the adult world. Proud that I’d done something meaningful and kind.

But instead of praising me, my parents said I had been fooled into wasting my money. Worse, I had aided a dangerous and unworthy person.

I fled to my room upset. I can’t recall exactly what went through my mind. Probably a child’s furious disappointment in my parents’ reaction. They’d been cruel to Angela, cruel to the passionate man who was working so hard to free her, and, above all, cruel to me.

Eventually I started to cry. I think they were tears of frustration and self-pity at my parents’ unjust refusal to understand the goodness of what I’d done. And mixed in somewhere inside of me, I imagine there was mournful sadness that Angela Davis was doomed to die. And the helpless frustration that there was nothing my nine year old self could do to change that. 4

Fifty years later in 2020, I started reading James Baldwin, driven like many others by the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed to try to understand something useful about the history of American race relations.

Intellectually, I was smitten by Baldwin. Entering his mind through his writing, I gained a greater degree of understanding, or at least, a diminishment to aspects of my ignorance.

As a Jew reading Baldwin, I was always intrigued whenever he wrote about Jews. The general theme I came away with, repeated often in his work, was that if Blacks hated Jews, it was not because we were Jews, but because we were white. I could live with that generalization.

I also formed an impression that Baldwin was decidedly not antisemitic. He had attended a predominantly Jewish high school where his friends were mostly Jewish. When Baldwin told his father that his best friend from school was a Jew,

“[my father] slammed me across the face with his great palm… I told my father, “He’s a better Christian than you are, and walked out of the house.” 5

I remember cheering inside when I read this. I wanted to be liked and respected by Baldwin despite being a Jew. Perhaps that’s an odd thought since Baldwin had been dead since 1987.

But I had developed a close relationship with Baldwin by spending hours alone with his words. I “talked” to him as I read, complimenting him on a particularly beautiful sentence or a compelling passage. And as I grew to admire James Baldwin for his beautiful mind, his passion, his ability to enlighten me, I wanted to feel that, in turn, he would appreciate me as a reader. Or that at least he would not despise me.

I returned to Baldwin this past week to see if there was some history and context he could offer to help me understand better the furious reaction of so many American progressives to Israel’s response in Gaza to the Hamas attack on October 7^th.

And indeed I discovered that Baldwin’s political development through the Black politics of the sixties and seventies had a malign effect on his view of Israel and of Jews.

I discovered as well that my desire to be respected by this writer I so admired had led me astray as a reader. I had focused on certain passages and essays and ignored others in pursuit of that relationship of mutual respect. I didn’t want Baldwin to be antisemitic.

I’d been a victim of my own confirmation bias, in some ways indistinguishable from the blank slate ignorance I had about Angela Davis at the age of nine.

1948 to the early 1960s: Enthusiasm for Israel With a Caveat

The creation and survival of Israel in 1948 was celebrated by Baldwin and other black intellectuals. The Jews were an aspirational model, an historically persecuted people who had overcome their oppression to claim a homeland of their own, after two millennia of displacement. Baldwin wrote:

“The more devout Negro identifies himself almost wholly with the Jew.”  6

In 1961, Baldwin traveled to Israel and noted the situation of the Arabs who were “controlled and “dispossessed” by Israel. But back then, he didn’t blame the Jews of Israel for their security measures against the Arabs. He recognized Israel’s perilous position surrounded by hostile countries with overwhelming numbers.

At the same time, Baldwin didn’t blame the Arabs under Israeli control for their resentment and saw a parallel with his own situation and resentment as a Black American.

“it has cost me… a great and continuing effort not to hate the people who are responsible for the societal effort to limit and diminish me.“7

It was around this time that Baldwin wrote Letters From A Region of My Mind in the New Yorker, the long essay that was to form the bulk of The Fire Next Time. My favorite scene in “Letters” is Baldwin’s dinner in Chicago with Elijah Muhammed, leader of the Nation of Islam.

In his retelling of that dinner, you can see the development of Baldwin’s intellectual struggles with black politics­–––his discomfort with the Nation’s unrealistic dream of a separate Black nation in America, but his admiration for the purity of the Nation’s discipline of abstinence and strict codes of dress and behavior that had lifted up and empowered many Black Americans, most notably Malcolm X, the Nation’s heir apparent.

Baldwin wrote approvingly of Malcolm X’s claim of hypocrisy that when Jews acted with violence to claim their homeland, they were praised, but when Blacks acted with violence they were condemned.

As Baldwin put it:

“In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks.” 8

Baldwin’s 1967 essay in the New York Times: All Subtlety Gone

A few years later in 1967, Baldwin wrote one of his most famous essays “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White” for the New York Times. 9

In his essay, Baldwin contrasts the world’s admiration for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with the world’s denunciation of the 1964 and 1965 riots in Watts and Harlem.  He anticipates that readers will find his comparison “outrageous,” but he does not retreat. He insists that

 “when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery.” (the quote I wanted to use is beyond the pale in 2023) 10

As for American Jews, Baldwin accuses them of using the Holocaust as a moral shield to protect them from their bigotry. And he dismisses Jewish financial support of the Civil Rights movement as mere “conscience money.” Finally, Baldwin sees Jewish pride about the “tremendous heroism” of the “Jewish battle for Israel” as a rebuke by the

“Jew [who is] really saying that the Negro deserves his situation because he has not been heroic enough.”

Here, Baldwin is imagining a truly outrageous slander by Jews against Blacks––– that Jews believe Blacks are responsible for their own oppression in America because Blacks lacked bravery. It’s an echo of a similar outrageous slander against Jews, not imagined but spoken and written, that the Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust because they lacked the bravery to resist the Nazis. 11

That Baldwin could imagine this unspoken slander by Jews against Blacks meant he was well on his way to resentment, envy, and hatred of Jews.12

The 1970s: The Gloves Come Off

“Envy” of Jews is a word Baldwin uses at the end of his 1967 essay and four years later in 1971 we can see his envy bear bitter fruit. In a dialogue with Margaret Mead, Baldwin said,

“No matter how bitter I may sound…I have been, in America, the Arab at the hands of the Jews.” 13

That’s a concise two for one shot: condemning Israel for oppressing Arabs and condemning American Jews for oppressing Blacks.

In his 1979 Open Letter To The Born Again, Baldwin reacted with fury when Jimmy Carter fired his UN Ambassador Andrew Young for meeting with the representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

By that time, Baldwin had decided that

“the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.” 14

Baldwin’s main intellectual and literary concern was of course the past, present, and future struggles of Black Americans against oppression. But the more he considered the oppression of Blacks in America, the more he came to identify with the Palestinians as a fellow oppressed race.

And he came to believe that this fellowship of oppression was bound together by a similar oppressor: Jews against Palestinians in Israel and Jews in cooperation with Christians against Blacks in America. From the 1967 article in the Times:

“[the Jew] is playing in Harlem the role assigned him by Christians long ago: he is doing their dirty work.”

The title of that Times article, Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White  was disingenuous. Baldwin gave many different reasons for his resentment against Jews other than the color of our skin. And what can one call resentment against Jews for the crime of being Jewish other than antisemitism?

I think of the national outrage when Derek Chauvin oppressed George Floyd to death by pressing down with his foot for nine minutes against Floyd’s neck. And then I think of all the people who marched in the protests that followed, mostly the young, mostly progressives, seeing in that horrible murder a clarion call to oppose oppression.

I see much of that coalition marching again today in hatred of Israel as a wicked oppressor against Gaza. When it comes to protesting oppression, perhaps the muscle memory is to hate first, ask questions later.

And I think about this. James Baldwin, possessed of a magnificent intellect marked by great subtlety and nuance, struggled and ultimately failed to keep his hatred of Israel separate from his resentment of Jews. In the end he became antisemitic.

So if Baldwin failed, I will not credit the current crop of Israel haters with avoiding antisemitism. I’m convinced that one hate follows the other as day follows night.

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1

Pew Poll

2

Below is Mamdani’s statement the day after the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack that murdered some 1,200 Jewish settlers and raped and kidnapped many others . In Mamdani’s mind the fault for the violence was Israel’s declaration of war after the attack.

The message seems to be that if you value your sexual satisfaction don’t get married. And if you are married and are sexually dissatisfied, you will be tempted into an affair that will ruin the rest of your life.

recently wrote a post disputing this message. She cites a survey of 4,000 of her readers demonstrating that married moms over 40 years of age are having the best sex of all demographics. 1

She defines “best sex” as orgasm, yes or no, a simple yet dispositive and rigorous measure. Here is her orgasm frequency chart for women in different heterosexual relationships.

Notwithstanding this evidence, there are a number of reasons we are intrigued by marital sexual dysfunction leading to sexual transgression.

Forbidden fruit is dangerous so therefore more alluring., It creates suspense. Who will find out about the affair? Will he/she leave their spouse?

As well, the problems of other couples in the bedroom feeds into our schadenfreude, our competitive sense that our relationships are relatively better off.

Although while we’re watching a show, my wife Debbie still yells at me for the wandering ways of fictional men. 2

Then there’s Tolstoy’s famous line about all happy families being alike and unhappy families being unhappy in their own way. I suspect Tolstoy was thinking at least in part about sex, since after that opening line in Anna Karenina, we immediately learn that a husband has been kicked out of the house for having an affair with the governess. And, of course, the centerpiece of the novel is Anna’s loveless, presumably sexless marriage that leads to her doomed affair.

The point is that happily married couples who remain happy and married throughout a book or show are just not that interesting. Married couples having satisfied sex at regular intervals is boring dramatic material to everyone but the couple themselves. It’s useless for gossip and it’s highly awkward, if not antagonistic and rude, to share with others. 3

For all the reasons above, I’m drawn to the dead bedroom/transgressive affair theme. But I wonder how many readers and watchers understand that it tends to be the exception not the rule.

Below are a few recent examples of the theme that I’ve enjoyed.

Lake Effect

This week, I did a rapid read of the new novel Lake Effect by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Two suburban couples, best friends and neighbors, each have sexless marriages. An affair between the sex-deprived husband and the sex-deprived wife is revealed in the first few pages. Their spouses have histories that make them sexually unenthusiastic.

It’s 1977 in a Catholic neighborhood in Rochester, NY, a highly repressed community. A minor character represents scandal because she’s divorced. She decides to buy copies of The Joy of Sex for her women’s group, a purchase that first scandalizes and then sparks curiosity in the young checkout lady who rings up the sale. 4

Within the first few pages, Sweeney made me care about the four adults and their combined four teenage children. She does a great job of characterization. I also liked the swift pace of the chapters and the shifts in points of view.

The book is at its steamiest and best when Sweeney writes from the adulterous wife’s and adulterous husband’s points of view. I was riveted by how their mutual attraction grows until, despite the extraordinary disruptions and difficulties that obviously lie ahead, they have no choice but to come together. It’s a great example of how effective it can be to put just enough sex on the page to allow the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest.

DTF St. Louis

The HBO series DTF St. Louis also features two dead bedroom suburban marriages, this time in current era St. Louis. The letters DTF stand for “down to fuck,” and DTF St. Louis is a hookup website that acts as a plot device.

At its heart the series is a buddy movie between the two male leads who develop an intense and intimate friendship. The Jason Bateman character starts an affair with his best friend’s wife, Linda Cardellini of Freaks and Geeks fame. And then Jason’s best friend, played by David Hopper from Stranger Things, ends up dead. All in the first episode.

This being HBO, the sex is explicit. But like the rest of the show, the sex is played with a lowkey, goofy sense of good cheer. The characters of both Jason Bateman and David Hopper are immensely likable. The Linda Cardellini character not so much.

Bateman does a great job playing a regular guy being haplessly bad at acting out kinks with his affair partner Linda, including impersonating a sex robot (picture below) or a (middle-aged) pool boy. Or asking in a halting, embarrassed manner for more anatomically explicit kinks.

The show’s message, however remains stark. Behind those suburban lawns, married couples are NOT having sex. And if you compensate by starting an affair, bad things will happen. Perhaps even murder.

In the novel Lake Effect, the reasons for the two dead bedrooms are tragic. In DTF St. Louis, the David Hopper character is dealing with multiple erectile dysfunction issues. As well, he’s stymied by a persistent image of his otherwise sexy wife Linda Cardellini in her enormously bulky baseball umpire gear. She “umps” as a side-gig.

The Dead

Perhaps the most famous dead bedroom in literature is the hotel room at the end of James Joyce’s great story The Dead.

Gabriel Conroy, the middle-aged main character is in the midst of a quiet crisis of self-esteem. He has presided over an annual Epiphany dinner party (January 6^th). He’s dispirited by his performance and generally by the mediocrity of his life passing soon from middle to old age and then to death.

The one thing he’s looking forward to is hotel sex at the end of the evening with his pretty wife Gretta. In the warm hotel room with a fire as the snow falls outside.

But Gretta has heard a song performed at the dinner party that brings back memories of a boy Michael who loved her many years ago. A boy who was so desperate to see her after he heard that Gretta was going away that he went out in a snowy, freezing night. Gretta tells Michael to leave before he catches a death of a cold.

But Michael tells Gretta he doesn’t want to live without her and gives her a look from his eyes that Gretta will always remember. Michael dies from pneumonia a week later.

Remembering all this, Gretta sobs herself to sleep. No sex for Gabriel. Worse, he realizes that he can never compete with that adolescent passion between Gretta and her great love.

The last paragraph of The Dead is justly quoted often, with its killer last sentence:

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

But the third to last paragraph below is also achingly haunting.

“The air of the room chilled [Gabriel’s] shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.”

Finally, for the benefit of my children, here is the last sentence in the post about women over 40 having the best sex:

“Of course, I am obligated to remind you all that there is no way that any of this was true of your mother over 40. This applies to everyone except her.”

Question for the comments: Has modern popular culture become more fixated on dead bedrooms or has it always been that way, just less explicit?

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For every fraud and every lie, there must be two parties, that of the scoundrel and that of the victim. Once the victim believes the scoundrel’s initial lies, the victim is often complicit in perpetuating the fraud because it becomes too painful to accept the truth.

I know.

Johnnie Walker hope

It’s 1999, I’m 37, and I can see myself late at night. My wife and kids are asleep and I’m pacing around the kitchen with a glass––a big glass––of Johnnie Walker in my hand, trying to convince myself I haven’t been defrauded. I shake the glass, but there’s no clatter; the ice has long since melted. ­­­

Anne is supposed to call me tonight. I haven’t heard from her for days. Even if it’s another improbable excuse–––bank wire numbers transposed or yet one more layer of approval needed from Exxon –––I need to hear her voice, need to hear her say something, anything about the deal. Any slender thread will do. I need to hang on to the hope that the money will come.

Exxon was supposed to send money to our firm a year ago to buy the pollution credits we own. It’s the largest deal Anne’s arranged for us.

Anne is my age, a cheerful, ruddy faced blonde, a rocket scientist from Cal-Tech who invented the South Coast Air Quality pollution credit market. She has the can-do vibe of an Elizabeth Holmes. Anne and I have done a handful of pollution credit transactions together, all profitable. I’ve been to her offices in Pasadena many times. I consider her a friend.

Despite the long delay and all the improbable excuses, I have not done what would be typical–––yell, threaten, bring in lawyers. Because all along, I’ve believed Anne wanted to pay us. That whatever was going on behind the scenes she was working on our behalf.

Months ago, Anne had faxed the signed Exxon contract to me. It’s on Exxon letterhead and signed by a real, google-searchable executive at Exxon. The contract states unequivocally that Exxon will buy the pollution credits from our firm. I’m bound by confidentiality not to contact Exxon directly. Only Anne can deal with them.

These faxed pages have become my bible, the sacrament of my faith.

The final blow comes in Rome on a family vacation. My daily search on Google yields devastating news. Anne has been sued by another investor. The complaint describes a fact pattern all too familiar to me.

I shouldn’t be shocked, but I am. I can no longer deny that I’ve been defrauded, that the Exxon contract is a forgery. Actually a crude forgery, once I look for the telltale signs.

A week later, while I’m at my ten-year-old son’s baseball game, I finally get Anne on the phone. She confesses to her lies, to her forgery of the Exxon contract. She apologizes with words and tears, and part of me feels sorry for her.

When I tell the firm’s founding partner, he smiles a bit and shakes his head at Anne’s audacity. It helps­­––a lot–– that the investment is relatively small.

I bring in our firm’s lawyers, and we report Anne to the authorities for wire fraud.

A few months later, I testify to a Los Angeles grand jury. One juror asks how I could have been fooled for so long. He questions why I didn’t just pick up the phone and ask Exxon if the transaction was real.

I cloak my answer beneath the excuse of ethical behavior. I tell him, “I signed a confidentiality agreement. I take any contract I sign seriously.”

The real answer was that I’d been scared to call Exxon, scared to find out for certain that I’d been defrauded. I didn’t want to lose the hope that all could still be well. Against all evidence to the contrary. 1

The expert fraudster’s toolkit

Imagination

Many years later, a friend of mine, an Assistant District Attorney who specializes in prosecuting White Collar Crimes, explains why white-collar criminals can go on thinking that they won’t be caught.

She tells me they have powerful imaginations that enable them to spin up a fantasy world consisting of increasingly improbable contingencies. They convince themselves that this fictional world they’ve created is the reality.

Victims like me not only accept the fraudster’s fantasy world, but we often help build it, because we don’t want to know the truth. We become co-conspirators in defrauding ourselves.

Self-deception

The best deceivers, the masters of it, develop a conviction that their lies are the truth. A liar becomes far more effective when he can self-deceive. He believes whatever he’s saying is the truth. Even if in the course of the same day, he makes diametrically opposed statements.

And the confirmation bias of the people lied to is also a form of self-deception. If it’s willful ignorance of a financial fraud, it has real resource costs. If it’s willful ignorance of a family member’s harmful behavior, it can destroy lives.

But if it’s believing in a fraudulent political leader, it may have no individual resource cost at all and it may in fact be protective of self-esteem.

At least in the short term.

Because the more that the self-deceived victim invests their self-esteem in a false hero, the more crushing the blow when they can no longer sustain the illusion.

Evolution is to blame

It is a truth seldom acknowledged that the ability to deceive is an evolutionary survival skill. 2

If you can cheat and get away with it, then there’s more resources for you and less for your rival. The more subtle the deceiver, the greater the survival flex.

Consider the animal kingdom where the survival of the prey and the sustenance of the predator depends on which is a better deceiver.

The ability to detect a cheater at the outset is also a survival skill. There’s an entire industry devoted to teaching people how to know if someone’s lying.

There was an underrated TV show in this vein starring Tim Roth as an expert who can detect lying. 3

You can think of it as psychological warfare. The first few lies by the cheater are the most important, like a pre-emptive strike. Because once the victim falls for the initial lies, they will look for ways to avoid admitting that they’ve been cheated.

That’s what happened to me with Anne and the Exxon deal. It quickly became too painful to my pride––how could I have been so stupid––and too adverse to what I wanted––the successful completion of the transaction––for me to admit I’d been duped.

Fraudster hall of fame

One of the greatest literary fraudsters of all time is Augustus Melmotte, the creation of Anthony Trollope in his great 19^th century novel The Way We Live Now.

Trollope’s novel and the character of Melmotte were inspired by Trollope’s dismay at how London society had come to venerate wealth without regard to honesty and his further dismay at society’s embrace of rampant gambling on the shares of dubious railway ventures.

When we meet him, Melmotte has swindled investors on the Continent out of a great deal of money. He flees to London where he hopes to bury his past beneath a veil of mystery and use the swindled money to establish his reputation as a great man of finance.

He lives lavishly and garishly, throwing extravagant parties that Dukes and Duchesses attend, giving him the imprimatur of respectability. His spending convinces the London world that he is wealthy and a master investor. Because how else could he afford to live the way he lives.

Melmotte soon takes control of a scheme to build a railway connecting Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz, Mexico. The railway is a fiction. It does not own a single acre of land. It has not laid a single track.

The only reality behind the scheme are colorful brochures and the shares of stock Melmotte sells to investors. Everything else is based on perceptions created by Melmotte’s false confidence, his lies, and his spending.

All the shares are in “Melmotte’s pocket” and every purchase and sale results in cash going to Melmotte. Which he then uses for further personal extravagance, embellishing his reputation as the Great Financier.

He creates a Board for the fictitious railway and seasons it with various members of the minor aristocracy. At one of the perfunctory Board meetings, Melmotte declares:

“I do not know that greater prosperity has ever been achieved in a shorter time by a commercial company.”

As the swindle grows more monstrous so does Melmotte’s arrogance. His “swagger” leads otherwise respectable men to become his toadies, to present their “hinder parts to be kicked merely because [Melmotte] put up his toe.”

Soon rumors catch up with Melmotte. He buys an estate, doesn’t pay for it, and mortgages it to the hilt. He engages in forgery. As lawyers close in, he decides that his only course of action is “brazen-faced audacity.”

He gets himself elected to Parliament and tries to marry his daughter off to the eldest son of a “Marquis.” He convinces himself that these maneuvers will offer protection. 4

Melmotte adopts the mindset that if his “imagination is strong enough,” he can do anything, endure anything. Confidence is everything. The narrative trumps the reality. 5

Eventually, however, reality catches up with Melmotte. It’s a rare 19th century novel that allows the villain to triumph. Financial fraud, after all, is about money and numbers. And like facts, numbers are stubborn things.

The Way We Live Now

Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now in 1875. His London world of rakes and deceivers, of irrational speculation and high hypocrisy, of the murkiness of what is fact and what is fiction, is a familiar one.

Here’s Trollope in his autobiography about what motivated the novel:

“…dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.”

The words and actions of the swindler and liar Augustus Melmotte echo and rhyme in many of the headlines of our current era.

We could be comforted by the familiarity of Trollope’s world. We could conclude that there is nothing especially rotten in our current state of affairs. That there really is nothing new under the sun.

Or we could be disappointed that 150 years have passed and human morality has made insufficient progress.

Or a third, worse choice. We could be alarmed that humanity is now endowed with unprecedented and awesome tools of mass influence and mass destruction; and yet we remain just as much controlled by our base impulses of deception and aggression.

Question for the comments: What would you say about these three choices?

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The Madison is a dreck of a television show created by manosphere adherent Taylor Sheridan of Yellowstone fame. I made the mistake of watching the first episode. The plot was clumsy and the writing was awful–––don’t ever waste Michelle Pfeiffer like that!

But more importantly, the show feeds into the myths that the Manhattan rich are miserable pricks, that New Yorkers live in a hellhole with no sense of community, and that poor New Yorkers are stupid.

Also, if you want a chance at a virtuous life, be a cowboy or a cowboy’s wife. Real men don’t work in offices.1 Real women cook meals and eat elk.

In considering the scheme of the world’s problems, it’s easy to dismiss The Madison as unimportant fluff. Yet millions of people will watch the show and be sold contempt as a way of feeling better about their own status.

Hate the rich because they hoard wealth but still don’t know how to be happy. Hate the poor because they create their own problems and then expect us to feel sorry for them. Hate New York City because it’s not where “real Americans” live.

Contempt is a corrosive form of hate, dividing between a better “us” and a lesser “them.”

The kindness of strangers

A few weeks ago, I fell in a fresh snow bank outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was carrying Sophie, my beloved Shih Tzu. I was seeking dry sidewalk because Sophie hates the snow.

It was a soft, slow fall and I was unhurt. I managed to keep my grip on Sophie and hold her aloft.

Immediately, two strangers rushed over to see if I was okay and to offer their help.

I’m clumsy. In my 64 years, I’ve probably fallen down on the streets of Manhattan at least a half-dozen times. And I’ve seen at least fifty other people fall. In every instance, people came over to offer aid to the fallen person. It’s what you do in a crowded city.

In ridiculous contrast, The Madison opens with an attractive, young, leggy blonde walking on a crowded downtown Manhattan street sporting shopping bags. She name checks Hermes and Brunello as her purchased items. Then she’s punched in the face by a mugger who steals her bags and flees.

It’s a sucker punch. The blonde collapses to the sidewalk. No one stops to help. The crowds stream around and past her as if she were a rock in a river.

When her father (played by Kurt Russell) hears about the assault on his daughter, he complains to his wife (Michelle Pfieffer) that their daughter should not have been walking but should have “taken the car,” meaning their car and driver.

Kurt is speaking to Michelle from Montana where he’s on his annual trip with his brother to go fly-fishing. Michelle’s back in New York City. She’s not a fan of fly fishing or a lack of indoor plumbing.

(Spoiler ahead but only for the first 25 minutes of the first episode.)

Kurt Russell wonders why their family lives in such a dangerous city when they could be enjoying the beautiful wilds of Montana. So much safer than New York City except for the bears, the hornets, the actual crime statistics,2 and the sudden storm that causes Kurt and his brother to crash their plane into a mountainside and die.

The show’s false myth is that New York is unsafe and New Yorkers are unfriendly.

The Myth of Miserable Manhattanites

Still staying within the first episode of The Madison, Michelle Pfeiffer is dishing over lunch with her best friend who says that if they ever left New York, they would have nothing to talk about because leaving New York is the main topic of conversation among their wealthy set.

It’s true that many wealthy New Yorkers consider leaving because a certain amount of wealth entitles you to live anywhere. That’s a benefit not a hinderance of wealth.

It’s also true that a fair number of wealthy New Yorkers age out and leave for Florida for the weather, the lower taxes, and the golf. But the majority stay because most of us love this city, which, admittedly, is a lot easier to love if you’re either wealthy or young.

Before Kurt Russell dies his fiery death, he bemoans that he’s 64 (my age), and having lived in the city, he’s running out of time to “make memories.” 3

And, damn it, Michelle tells him he has to go back to the city to attend the Met Gala, which an ordinary rich guy would never be invited to,4 and, if he was, the Gala would be far more memorable than anything Kurt could possibly do in Montana. Except die in a plane crash.

Kurt’s problem is that he works all the time so he can support his two ungrateful and spoiled adult daughters who see him as only the “bank of dad.” The show implies it’s the Manhattan lifestyle that has led to Kurt and Michelle’s poor relationships with their children.

But if you’re a careless parent, you’ll be a careless parent no matter where you live. Or what your economic status is.

In Montana, Kurt tells his brother about his recent family vacation to an unnamed Caribbean island where the hotel rooms cost $10,000 a night and all the fellow guests on the beach are in their 70s and 80s. The aged beach people have “made it” but it’s too late for them to enjoy the fruits of their demonic workaholism because their bodies have given out.

The island is unnamed because no such geriatric paradise exists. But it’s a convenient addition to the myth. Some people will want to believe that the rich, especially the New York rich, live lives of striving desperation until they grow old and decrepit.

The stupid poor

We’re still at the start of the first episode when Michelle is at a charity lunch about giving assistance to the poor. A cartoonishly obnoxious wealthy woman leans over to tell Michelle that the poor eat junk food because they “don’t know any better.”

The wealthy woman goes on to say that the poor refuse to help themselves from the food bank’s abundant selection of fresh produce, a selection she claims is better than the wealthy woman’s Whole Foods.

Nonsense.

I know a fair amount about food insecurity among the impoverished. My family’s biggest charitable project is supporting a local food pantry to deliver robust bags of food to 250 school families at their school door in Washington Heights 40 weeks a year.

I visit the school and talk to the parents and the principal and the people who run the food pantry. I know that the parents want nutritious food and they want as much fresh produce as possible.

So, the claim that the poor would not snap up fresh and nutritious food is pure nonsense.

I’m also a faithful reader of , a Substack newsletter in which Michelle writes passionately and knowledgeably about our current exacerbated economic inequality and what it’s like to be on the impoverished side of that equation.

I learn a lot from reading that newsletter.

Michelle recently wrote a particularly illuminating article called Let Them Eat Fast Food about food insecurity and the misguided notions of many people about eating while impoverished. I strongly recommend the article and her Substack.

In her article, she details what it’s like to feed a family when you’re short on time or short on money or short on both. She’s lived it.

Fast food is expensive compared to cooking at home and far less nutritious. For the poor, fast food is an extravagant last resort when time runs out and you need to feed your kids and yourself in a hurry.

As for the “ignorant purchase of junk food” at the grocery store, Michelle (of Untrickled) describes how it’s often the least worst of options.

“A frozen pizza means dinner gets made. Hot dogs mean a kid can feed themselves if a parent is working late. Those choices aren’t about nutrition. They’re about logistics.”

That stray comment on the show about the poor and how they “choose” to eat has a special kind of malice. It was largely left unchallenged so that it might enter with insidious intent into the minds of viewers. 5

Light a candle and curse the darkness

In last week’s post I highlighted that I was featured in a New York Magazine article called What Does Extreme Wealth Do To The Brain. I’ve looked at the comments on the magazine’s website and Instagram. One has to search hard for any positive or even neutral comments. 6

Of course, it’s not surprising that haters predominate among the commenters. Such is the way of most social media.

Still, it was jarring to me to read such a pure stream of anger and hate. I think that’s one reason I reacted so negatively to The Madison’s unsubtle implications about the extremely wealthy and about New York City.

I shouldn’t take it personally but I do. And I know that the reach of this newsletter, which seeks to present an authentic picture of myself as a wealthy New Yorker, is no match for the reach of a mass market show like The Madison.

But every bit helps.

Question for the comments: Are there shows that tick you off as The Madison did me? Barring that, any good TV show recommendations?

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1

I “bonded” with Michelle Pfeiffer’s hapless “finance bro” son-in-law who works in an office and thus is not manly.

At dinner (still in the first 25 minutes!), Michelle asks him if anything interesting happened to him that day other than his wife getting punched. He responds by describing a business deal he’s working on that I thought was interesting.

But Michelle interrupts him with undisguised scorn and says, “So, nothing interesting happened to you.”

Also, a bit later in the episode the son-in-law is flummoxed by the barbecue in Montana.

I can relate!

3

My brother-in-law Ken who watched The Madison with Debbie and me (sorry, Ken!), recalled that Kurt Russell starred as Snake Plissken in the 1981 movie Escape From New York. And in that movie, unlike in The Madison, his character survives.

4

Anna Wintour, fashion editor icon, decides who can attend the Met Gala.. It’s an event you cannot buy your way into. At least that’s my understanding. Donald Trump has been banned at least since 2017. Confirmation sought from of

Most of Lane’s interviewees took shelter under the protection of anonymity. Only two people went on record: me and billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Shark Tank judge.

The article and my contributions to it touch on many of the themes I’ve written about. A few excerpts.

Entitlement

[Roberts] thought of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby — “careless people who break things and let other people clean up the mess. They’re the literary paradigm of [wealthy people turning into monsters].”

“There’s a lot of infidelity among wealthy people because the men just feel entitled to a newer model of their first wife. And they don’t think about how it might affect their children.”

Powerful men confused about the meaning of legacy

“Why did [Howard Lutnick] visit Epstein’s island? Probably because he thought it would make him look powerful,” Roberts said. “I think it was impulsive. A lot of wealthy people don’t really think about what legacy means. They think it means having a building named after you. They don’t think about the more important part: Are you remembered as a good person?”

The entire article, thoughtful and thorough, is well worth reading.

New York Magazine Article 3/13/26: What Does Extreme Wealth Do to Your Brain

The NYMag article recalled to mind the essay below, originally published in August of 2024, which seems like forever ago.

Shorter than the original because I had more time to edit it. 2

Beautiful Women And The Indecency Of Powerful Men

August 2024

Last Saturday, I was at a cocktail party in the Hamptons, a gathering without the extravagance and Gilded Age showmanship people may associate with the phrase “Hamptons cocktail party.”

Dress was casual. No celebrities in sight. There was, however, a violinist and flautist who at my request played a perfect rendition of the theme from Game of Thrones.

The backyard setting was beautiful in its simplicity of tall green hedges on either side connecting the house’s back porch to a back wall of subtly colorful wildflowers. A human-sized, square-shaped outdoor room. 

When we got home from the party, my wife Debbie told me that a married man of long acquaintance had complimented her a number of times on how “good” she looked. It was flirtation.

My wife was alone when this happened. I doubt the man would have taken those liberties if either I or the man’s wife had been nearby.

At the time of that party I was living in two different worlds

It happens to me with some books, the sense that I’m living inside two worlds at the same time. The world of the book I’m reading affects my mood, my language, my perceptions.

This happened to me with The Custom Of The Country, Edith Wharton’s brilliant creation of a world set in an earlier Gilded Age circa 1910. It’s a world of dwindling old money society superseded and nearly effaced by the triumph of new and gaudy money. 3

I was reading Custom at the time of the party and so I thought about the flirtation of the man with Debbie through that earlier, Gilded Age lens.

If there still exists a world of old money with its exacting standards of behavior and disdain for commerce, I’m either not aware of it or have been excluded from its precincts. Good and bad taste, good and bad manners can be found all over.

In fact, it seems that vast wealth and power are contrary to taste and good behavior. Divorce and affairs among the wealthiest of billionaires seem endemic. Just as they upgrade their gigantic playthings–––yachts with heliports, private islands and vast estates that a James Bond villain would be proud of–––they upgrade their wives for younger, more attractive versions.

The spectacularly beautiful Undine Spragg

Young Undine4 is the heroine of Wharton’s Custom of the Country. She is poor by New York society standards but uses her superior physical beauty to capture men who can deliver what she craves.

She wants to be the center of attention in front of the right people in the right places, wearing the best dresses and the most precious jewels. All of it with the goal of displaying her beauty to painful effect so that men adore, admire, and dream of her and women envy her.

She has no concept of money except as necessary to pay for the travel, accommodations, clothes, and jewelry in service of the display to which she feels entitled.

Men want Undine for her beauty, and the novel is the story of Undine using men and men trying to use her. Sex is implicit (remember, Wharton published Custom in 1913), but Undine is not motivated by sex.

Instead, sex for her is a complement to her beauty, to be used only when she deems it appropriate. No man forces himself on Undine. She remains in control.

I find myself rooting for Undine because she’s consistent and honest about what she wants. Plus she’s tough.

Her experiences with old money New York and aristocratic Paris teach her “shades of conduct, turns of speech, tricks of attitude” about which the new Wall Street money is ignorant.

So as Undine observes the behavior of her current Wall Street man, who can buy her everything she wants, she finds herself “jarred” and “irritated” by:

“…his loudness and redness, his misplaced joviality, his familiarity with the servants, his alternating swagger and ceremony with her friends…”

I have pity for Undine when she learns that her social ambitions can never be fully satisfied.

Imagining Undine In 2024

Where would Undine Spragg be today? Perhaps a model, an influencer, an actress.

Married to a wealthy man? Not necessarily if she earned enough on her own to satisfy her material ambitions. That possibility is progress.

But there’s another scenario that troubles me.

A young teenage beauty such as Undine might fall prey to the worst of the wealthy and powerful, those who lack a code, who lack scruples, and who too often lack consequences for behavior that in Wharton’s (idealized) world would have condemned a man to exile from decent society.

I think of Bill Clinton who as president was a sexual predator, having shtupped5 young intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office and then lied about it both under oath and to the country. Clinton has never apologized. 6

Apparently, if you possess enough political juice and are a charming enough scoundrel, you get a free pass. You’re invited everywhere; you’re lauded everywhere. That’s not right.

Clinton spoke at this week’s Democratic Convention. One of the Convention’s themes was to defend the reproductive rights of women; its main theme was to defeat the outrageous misogynist and abuser of women Donald Trump.

I thought Clinton’s appearance was off-brand and tone deaf. It’s long past time for the Democratic party to cut him loose. 7

What is disgraceful

Maybe I’m living in a dream world. Maybe my indignation is a form of self-righteousness.

But I have a wife, a daughter and daughter-in-law, five nieces, sisters-in-law, many female cousins, and soon I hope, a granddaughter. [Note: now I have two!]

Through them, my protective instinct for all women is always top of mind. So it makes me furious to think that men abuse women and get away with it.

Of course any male abuser is a disgrace. But I’ll go further. Anyone who gives social sanction or pays homage to a known male abuser is complicit in that disgrace.

Finally, I hope it’s clear that whether behavior is or is not legally punished should not be the arbiter of what is disgraceful.

Question for the comments: How have your views on the wealthy changed since August 2024 and why?

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When you put taxes in your headline, you need to find a way to spice things up.

I happen to agree with the slogan snaking around the back of AOC’s dress. The rich do not pay enough in taxes, especially after the tax cuts of 2017 and 2025.

America is the wealthiest society ever to exist. We should be ashamed that we do not provide the basic needs of food and shelter and safety to the less fortunate among us.

Our tax code is at the root of that moral catastrophe.

Recently I was on a LIVE video talking about taxes with who writes . Allison is a law professor specializing in estate and tax law.

Following are a few takeaways and video snippets (about two-three minutes long) from our conversation. However, you can get the gist of it from the text alone. The full conversation can be accessed via this footnote. 1

Confession of a capitalist

I’m not an exception to the general principle that no one likes to pay taxes. Or certainly not to pay more than legally owed.

And when my tax rates have been cut or when I’ve benefitted from various tax code gifts to the wealthy, I’m not at all unhappy. Even though I know that if I were the dictator of tax policy, I’d create a far different system that cut significantly against my financial self -interest.

As a prime example, current tax law says that if you sell an asset for a gain after you’ve held it for a year and a day, you’re taxed on that gain at a much lower rate than if you had held it for 364 days, the two days in this case being the difference between long term vs. short term. For the wealthy, the Federal tax rates are 23.8% for long term and 40.8% for short term.

My family has been a big beneficiary of this quirk. But it’s a quirk that I cannot justify intellectually. And eliminating that quirk would raise a significant amount of tax revenue.

Below, in a halting, hesitant, and inarticulate manner, I struggle against my self-interest, to say that, yes, capital gains should be taxed no differently than other income.

A Wealth Tax and that AOC dress

I am not a Bernie Sanders fan, except when Larry David plays him on Saturday Night Live. Bernie’s rants about billionaires and his proposals for wealth taxes on billionaires are strictly performative. AOC’s dress is more effective.

Wealth taxes are highly inefficient and do not raise much in revenue. That’s not a guess. Many European countries have tried them and soon repealed them because they were failures at raising enough new revenues to offset the costs in lost revenue and administrative headaches.

Wealth taxes have also been a boon to the accountants and lawyers who help the rich avoid taxes (legal) and evade taxes (illegal). My friend has a great post titled Do Wealth Taxes Turn Honest Taxpayers Into Criminals?

A billionaire wealth tax is a great political soundbite. That’s it.

Below, Allison and I discuss wealth taxes.

Unsexy ways to address inequality

In contrast to wealth taxes that have little chance of raising significant revenue and may not survive legal challenges, raising the minimum wage and making it easier for private industry labor unions to organize would significantly alter the balance of power between capital and labor.

Compensation as a percentage of gross domestic income is down and while there are many reasons, those reasons include the fact that the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and the private labor union participation rate has been cut in half from 1983 to today. 2

The fifty states compete for wealthy residents and businesses. Among the ways they compete are to have a low minimum wage, be unfriendly to labor unions, and of course have lower taxes. In the forefront are states like Texas and Florida and, typically, other Republican voting states who have weak state-level safety nets. 3

Here’s a chart from the Federal Reserve showing the decline in compensation as a % of gross Domestic Income.

Here’s a clip of Allison and me discussing some of the unsexy policy fixes that would not fit on AOC’s dress.

Don't tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree

One of the issues with substantive tax reform is that in order to raise significant revenue, we need to increase taxes not only on billionaires but on the entire tax base of the affluent.

But as Allison and I discussed, very few people consider themselves to be truly affluent. Our natural inclination is to be envious creatures. This leads many of us to compare ourselves to those in our circles who have more. Even if we ourselves are very wealthy. 4

So raising taxes on a large swath of the affluent is a tough political challenge. And in certain rarified settings, where everyone’s a billionaire, even having five million dollars can seem worse than nothing at all as this 30 second clip from Succession sets forth.

Question for the comments: What say you about wealth taxes, other taxes, Sanders and AOC?

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In the fall of 2008 as the Great Financial Crisis unfolded, I felt flashes of panic. The photograph below, Desperate Man, was prominent on our bedroom wall and every time I looked at it, I’d feel like seizing my own hair.

Lehman had failed, the stock market was on its way to a 50% crash, and the Bernie Madoff fraud had been revealed. Although I was not a Madoff victim, the scale of his fraud––headline of $50 billion–– combined with the failures of Lehman and other institutions rocked my confidence.

Perhaps the narrative I’d been telling myself about the financial world was completely divorced from reality. Perhaps I’d been clueless about the true nature of Wall Street and how it all worked. I wondered how it was possible to know the true value of anything I owned. Or whether in fact I could really be certain that I owned what I thought I owned.

I was 46 years-old and senior enough to have earned a fair amount of responsibility as an investment manager. For the investments in my portfolio, it would be mostly my burden to decide which investments to save and which to let perish.

My emotional response was to take flight, to flee this financial world that had suddenly become hostile, cruel, unrecognizable. Flee from my responsibilities that had turned from a source of pride to a source of self-doubt and shame. I hated losing money for my partners and investors.

I could cash out and pick up the pieces. Find a career less stressful.

I told my wife Debbie how scared I was. Soon thereafter, at a December black-tie benefit at Chelsea Piers––benefits sailed on through the gloom––Debbie asked an older, wiser, and very good family friend to chat with me. He told me to be patient, that there’d be good opportunities that came out of the downturn for me and for my positions. I listened to him and he was right.

“Narrative is all that matters”

I’ve recently binge-watched the TV show Industry about a group of young finance and business professionals who make and lose fortunes, are beautiful and fit, snort enough cocaine to kill a small horse, and have frequent and explicitly staged sex with one another in fabulous locations. 1

The show is excellent and not in a “I read Playboy for the articles” way. It’s well acted and well written, and consistently clever. Its breakout star is Marisa Abela as Yasmin, the rich girl with a tortured past.

More than anything, however, Industry captures the zeitgeist of our times––the predominance of narrative over reality.

The creators have scripted much of the show’s financial shenanigans in a brazenly inaccurate way. Many of the numbers, timeframes, and legal proceedings don’t make sense. But it doesn’t really matter. The details are subsumed beneath the dramatic power of the narrative and the appeal of the complex characters who come with a mix of flaws and virtues.

The creators are ex-finance pros so maybe they created cartoon scenarios on purpose to underscore the often-spoken motto of the show: “narrative is all that matters.”

Casinos vs. frauds

Industry’s creators get away with their version of finance theatrics (even with a pedantic stickler like me) because the schemes they write about are generally on the right track in portraying our hyper-gamified, casino economy where value is what someone says it is on any given day.

Naturally, there are financial frauds on the show. That’s inevitable; there’s always been frauds in fiction and in real life.

The financial frauds that Industry showcases are realistic. Madoff happened because investors wanted desperately to believe his mathematically improbable returns were true (akin statistically to filling out a perfect NCAA bracket!). 2

Investors are no match for fraudsters who regularly trick accountants and regulators to bless their financial statements. As Eric (my favorite Industry character) said recently on fictional CNN,

“You want me to give you a list of the number of times regulators have been wrong. How long is your show?”

The narrative, on the other hand, is different than fraud. It does not hide. It’s all out in the open.

That six-million-dollar banana

All the real-life buyer got is a sheet that instructs you how to tape a banana to a wall, because the banana is real and will soon spoil. The sheet is first sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and then for over six million dollars. It’s not a fraud. The buyers know exactly what they’re getting.

The narrative behind the banana instruction is that if someone made a fortune buying it for a few hundred thousand, why can’t the six-million-dollar buyer make a fortune off the next buyer who might pay $60 million? One number is just as untethered to reality as another. If Bitcoin can trade at $100,000 a coin, why can’t it trade at a million dollars?

On Polymarket, a prediction site, you can bet on whether Bitcoin will go up or down in the next five minutes. On Industry, time is super-compressed. Fortunes and reputations go up and down in minutes or seconds.

One of the trader characters, Rishi, is a compulsive gambler. When he keeps betting red on roulette and keeps losing, we watch him watching the wheel spin and the ball bounce, and we understand it’s a perfectly accurate extension of how Industry presents his day job. And financial markets today.

Perpetual assets

Every asset---Rishi’s casino chips, the sheet of paper that instructs you how to mount a banana on your wall, every crypto coin, every share of stock, every parcel of real property---must be owned by someone. Barring a few exceptions, that truism does not change. The assets I’ve mentioned can be bought and sold but unlike debt there is no one obliged to redeem them from you for any specified or certain value at any certain time. 3

They are perpetual assets traded among ourselves in a closed loop, a merry-go-round, at prices set by human buyers and sellers based on the current narrative. That they can often be sold at relatively consistent prices over the short term is a human construct that’s usually true but not guaranteed.

Imagine a world where after you bought a perpetual asset you could never sell it. How would you value it?

If it’s an asset that doesn’t produce any utility or cash flow to you––a piece of art, whether a banana or a Rembrandt on the wall––you’d value it for the aesthetic pleasure it gave you. If it were a financial asset, like a share of stock, the only rational way to value it would be for the present value of future cash flows.

What I’ve described is the reality of our world when viewed as a whole. And when the narrative spins away from this hard truth, the reality can bite. As Bethany Mclean, a great financial journalist, recently writes:

“When no one can find an anchor for the fundamental value of companies, the market starts searching for a narrative.” 4

If the bubble is pricked

It would not surprise me if the U.S. stock market declined 50% as it did from the 2000 and 2008 peaks. In that scenario, more speculative assets like banana art and crypto would likely suffer worse fates.

That said, I’m not betting on that happening and I make no claim to any special perspective or predictive power. Admittedly, it’s hard to imagine the stock market getting cut in half after 17 years of stocks rising, But the numbers and the history I look at suggest it’s a risk to take into account.

One might say, so what? Each share of stock is still held by someone. All that’s happened is that investors collectively decided on new, lower values for the same assets they collectively hold.

Plus, the stock market has always come back.

And for young investors who have not yet or are just starting to invest, a 50% decline can be seen as a great opportunity. Now they get to buy the same assets at a 50% off sale.

All this is true but it ignores human emotion and how the financial economy can affect the real economy. Because when people feel wealthier, they spend more. When people feel less wealthy, they spend less.

Tightening our belts at Big Pink

In December 2008, we were at the Big Pink diner in Miami when I spoke to our three children, (ages 20, 18, and 15) about the financial crisis and the Bernie Madoff fraud. 5

I told them our net worth had declined substantially. I was uncertain what would happen to our income and our wealth going forward. “Mom and I are planning to tighten our belts.”

Until things recovered, we reduced our spending where we could. 6

This is called the wealth effect. The popping of a bubble will make many families reduce their spending.

When many families react in similar fashion, the reduced spending reverberates across the economy. Although the wealthy may lose the most in dollars, the decline in spending hits hardest those with the greatest amount of precarity. It also impinges upon philanthropy at the very time it’s needed most.

The state we’re in

The wealth effect of a bubble deflating in 2026 or 2027 could be more severe than it was in 2000 or 2008. A few facts to consider:

1) Wealth is more concentrated at the top and so is spending. The top 10% are responsible for about 50% of all consumer spending. 7

2) The amount of wealth represented by the stock market has increased significantly. It’s estimated that the stock market is worth about $70 trillion today vs. $18 trillion at the 2000 peak and $20 trillion at the 2008 peak. As a % of GDP, it’s never been higher in post-war history and perhaps ever. That wealth is concentrated among the wealthiest, the big spenders.8

3) Federal debt is now 120% of GDP vs. 60% in both 1999 and 2007 (the years prior to the 2000 and 2008 crashes). In 2008, the government was able to function more or less cohesively to address the financial crisis. Today the government has little fiscal room to address a crisis without risking a debt crisis and scant unity of rational purpose. 9

So, our country is particularly fragile right now to the risk of a downturn caused by a change in the narrative of what we collectively decide our assets are worth.

No one should root for a downturn. Good luck to us all.

Question for the comments: Is a potential asset value bust something you worry about, and either yes or no, why?

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When Clinton entered the room and began to speak I understood that I was witnessing the power of charisma. The combined wattage of the actors and actresses was no match for Clinton’s star presence. Like a charismatic black hole, he sucked up all the attention, even while knowing he was about to be disgraced by the scandal.

The price of admission that evening was a $5,000 political contribution. When it was over and I was downstairs looking for a taxi, Christie Brinkley, supermodel and actress, asked me if she could borrow my phone to call her driver. There are few certainties in life but it is certain that the loan of my flip phone made a greater impression on me than it did on her.

She was with her fourth husband Peter Cook who she ended up divorcing after discovering that he had cheated on her. But that evening outside the Dakota I was dazzled by their powerful smiles and preternatural good looks. The perfect couple.

The book that sparked my thoughts on varied encounters with fame

This week I spoke with about her new novel MEDIUM RARE, which was inspired by the tragic tale of Icarus who managed to fly with wings of wax. However, Icarus did not heed his father’s warning about what would happen to his wax wings if he flew too close to the sun. 2

In MEDIUM RARE, the role of Icarus is taken by a “mid-level” Washington lobbyist named Phil who achieves sudden and “stratospheric celebrity” when he fills out what may be a perfect bracket for the NCAA March Madness tournament against odds of one in multiple billions.

Phil’s bracket selection feat is the quintessential route to celebrity for our gamified modern times where media amplifies all sorts of random and frivolous accomplishments out of proportion to their difficulty, daring, and virtue. Think of any professional influencer.

The novel’s narrator is Cassandra, a seer like her mythic namesake and a contemporary of Phil and his wife. Cassandra comes from a higher social stratum than Phil and her unfiltered observations about Phil’s pedestrian tastes are delightfully and ruthlessly snobby.

MEDIUM RARE comes out March 3^rd in time for March Madness. I loved it. You can pre-order it here––pre-orders have an outsized influence on a book’s success.

A dance of fame at a power lunch

Before it closed in 2016, the Four Seasons Restaurant Grill Room was the place for a power lunch. In my forties, I grew to love that restaurant. I became a regular and had an account linked to my credit card so all my lunches would be charged automatically. Leaving without the check ever appearing at the table was a power flex.

Instead of the Grill Room, I preferred the Pool Room, which I thought was the most aesthetically glamorous room in the city. The picture of the Pool Room below is from 1960.3

Years before I became a regular, circa mid 1990s when I was about 35 years old, I recall having lunch in the Grill Room with two power players–––the consiglieri to a famous billionaire (being a billionaire then was something special) and John Angelo the founder of the firm where I worked. John had taken me along to pitch the consiglieri on an investment fund.

When the lunch was over, I walked directly to the head of the stairs ready to descend. But I had to wait.

The consiglieri and John were just beginning to perform their individual power dances weaving back and forth among the Grill Room tables of other power players, shaking hands, smiling, laughing. They bounced from one power table to the next, and I could see their faces were flushed with pleasure.

As I watched them, I wondered who would triumph, who could dance the longest, who between John and the consiglieri was more known and knowing. Who in this room was more famous.

John finished before the consiglieri. I consider that to be to John’s credit. He had things to get back to at the office and so, taking me with him, he sailed on.

Fame at the bar in Cheers

Fame among a tightly-knit group of people is not confined to a particular social or economic class. The regular patrons of a working-class bar would experience a pleasure similar to John and the consiglieri in the Grill Room at being known by other regulars in the bar. Like the bar in the TV show Cheers, “where everyone knows your name.” 4

I feel a sense of self-satisfaction when I see someone on the street who I know well enough to stop and chat (fans of Curb will know what’s in the footnote).5 It makes me feel known and knowing and reminds me that despite its size, New York City is my neighborhood, a place where I belong.

Stratospheric fame

Then there’s the stratospherically famous---think immediate identification by a single name. As Natasha and I discussed, such fame attracts parasitic sycophants who never disagree with their celebrity “host.” That lack of critical pushback makes the celebrity intellectually lazy to the point where they can lose their perspective. Unlike good basketball players, they don’t know where they are on the court. And that can lead to all sorts of mistakes and disasters.

We also noted how outsized fame and success in one field can mislead a celebrity into thinking they can transfer their success to other, unrelated pursuits. Phil in MEDIUM RARE, overly lauded for his luck in picking winners of basketball games, begins to think that he can apply his “skills” to media and politics.

Elon Musk and other tech billionaires have proven themselves to be brilliant and lucky entrepreneurs. Because of that success and because of their vast wealth and fame, we tend to pay attention to their views on all sorts of matters. But instead, we really should be downgrading those views and be skeptical of their ability to think clearly given the defect of being surrounded by people who constantly stroke their ego.

Celebrity fame that repels good people

There’s an adverse selection process at work in who courts the company of the celebrity. Most of the people who thust themselves forward view getting close to a famous person as a chance for money and reflected power and glory. (See the movie Lurker.)

Natasha and I feel the opposite.

We have both had the experience of being a good friend with someone before they were famous. Once that fame was achieved, we became hesitant about being overly familiar with our now famous friend. We questioned the purity of our motives and also recognized how much busier our respective friends had become. Probably unfair to our friends who more than ever need to be with people from “before times” who will act “normally” with them.

Fame that robs you of your humanity

Vaclav Havel, the brilliant intellectual who became president of the Czech Republic, was uniquely able to self-reflect about his fame and power. In a 1991 speech, Havel examines what was happening to him because of all the perks he enjoyed thanks to his position.

His dentist comes to him, he never goes shopping, he is in the “world of VIPs who gradually lose track of how much butter or a streetcar ticket costs, how to make a cup of coffee, how to drive a car, and how to place a telephone call.”

The celebrity loses control of their life, becomes trapped by their very celebrity, by “its exigencies, consequences, aspects, and privileges.”

In a beautiful summing up, Havel says that, ultimately, the celebrity “is transformed into a stone bust of himself. The bust may accentuate his undying importance and fame, but at the same time it is no more than a piece of dead stone.” 6

Celebrity fame that obscures art

In our discussion, Natasha referenced a Substack essay she wrote called “Fame’s Inflection Point.” An inflection is reached when a person’s fame becomes so powerful and intrinsic that it overshadows anything extrinsic that they produce.

Natasha may have been wrestling with her novel MEDIUM RARE when she wrote:

“As more and more people desperately try—and succeed—to pass fame’s inflection point, doing so seems to become both more existential and meaningless than ever. This is the labyrinth I’m currently stuck in, trying to build some wings.” 7

A video clip

Below is a 13 minute excerpt from my LIVE with Natasha this past week where we spoke about fame and celebrity as it related to MEDIUM RARE and beyond.

The full LIVE can be accessed here. 8

Question for the comments: Despite what I write above, I am intrigued by celebrities for no good reason other than they are famous. What about you?

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My wife was away skiing this week. As I often do when I’m alone, I went over to the Upper West Side to catch up with my friend Tommy. He and I have a relationship built on loneliness, although mine is temporary while his seems more or less permanent.

After spending time with Tommy, I always have an urge to help him. He deserves to be with someone who loves him. I think Tommy’s good points outweigh his bad ones. You be the judge.

Tommy’s profile

Looks

Tommy’s a good-looking man. He’s tall and broad with thick, blond hair the “color of whitened honey.” At the age of forty-four, he’s on the big side, not fat but perhaps stout or sturdy. But it’s nothing that some time at the gym or a GLP-1 can’t fix. The good news is that he’s hard on himself, never in denial. He calls himself, unfairly I think, a “hippopotamus.”

When Tommy was a college freshman, a Hollywood talent scout saw his picture and called him in for a screen test. Admittedly the talent scout was on the lowest link of the industry’s food chain, but he thought Tommy might be the perfect actor to play “the guy who loses the girl.” That led Tommy to quit college and try his luck at acting in LA. He did not find luck.

Tommy’s current domestic situation

Tommy has two women, both of them quite pretty if not beautiful, who want to be with Tommy but circumstances prevent him from being with either. He’s legally married but he and his wife have been separated for four years. He has two boys, fourteen and ten. He supports his wife and boys,

It’s hard to say what went wrong with the marriage although Tommy will say that he married in haste, against his own better judgment. Tommy’s harsh, old-fashioned father has speculated that there might be “bed-trouble.”

Tommy would like to marry his girlfriend. As far as I know Tommy did not cheat on his wife before the separation. And his wife currently dates other men. The issue with Tommy’s girlfriend is that she’s a devout Catholic and won’t stay or even be seen with him until he gets a divorce, which his wife refuses to give him.

So Tommy is caught in a vise between the two women.

His wife’s strategy is to make Tommy’s situation so miserable that he will come back to the marriage. I only have one side of it but his wife seems like a very hard and unpleasant person.

They each have divorce lawyers. Tommy’s willing to give his wife all he has, but his wife keeps moving the goalposts. As Tommy says, “the lawyers talk and send bills and I eat my heart out.”

For what it’s worth, Tommy tries to be a good father. In addition to sending money to support his sons, he takes them to baseball games on the weekend.

Tommy has so much love to give but right now he can’t seem to find an outlet for it.

Tommy’s financial Situation

Tommy lives in a residential hotel on the Upper West Side. Not one of the new, super luxury ones like One Central Park West at Columbus Circle but one of the older pre-war ones further uptown on Broadway, similar to the Ansonia, a Stanford White building that Tommy likes to stare at.

Tommy likens the Ansonia to a “baroque palace from Prague” and notes its “towers, domes, huge swells and bubbles of metal gone green from exposure.”

My boy Tommy has a way with words.

Tommy is recently unemployed. He was a high-level sales executive, earning an upper-middle-class income (which put him in the 32% tax bracket). He quit because the owners wouldn’t give him equity and diminished his position by bringing in someone above him. Tommy’s currently weighing his career options.

As for Tommy’s balance sheet, it’s admittedly not a pretty picture. A malevolent huckster named Tamkin, who may or may not be a doctor, has preyed upon Tommy’s fears that he is missing out on the speculative boom in the financial markets.

Tamkin made day-trading sound simple. Get in, watch your position tick up, and then get out with a profit. Tamkin taunted Tommy by asking him how he could possibly sit still and do nothing and watch everyone else make money. He lured Tommy in by tales of people making five, ten thousand, or more a week, doing nothing but watching the tape.

Money is oppressive to Tommy. Despite his potential to make a good living as a sales executive, his soul rebels against hyper-capitalism. He hates that the world has made it “shameful” not to have money.

Nevertheless, Tommy was gripped by Tamkin’s incitement of FOMO, the “fear of missing out.” Tommy gave Tamkin all his money and the authority to trade with it. Tamkin took some highly leveraged positions which crashed. Tommy lost everything he had, which wasn’t that much to begin with..

I want to make it clear that Tommy did not consult me before getting mixed up with this Tamkin character.

Tommy’s father

Tommy’s mother is dead and he’s estranged from his sister. His father is a wealthy retired doctor who lives in the same residential hotel. Tommy’s father is a tightfisted and coldhearted bastard. He refuses to provide any financial help to Tommy. In fact, he never has.

More than money, Tommy just wants some sympathy or empathy from his father. Instead, his dad is constantly critical of the choices Tommy has made. He doesn’t want to be burdened by Tommy’s “confusions.”

Tommy told me about a breakfast with his dad in the hotel dining room. His dad bragged about Tommy’s lucrative former job in front of his friend. But as soon as the friend left and he and Tommy were alone, his dad started in with Tommy about his sloppy appearance and the domestic and career messes he’s made. His dad’s also been on Tommy for taking too many prescription pills. His dad has a point about the pills.

Tommy’s dad has said things like this to Tommy’s face”

“I see other elderly parents here with children who are no good, and they keep backing them at a great sacrifice. But I’m not going to make that mistake.”

Tommy is truly, sadly, deeply alone.

My kinship with Tommy

I can relate to Tommy’s loneliness.

I was a shy boy, scared of girls, and without anything to be confident about. I recall being alone in my room most nights and weekends. And dreading, with that telltale pit in my stomach, the approach of Sunday night bedtime, because I knew I’d wake to Monday morning and have to go to school.

Back then, I never said to myself, “I’m lonely,” but instead I distracted myself by playing games against imaginary opponents or reading fantasy books. A complete immersion in different worlds could shield me against feelings that were too painful for me to handle at that age.

Now as an adult, my circumstances have changed with a large family and many dear friends. Still, when I’m alone and triggered, my childhood loneliness comes back to haunt me. It can sting more than the original, because as an adult I’ve lost my childhood ability to escape completely into an imaginary world of a game or a book.

Memories of childhood are more poignant when you’re older. You look back over a longer vista of your life, and you realize that your childhood stands out, a mountain range that formed your life’s landscape.

They’re unpredictable, these feelings of despondency. They’re usually short-lived, but twice they lasted, not for hours or days, but for many months. Those were awful periods, times I could say I was depressed.

Tommy Wilhelm’s lonely and beautiful soul

As you may have already surmised, my friend Tommy was born not of man and woman but from the imagination of Saul Bellow who breathed life into him through the pages of his 1956 novella, Seize the Day.

A great author allows us to know a character with a completeness and clarity we rarely meet in real life. Bellow lets us see into Tommy as he really is, a profoundly lost and lonely soul. And in understanding and empathizing with Tommy, I recall the loneliness of my childhood but in a kinship which makes me feel somehow better.

At the end of the novella, after Tommy’s lost every penny, Tommy wanders into a funeral home where a dead man, a stranger, lies in an open coffin. The sight of the dead man breaks the dam of Tommy’s sadness and he begins to cry “with all his heart.”

Here’s the last paragraph of the novella.

“The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in [Tommy’s] blind, wet eyes, the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need.” 1

What is “deeper than sorrow” and the “heart’s ultimate need?” To me, it’s loneliness and the desperate need for connection. In the funeral parlor, Tommy finally finds a shared connection of loneliness with a dead stranger, for who can be more alone than the dead?

This connection with the dead man, fellow sufferer of loneliness, provides an outlet for Tommy to express pity for someone other than himself. And in that he finds a release.

Notes:

All words in quotes are from Seize The Day, either verbatim or closely paraphrased.

I have written about Tommy and Seize the Day before, in the fall of 2023, here.

And below is what continues to be my favorite loneliness song. Janis Ian’s At Seventeen.

Question for the comments: Who are the fictional characters who you consider to be friends?

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On Tuesday, February 17th at 5:30 PM, I’m going Live with to discuss her new novel MEDIUM RARE, out March 3rd. I devoured an advance copy.

We won’t spoil the plot but we will discuss some of the book’s juicy themes, which include the gamification of everything, March Madness, status choices in marriage, and infidelity.

Tuesday, February 17th at 5:30 PM EDT

Use this link to put it in your calendar.

However.

Before the news and extent of Epstein’s crimes became well known, I’d probably have accepted an invitation to attend a dinner with people like Bill Gates or Elon Musk at Epstein’s townhouse. I’m not immune to the thrill of meeting celebrities. And being asked to be included in an inner ring of wealth and power for an evening can be heady stuff, leaving you wanting more.

If I’d done a google search on Epstein, circa 2014, it would have revealed that he was a convicted and registered sex offender who’d served 13 months (with extensive work-release privileges) for a single count of soliciting sex with a minor. I’d have also discovered that despite that conviction Epstein moved within elite and inner rings of power, influence, and wealth.

As well I’d have thought about then what I don’t think about now. Meeting people of significant wealth could have helped my career as an investment manager. So, yes, I might have gone.

The phenomenon and danger of the appeal of exclusive networks, or Inner Rings, was the subject of a famous speech called The Inner Ring given by C.S. Lewis to students soon before the end of World War Two. His speech has lessons for all of us because it explains how Epstein lured so many otherwise seemingly sensible people into his network despite evidence of Epstein’s monstrous crimes. 1

One of those people is Peter Attia, a celebrity doctor who has been rightfully disparaged for his close friendship with Epstein and some related disgraceful emails and behavior. I met Attia at a conference in Florida for wealthy investors in 2015 and was impressed with his presentation on healthy exercise. Attia’s star was then on the rise. Now his reputation has been destroyed.

Unlike Attia, I think I’d have soon determined that Epstein’s scene was not where I belonged or felt comfortable.

There were clear signs of his corroded and corrosive character. The décor alone…

I’m not excusing anyone who was aware of Epstein’s heinous lifestyle and monstrous crimes and continued to consort with him in any meaningful way.

In fact, I’m not even excusing my hypothetical self for possibly accepting that hypothetical invitation. I can hope that I would have declined. But it’s important to be honest about one’s vulnerabilities, even in the abstract. To learn lessons from the mistakes of others such as Peter Attia.

A quick word on the DOJ data release

I think the Justice Department release is a good thing. We deserve to know the full story and to hold all the malefactors to account.

In a release of this magnitude, however, it’s inevitable that some of the people named will be the subject of false rumors or will be unfairly stigmatized out of proportion to their actual dealings with Epstein.

It would be awful if the data dump turns into such a widespread witch hunt that the backlash dilutes the severity of the crimes and moral failings of those who are truly guilty and thereby interferes with the severe and necessary punishment they deserve.

Once inside the Inner Ring you never want to leave

C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series and Christian intellectual, delivered his Inner Ring speech to students of King’s College in London in December 1944. His purpose was to warn the students about the seductive nature of belonging to the exclusive cliques that exist everywhere but have no charters or by-laws or membership lists. If you belong, you know.

In addressing students, Lewis was confident that they had already been exposed in the course of their schooldays to many hierarchies of who’s in and who’s out of this ring or that.

We all have memories from school when being included or excluded from a clique was all that mattered. In fifth grade I was “Vice-President” of a club whose sole activity was giving and taking away membership and titles. In seventh grade, at a new school, I was outside of every ring. An outcast. The memories of being “out” outweigh the memories of briefly being “in” and are still fresh and painful.

Cliques and rings will ceaselessly shift, but at any moment in time, when you are an outcast, your situation can seem permanent, relentless, agonizing.

Lewis is realistic about human nature. All of us will desire to be inside many rings over the course of a lifetime, some aimed at good, some at evil. An Inner Ring by its nature will be exclusive. It is always an “us” or a “we.”

A ring could be the same six volunteers working every week as a well-practiced squad at their children’s school packing food into bags for their fellow parents. A ring could be a group of six pedophiles connected by their criminal sickness and their trust in each other to keep their crimes hidden. 2

“Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.” 3

In the neat summation above, C.S. Lewis wants us to recognize that a desire to be inside a ring can be strong enough to cloud moral judgment. Below, Lewis captures the moment when you are given a subtle invitation, a solicitation, to join a morally corrupt Inner Ring.

“And you will be drawn in because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face––[‘a good-looking man, resembling Ralph Lauren, with thick gray-white hair and a weathered face’] —turn suddenly cold and contemptuous.” 4

In the brackets, I substituted a description of Epstein from a Vanity Fair article. 5

Peter Attia’s failed apology

The celebrity doctor Peter Attia says he did not engage in any criminal activity, and there is no proof that he did. However, his email correspondence with Epstein shows that he knew about Epstein’s criminal predilection and despite that knowledge he was obsequious to Epstein and used language that condoned and cheered on Epstein’s criminal behavior. 6

In his press release, Attia explains his motivations to be part of Epstein’s world.

“Everything about [Epstein] seemed excessive and exclusive, including the fact that he lived in the largest home in all of Manhattan, owned a Boeing 727, and hosted parties with the most powerful and prominent leaders in business and politics.” 7

I bolded the word “exclusive.”

As C.S. Lewis said of any Ring,

“Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.” 8

And of course Epstein’s possessions have nothing to do with excusing Attia, a doctor, for writing the below email to Epstein.

“Pussy is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.” 9

Nor does the size of Epstein’s plane or mansion have anything to do with Attia staying in New York after his infant son suffered a cardiac arrest. He ignored his wife’s pleas to come home The timing of Attia’s emails combined with his self-reporting in a book reveals that he stayed to meet with Epstein. “Doing a very bad thing,” indeed. 10

In another email exchange, this time with Epstein’s assistant, Attia thanks the assistant for the loan of an apartment from Epstein and is embarrassingly obsequious.

“No...thank YOU so much. See you next time, hopefully JE in town when I’m back in 2 weeks. I go into JE withdrawal when I don’t see him...” 11

In reading Attia’s correspondence with Epstein, it seems probable that Attia was not in the inner sanctum of Epstein’s rings but rather in one of the satellite, outer rings. Attia later wrote that he wanted to visit Epstein’s Island. Perhaps Attia hoped that his flattery would gain him access to an even more exclusive ring within Epstein’s circles.

In his speech C.S. Lewis notes that once inside one ring, there’s always another, even more exclusive ring to penetrate. Lewis compares this search for more and more exclusive rings to peeling an endless onion or

“the torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water…” 12

A supposed code of silence

In another email to Epstein, Attia writes:

“You the biggest problem with becoming friends with you? The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul…” 13

In his attempted apology, Attia spins that email as having nothing to do with his knowledge of Epstein’s sexual predilections. Instead, Attia claims this:

“I treated that access as something to be quiet about rather than discussed freely with others…What I was referring to, poorly and flippantly, was the discretion commanded by those social and professional circles–the idea that you don’t talk about who you meet, the dinners you attend and the power and influence of the people in those settings.” 14

I’ve bolded certain Inner Ring words: “access,” “discretion,” and “circles.”

In my experience, very few people can resist talking about the famous people they’ve met. Name dropping is very tempting. It can form a good part of the motivation to spend time with people of power and influence. Attia seems like someone who, when it comes to name dropping, is no slouch.

I do not credit Attia’s apology with sincerity, and I think it did him more harm than good. It makes the typical general mistake of poorly designed apologies. A rote sentence that there is no excuses for his behavior followed and surrounded by a torrent of words filled precisely with excuses, misdirections, and equivocations.

Justice and judgment

This is a moment in American life when bad behavior among the privileged and powerful seems prevalent, if not ubiquitous. Many of us, privileged or not, are trying hard to be virtuous. But virtue is quiet and generally unremarkable while vice is noisy and newsworthy.

My only suggestion is a modest one. To understand and be on guard against our own moral weaknesses in order to be as virtuous as possible.

When I shared an earlier draft of this essay with my adult children, my daughter Lauren had a strong reaction. Her comment, pinned to the top of the comments section, is powerful and should spark conversation.

Motivated by Lauren’s comment, I am linking to this recent post, Understanding Epstein’s Crimes, by , whose heroic reporting for the Miami Herald in 2017-18 ensured that Epstein would not get away with his crimes.

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Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers is a post-mortem on the sudden rupture of her seemingly idyllic twenty-year marriage. It is marked by the agony of her fight against hindsight bias. The “I should have known’s” and the “how could I have been so stupid’s?” that plagued her and can plague any of us when we look back from the anguish of the present to a serene past and assume, mistakenly, that if we had just been more astute and less naive, then we could have predicted the future. And prevented it.

The destruction of Belle’s twenty-year marriage and the breakup of her three-child family was an earthquake. Her husband “James” abandoned Belle and their children when they were quarantining together on Martha’s Vineyard during the very early days of Covid in March 2020. First came a nighttime phone call from the husband of the woman James was secretly sleeping with. That was followed the next morning by James’ announcement that he was “done” being Belle’s husband and effectively “done” with their children.

When Belle asked him why, James gave no explanation, just an emphasis on the totality and finality of his rejection.

“I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life but I don’t.”

Belle’s family is famous, glamorous, and old-money. Her parents Amanda and Carter Burden were socialites and a famous “it couple.” Her grandmother was Babe Paley, wife of Bill Paley of CBS fame, and best friend of Truman Capote until Capote betrayed Babe by trumpeting Bill Paley’s affairs.

The wealth and the fame are part of the book’s appeal. Belle brings us inside a type of life that is largely inaccessible. But what propelled my reading was joining Belle in her hunt for the “why” of it all. Also, Belle’s prose carries the unmistakable clarity of the truth as she saw it and felt it.

In the years after the rupture, Belle’s inner voice questions her decisions and the course of her whole life. That voice is fierce and compelling. Her current self argues against that voice. Near the beginning of the book, she writes

“Other couples I knew then, and know now had many more flags, redder flags, and they stayed married.”

But until after I finished the book, I found myself taking the side of Belle’s fierce and critical inner voice. I agreed that Belle had indeed failed to see the red flags of her marriage. And that she had acted impetuously and without judgment about financial matters.

The book effectively recruited me to join Belle’s monstrous inner critic, a critic that was aided and abetted by many factors. There are the thoughtless comments by her friends and acquaintances like her gynecologist who blames Belle for her situation because when Belle gave up her career, she became uninteresting to her husband. There are exogenous reminders such as a deluge of Christmas cards with pictures of families, smiling, loving, and complete. Pictures that Belle tears apart in fury.

But after I finished the book, I understood much better, thanks to Belle, the error of hindsight bias, highlighted by my own hindsight bias about a recent trivial matter.

My trivial example

Eighteen months ago, I bought a mining stock for $5. I sold it last year for $8 because I became nervous about a change in management. Soon after my sale, the commodities the company mined shot straight up in price as did the stock, which went to $20. Even though I’d made money I still felt like an idiot. Irrationally, I’d have felt better if I’d never bought the stock in the first place.

My inner narrative was that I was a fool, a sucker, for having made such an untimely sale. This familiar inner voice is cruel and sadistic. It pounced on me whenever the subject of investments came into view. A newspaper headline, a check-in with the financial markets. Sometimes it caught me totally unaware. It was relentless.

A solution

Then I came across some terrific advice in the Substack newsletter of . An excerpt and a link is in the footnote, and I encourage everyone to read it. 1

To summarize Dr. Hall’s insight, the irrational attacks of your inner critic, your “sadistic bully,” will wither if they are exposed to outside light. Just write the ridiculous words down or say them aloud.

So I started to tell my wife Debbie about a terrible mistake I’d made and how I was tormenting myself over it. Debbie assumed I was referring to a grievous bidding error I’d made as her bridge partner in a recent competitive game. That regret she was perfectly happy to have me agonize over so I would not repeat it. 2

But when Debbie heard that my actual, beat-myself-up regret was about the timing of selling a stock, a situation where I could never have expected to know the future direction of the stock as well as unimportant to our lives, she quickly and assuredly confirmed that my self-accusations were absurd.

I immediately felt better and recognized Belle’s memoir as her way of exorcising the bully of her inner voice and inspiring others to do the same.

I found Belle’s husband to be weird, especially about money

It’s easy to make judgments when we’re scrutinizing a relationship from the outside. We’re not in love! Plus we have the advantage of holding in our hands a few hundred carefully written pages detailing the relationship’s entire history.

Nevertheless, I judged.

When I was on the side of Belle’s inner bully, I concluded that the obvious problem with the marriage was that Belle and James had vastly different backgrounds and approaches to money. Perhaps that was my focus because I write about wealth. As well, I can relate to some of Belle’s attitudes about money as a fellow beneficiary of multigenerational wealth. 3

Not surprisingly, I was convinced that James was the weird one about money. His family was briefly wealthy until his father went broke. Because of that, he was parsimonious and careful to a fault.

For example, on their honeymoon when Belle would pay the restaurant check (why is she paying the check when he has a well-paying legal job?) James would get angry that Belle paid without looking, that she didn’t audit the itemized bill. I’m with Belle. I never check the itemized bill. It’s as likely that the restaurant makes an error in our favor as in theirs. And if James really needed to check the itemized bill, let him pay for it!

Or, this:

“[James] asked me to annotate our joint credit card bills, explaining each charge in tiny print.”

Reading that, I’m screaming, Belle, can’t you see how this would never work. The two of you come from such completely different worlds!

Or the sinking feeling I got when I read that James would tell Belle how much money to wire into their joint checking account each month. As if his income didn’t even exist.

And his various machinations over the pre-nup. Dastardly, cheap parvenue without manners!

But then Belle and her inner critic pointed out a habit about James that struck me quite differently.

“[James] didn’t like small talk, and he was always the first to leave a dinner or cocktail party, entirely confident in his right to do so.”

Wait, that’s exactly how my family has described me! And accurately too. I’m a decisive “leaver.” This made me slam the brakes on my judgement.

Why I’m glad I read Strangers

• Hemingway defined courage as grace under pressure. In the full telling of her story, Belle is gracious to herself and even to James. She takes us along with her to the healthy conclusion of “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

• As already noted, Strangers is a strong antidote to the poison of hindsight bias.

• The book also serves as a warning against allowing the “peak-end rule” to run amuck. The peak-end rule states that for events during any time period, whether an hour of playing tennis or a twenty year marriage, we will overemphasize any peak experience, good or bad, and overemphasize what happens at the end of the experience, whether good or bad.

  A highly charged negative emotional peak comes at the end of Belle’s twenty-year marriage. But she is determined not to allow the end to nullify the memory of all the past happy times of their marriage, especially the magic of that first period of falling in love.

• Strangers is a master class in humility in accepting that there are certain things about people we can never know. Belle accepts that she will likely never know why James left. People are complex. She also understands herself well enough to realize that she is strong enough not to need to know.

I was having lunch this week with a friend who was reading and enjoying Strangers. My friend said reading the book made her feel a bit like a voyeur. That’s true of any good memoir.

Here is the link to the book’s Amazon page.

Question for the comments: When has your inner critic turned into a sadistic bully?

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2

For those who play bridge, my error was that I passed after Debbie had bid a new suit as an overcall. You do not pass when you open a diamond, your opponent bids three clubs and then your partner bids three hearts. Bridge partnerships have been permanently sundered for sins less severe.

Here’s the fateful hand. We could have made a slam. Bridge is a wonderful game! As you play more, you just make different mistakes.

I rewatched the movie Oppenheimer this week. I watched it over a few days. It’s a long movie. I appreciated it much more the second time because I could track the timeline shifts and concentrate on the emotions of the brilliant, flawed humans conjuring something amazing––a device built from the elements on Earth that gave us life yet powerful enough to destroy that same planet and that same life.

This week, in between watching Oppenheimer, I also watched Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minster, give an important speech at the Davos conference. It’s well worth watching. The link to the speech is in the footnote. 1

Carney’s speech was a eulogy for the post-World War Two rules-based international order. He said it was dead and he was right. We now live in a world where America is no longer absolutely supreme. Now, great powers contend, and “middle powers” like Canada must scramble to keep their sovereignty.

Carney didn’t mention nuclear weapons. But since I was in the middle of watching Oppenheimer, it was nuclear weapons that I thought about. And how for the first time in history we live in a world rife with nuclear weapons and where we can no longer even pretend that America is a “world policeman.”

In the media, Carney’s speech was quickly overshadowed by coverage of Trump’s petulant and ridiculous designs on Greenland.

We have become so horribly complacent about the risk of nuclear weapons. The idea of a nuclear war or any nuclear device being detonated is too abysmal. So rather than look into the abyss we look away.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Carney’s speech was a version of the old fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the joke being that the Emperor is naked and no one dares to tell him that the clothes he thinks he’s wearing are an illusion. The illusion is created by communal fear, a sort of group psychosis. But the fear is real and the risk is real. And so the people have to hide their disgust beneath their applause and cheers for the naked Emperor.

Until a child says the simple truth––“He’s naked”––and the illusion is destroyed.

To Carney, the idea of a fair and free rules-based order was always “partially false.” As a hegemon, America could operate by different standards than other countries. America could “exempt [itself] when convenient” from rules governing trade and from rules governing the use of force.

But even with some hypocrisy between the “rhetoric and the reality,” there was much to be grateful to America for its exceptional role.

…”public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes…”

In his speech, Carney played the part of the little boy pointing out the nakedness of the Emperor. In world affairs America may still be the strongest but it is now the first among others and no longer indispensable, no longer, in fact, to be depended upon to act in any way other than to further its own great power interests. The “rupture” between the reality and the rhetoric is too great to maintain the fiction.

We’re back to a world of multiple contending great powers attempting to impose their wills on each other and on less powerful nations. Except this time, for the first time, with nuclear weapons.

Seeing missiles descend on Central Park.

In the 1980s, the decade before the Cold War ended, I was in my 20s, got married, had our first child, and feared nuclear war. I remember watching the nuclear war movie The Day After with my wife Debbie and our saying to each other “wait, this could really happen.”

I remember imagining the sight of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile descending from the clear blue sky of the heavens over Central Park and knowing that my life and the lives of everyone I knew would be over. It was a thought so evil and horrific that I couldn’t hold it in my imagination for more than a split second.

At the time, I could comfort myself that the West was united behind the United States, that we seemed to be “winning” and that the Soviet Union had been checkmated by Mutually Assured Destruction. I believed we were the good guys keeping the world safe and we would prevail.

Late last year Debbie and I watched Katheryn Bigelow’s harrowing and well-named movie House of Dynamite, a reminder that a single missile might create a chain reaction of responses that would destroy the world. Nuclear weapons are the Dynamite and the House is our planet. 2

Luck is fickle

Movies like The Day After and House of Dynamite and my attempt to imagine seeing an ICBM about to hit New York City are all in the ancient tradition of stories and myths about technology racing well ahead of humanity’s capacity for good judgment.

Consider, as examples, the Tower of Babel in the Bible, the wax wings of Icarus in Greek myth, Dr. Frankenstein’s creature as imagined by Mary Shelly, and Stephen King’s bio-dystopian novel The Stand (echoed by the real live ravages of Covid). Our myths and our stories reflect that we always seem to take things too far. Many people believe artificial intelligence is in this category.

It’s true that since August 1945, the world has not experienced a nuclear weapon used in war. That has nothing to do with leaders being unwilling to kill their adversaries at great scale. There is ample and consistent evidence to the contrary. Instead, it has everything to do with a combination of the old rules-based system and a fair amount of good luck. We’ve had many close calls of nuclear weapons being launched.3

But luck is fickle and we no longer have the rules-based order. There are now nine countries known to possess nuclear weapons. The U.S. China, Russia, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.

As well, there are many countries that undoubtedly want to possess nuclear weapons for protection and prestige. Knowledge and technology spread and advance. Countries only advertise their nuclear weapons capability after they’ve achieved it.

Would it be wise and in Canda’s self-interest to acquire its own nuclear arsenal if it could do so covertly. You have your answer if you heard Mark Carney say in his speech that submission is not sovereignty and if you heard Donald Trump’s reply the next day,

“Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

Reconsidering “Thank God For The Atom Bomb”

In November 2023 I wrote a post about Paul Fussell’s essay Thank God For The Atom Bomb. Fussell had been one of the soldiers preparing to invade Japan and was saved from doing so by Japan’s surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 4

The argument in favor of using the atomic bombs invented by Oppenheimer and his colleagues at Los Alamos was that the two bombs would kill fewer people than would die in a long and hard-fought invasion of Japan. And that the people killed by the bomb would be Japanese while during an invasion both Americans and Japanese would die.

That debate over whether to use the bombs recalls to mind the “trolley problem” where unless you push a lever a trolley will continue down a track to kill three people. If you pull the lever, you divert the trolley to a different track where “only” one person will die.

On a utilitarian basis, it’s obvious you ought to pull the lever because one death is better than three deaths. That was the position taken by the Truman administration and by Fussell in his essay in favor of dropping the bombs. In my post I agreed with Fussell who contended that the only morality associated with war is to end it as quickly as possible.

But I missed the moral implications

But now I think there was in fact a crucial moral dimension to using a weapon designed to kill so many civilians with a single bomb. A moral dimension to set the precedent that atomic weapons could and would be used to kill civilian populations at great scale because that was what they were designed to do.

In the trolley problem, if you pull that lever you have become the agent of someone’s death. After the successful atomic test a few weeks before Hiroshima, Robert Oppenheimer famously said, “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds,” a reference to the Hindu god Shiva.

Nuclear weapons are different than conventional weapons because they carry with them seeds of destruction so vast that their use is awful to contemplate. Thanks to John Hersey we have a journalist’s candid report of the human horror of Hiroshima.

“On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.” 5

Eighty years later, the destructive power of atomic weaponry has increased by a similar magnitude as have other technologies. The first hydrogen bomb America created in 1952 was about 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In hindsight, I wish Truman had listened to the hesitations of some of the scientists involved in creating the atomic bomb about using it. Some scientists advocated warning Japan coupled with a demonstration of the bomb’s destructive power.

Later, Robert Oppenheimer opposed the development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb because he was morally affronted by its destructive potential and the inevitable spread of the technology in an arms race.

How can we be calm when human beings control these weapons? Especially human beings who crave authoritarian power. It is a huge error of imagination to think that men like Hitler and Stalin were unique in their moral monstrosity.

What can be done

Mark Carney did the world a tremendous favor at Davos by speaking truth to power. His speech will likely be remembered as a stirring warning that we are in a new and more dangerous era.

Following and building upon Carney’s example, we can speak the truth loudly about the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation and the dangers of nuclear weapons use, whether in a war or by accident or by terrorists. Especially in this new multi-polar, great power environment.

Protest and attention can have an effect on our leaders.6

As well, we should be studying the many close calls of nuclear war that occurred throughout the Cold War to remind ourselves of how necessary it is to have as many precautions as possible.7

Ever since the invention of an atomic weapon in Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos facility we’ve lived, often way too comfortably, with this greatest of all existential threats to human survival. Complacency could be the death of us all.

No specific question. Please comment!

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The subject matter of this article in New York Magazine gave me a bad case of “the ick.” (Link at the bottom.)

I’ve contended that the way the media portrays the wealthy is unrealistically skewed to the negative. 1

So it certainly doesn’t help my cause when an extremely wealthy hedge fund executive and his wife choose to splash their extravagance in our faces.

I have no objection to extravagant parties. They help the local economy, which is a good thing. And many people enjoy them. As well, my wife and I have been involved in throwing wedding celebrations for two of our children. Those celebrations were costly. Although we weighed each expenditure against value received and tried to avoid anything that might be considered too over-the-top.

What I object to is not the extravagance itself but the avid self-publicity of “let them eat cake” spectacles like this party. What is the purpose of agreeing to have a magazine write about this event and otherwise hyping it through public social media other than to show off? In a time of hyper-attention to economic inequality, what is the result other than to inflame economic class resentment?

Am I throwing stones from my glass house

It’s a true cliché that a trait we critique, or even despise, in others is often a trait we despise in ourselves. So I have to wonder whether my negative reaction to the article is in part based on my impulse to show off through different means and in a different tone.

After all, this newsletter is a form of social media where I write from the point of view of personal wealth. And while my aim is to give a more balanced view of the wealthy––that not all of us are smug or obnoxious––I can’t be sure if that’s how my posts land.

And even if my aim is achieved, I can’t be certain that my motivation is entirely free of that same impulse I deplore in others––to seek attention for “my success, my money, my fabulous life.”

Do aesthetics matter

My wife Debbie’s aesthetic is understated elegance and maximum personalization, and whatever she can do by herself she does. She is her own party planner.

The little details that my wife loves to deploy––delicate flower arrangements that follow the colors of the rainbow or wedding pictures of our ancestors at our child’s wedding––might seem invisible and restrained to the point of dullness to givers of elaborate themed parties like the one featured in the article. Here’s a snippet from the article.

“And they’re going all out, embracing obscene excess. ‘Everyone is one-upping each other. Someone throws a party, someone wants to throw the next one, everyone’s posting it on social’.”

However, what might seem declasse to us might be seen as great and clever fun to others. Each to their own taste.

A digression–what makes an evening successful

As with aesthetics, different people will have different notions of what makes a wonderful party or evening. I’d dread going to one of these types of parties. No worries about that, especially after this is published! My wife and I are not on that circuit.

In the same New York Magazine article, a Greenwich, CT woman notes that a penchant for frequent and fancy theme parties has travelled from New York City to the suburbs. These evenings are preferable, she says

“to the same four restaurants, with the same four couples, talking about kids and vacations and ‘Should we split the Brussels sprouts to start?’ The theme parties shake it all up.”

I agree with the first part of that sentiment. I too don’t really want to hear about vacations or kids other than a quick and polite exchange. As well, I’m a fan of decisive menu orders, I don’t like to share my food (exception for dessert), and I will not eat Brussels sprouts.

[Editor says, “you sound like so much fun! And, don’t forget, we met at a Halloween party!”] 2

I like to be in pleasant, quiet, and intimate settings with kind people who bring varied perspectives. Or, who teach me something new. Or, who make me laugh. I find that writers and artists (and my children and brothers) generally tend to be the best at this. Although I can think of friends in business who have a gift of going off on hilarious tangents and telling wonderfully strange stories.

Back to the main point

Most people are restrained in their actions by a desire to be seen as kind and humble. Or to put it another way, most people will feel ashamed if they are viewed as arrogant.

Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments writes that the restraint of prospective shame is governed in most of us by an inner and “impartial spectator” who warns us when we are about to act in a way that will prevent people from finding us lovely in character. As (no relation) writes in his wonderful book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life:

“The successful man will mute his trumpeting of his good fortune.”

When the impartial spectator is nowhere to be found we risk becoming prideful to the point where people wish us ill.

The futility and evanescence of that Pride is captured well in the final lines of Shelly’s poem Ozymandias about an ancient statue in the desert whose “shattered visage” lies “half-sunk” in the sand.

“And on the pedestal, these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Here is a link to an excerpt from the article that sparked this essay. It’s on ’s new Substack. The full article is paywalled but if you’re not a subscriber, you get a few free articles per month.

Question for the comments: Do you object to the extravagance or the publicizing of it or both?

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This week I was full of rage, contempt, and astonishment. Not a good place from which to write anything useful to me or to you.

I found solace, however, in revisiting my old post and my fictional friend Willy Loman. Willy believes whatever he needs to believe in order to make his world make sense. Willy clings to his delusions because the truth of his life is too disappointing, too painful to accept.

To varying degrees and about various things, there’s some of Willy Loman in all of us.

My post also reminded me that great literature is timeless in both its artistry and usefulness.

Here’s the post as originally published.

Willy Loman in the age of Trump

June 2023

This weekend, in one of my bookshelves, I came across Arthur Miller’s late 1940s play, Death of a Salesman. It was a chance encounter, the best way to renew a relationship with an old friend.

The play’s main character Willy Loman is an elderly man thwarted by the failures of his life, a result in part of his own choices, but due more to vast and impersonal forces outside his control. Willy is in extreme despair, and it is a cold heart indeed that does not share vicariously in the sorrow of Willy’s plight.

I hadn’t seen or read the play for at least a decade, and this time I took away something new, something relevant to our current times. An author/playwright has no bounds about revealing the inner life and mind of their characters, and a great one like Arthur Miller can do so with an artistry and exactitude rarely if ever met in real life.

So, I’m certain had Willy lived today, he would have been a die-hard supporter of Donald Trump. I’ve always felt a keen empathy toward Willy, and seeing him through this prism of politics in 2023 has deepened my understanding of the vast swath of my fellow citizens who covet the return of Trump to the Presidency.

I’m a believer in the free market. And so, in the winter of 2020 when the question was posed to me whether I’d vote, hypothetically, for Elizabeth Warren or Donald Trump, I hesitated for a beat. My questioner, someone delightfully free with expressing his views to me, was not pleased by my hesitation and declared that a voter for Trump was either “ignorant” or “morally bankrupt” and invited me to place myself in one or the other category.

However, even after all that’s happened, I refuse to think of Trump voters in such all or nothing terms. I think many of them are very much like Willy Loman, thwarted in their lives and looking for someone, anyone, who they think understands them and will fight for them. Trump gives them hope, if not for improving their lives, for at least wreaking havoc on a system and on the people they think have failed them. The same people who look down upon them and ridicule them.

Willy Loman is an elderly salesman in late 1940s Brooklyn. Twenty years ago, his house was more country than city with trees nearby and a clear sight of the sky. Now the city has come for him in the form of looming apartment buildings that surround his house and block his view.

Willy has been peddling his wares for a company up and down New England for his entire career of three and a half decades. He’s married and has two grown sons in their thirties. Willy had placed all his hopes in his elder son Biff who in high school was the charismatic football captain, good enough at the sport to win college scholarships.

As the play begins, we learn that Biff, home for a visit, has been a disappointment, having failed to fulfill any of Willy’s hopes. At the same time, Willy’s identity as a salesman is fading. He was never a great success but was able to make a living at the cost of great physical strain (his sample cases are heavy things to lug around.) Willy’s sales have dwindled to nothing. His salary has already been taken away and now Willy’s boss, the son of the founder, fires Willy. The firing happens as the boss plays with and marvels at an expensive new machine he’s purchased that can record his little daughter’s voice. The technology of the machine is far more valuable and interesting to the boss than Willy, who is disposable, a liability.

All of Willy’s years of service humping his heavy sample cases hundreds of miles across New England have provided no protection from the cruel math of the marketplace. Willy has no union, no pension, no severance, no loyalty from the company he’s served for his entire career. He’s essentially a gig worker, cast adrift when he’s reached the twilight of his usefulness.

Willy is mentally unstable. He frequently slips out of the present into a past remembered by him as a golden age. That mythologized past is Willy’s refuge from his current troubles. I’m sure he would have heard in Trump’s rants a promise to restore that past. And he would have grabbed onto that promise, despite it making no logical sense. He would have grabbed onto it because it would have given him hope.

In the past, Willy was an extreme optimist, convinced that his life and his family’s life would ascend. He and his sons are constantly expanding the house using their physical strength and their know-how with tools. And Willy instills in his sons that the key to success is being well-liked. It’s the elder son Biff with his football stardom, his scholarships, and his throngs of admirers, in whom Willy places all his hopes and dreams.

But Biff flunks senior year math, his scholarship’s at risk, so he travels to Boston to seek advice from Willy. There he catches his father committing adultery. Totally devastated. Biff forgets college and flees home to go out West, “giving up” on his life. Over the next fifteen years, Willy is oppressed by guilt and remorse for which he has no outlet. (Willy might have seen in Trump a fellow adulterer, no worse for wear.)

Despite his oppressive present life, Willy still has occasional bouts of wild optimism that Biff will come through if only Willy can give him enough money to start a business. Willy sees his life insurance policy as the only viable source so Willy kills himself, not knowing that the policy will be voided by his suicide. Another bad choice where brawn and charisma are no substitute for reading the fine print.

Willy’s is a death of despair. He can find no hope for himself alive. No dignity. He’s not a bad man. But he makes a few choices that are bad enough to crush his spirit. He sees others succeeding around him, both his contemporaries and his son’s. And he lacks any coherent narrative to explain to himself why that should be. The quintessential nerd neighbor who as a boy carried Biff’s cleats is now a lawyer off to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court. Willy’s impressed, but baffled.

Would Donald Trump have given Willy a narrative, false as it might be, to prevent his tragic end? I’m intrigued that the answer might be yes.

In any event, those of us who have thrived in our modern world, or at least not been its victims, would do well to understand the despair behind so many of those who support Trump. And reading Death of a Salesman or watching one of the great filmed versions of it might be a start to that understanding.

Question for the comments: Is there a book, poem, song, artwork, or show you turn to in order to help you make sense of what you consider senseless?

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This topic was sparked by a few articles that kicked up controversy over parents giving financial support to their adult children. A New York Magazine article focused on the alleged secret shame of adult children receiving parental support. did a great job in her Substack counter essay showing how such support can be natural and good.

A WSJ article dished about “Trust reveals,” in which supposedly unsuspecting adult heirs are surprised that they have huge trusts coming their way. took that article as a jumping off point in her thoughtful Substack essay about bad and good practices of passing down wealth.

My experience

When I was 18, I came into some money accumulated through annual gifts from both my parents and grandparents in what’s now called a “UTMA”–– Uniform Transfer to Minors Act that liberates funds at either age 18 or 21. Then, at ages 25 and 30, I received more substantial sums in trust when my grandparents died. As well, my mother paid for most of the private school tuition for my children because she wanted to do it and because she could do it free of any tax.

Most of our initial money came from my maternal grandfather who we all called “Ganky” because that’s what his first grandchild, my sister, called him. Ganky was by far the wealthiest person in our family. Born in 1905 in Tulsa, he was a wildly successful oilman in the 1930s and sold out his holdings at the top of one of the oil cycle’s perennial booms.

Growing up, Ganky witnessed a great deal of personal and financial volatility. His older brother was killed by a combination of an oil field accident and the Spanish Flu. His father died of a heart attack in a Tulsa “house of pleasure.” And he saw many families in the tight-knit Jewish community of Tulsa oilmen ruined by lavish spending combined with pressing their luck during the boom years, heedless of the cyclical nature of the oil business.

Once Ganky made his fortune, he was understandably very cautious and conservative about money. For himself and for his family.

Ganky once showed me the photo below, circa 1915, of the black-tie wedding reception for his older sister in a Kansas City hotel. He named the people in the photo, including his ten-year-old self in the back left corner and a few men he said were millionaires at that time but subsequently leveraged and spent their way into bankruptcy. It may have been then that he told me he could have been far wealthier if he’d been willing to take on debt to leverage his investments. But he hated debt!

As the patriarch of the family, Ganky was generous to his two daughters and six grandchildren but he was perpetually frightened that we would squander his money by our extravagance or poor investment choices. Ganky had visibility into all the family accounts, and if our spending looked suspiciously high, he’d complain, usually to my mother.

Only once did Ganky complain directly to me. Debbie and I were just married and we were visiting him in Palm Beach. He told me he needed to speak with me about my spending and asked if I wanted to be alone or with Debbie there. My intuition was that if Debbie was at my side, his lecture would be tempered. And in any case Debbie would want to know precisely what had been said. So Debbie stayed.

The actual “lecture,” turned out to be a profession of love and a gentle request for my assurance, quickly given, that we were monitoring and in control of what we were spending. Ganky’s “lecture”was brief and heartwarming––the twinkle never left his pale blue eyes. It was the sort of shy, hesitating remonstration that the kind and gracious benefactor John Jarndyce from Dickens’ Bleak House might give to his ward.

To Debbie and me, Ganky was exactly that––a kind and gracious benefactor. We spent time visiting with him for almost a decade before he died. He was able to meet our first two children. When I told him we had started giving small sums to our children, he replied in his Tulsa twang, “That’s good; you’re building ‘em up.”

The inheritances changed our lives

It turned out that the inheritances I received from Ganky in 1987 (when my grandmother died) and 1992 (when Ganky died) were instrumental to our lives. We were able to have three children and raise them in Manhattan without too much concern over the cost. Although when we bought a six-room apartment on West End Avenue in 1990, the cost of it was very stressful to me. Ganky asked me how much the apartment had cost, and I told him he didn’t want to know.

I joined the asset management firm of Angelo Gordon in 1993 when it was still small. Both my father and Ganky had instilled in me the idea that being an owner was the path to wealth. So, I asked John Angelo and Michael Gordon if I could invest in the firm as a Limited Partner owner. They said yes, although to get “fully invested” with my inheritance money I had to be persistent.

In 2003, when our three children were still young, we set up a trust for them and invested that trust in Angelo Gordon. On the one hand, our family’s investments were highly concentrated. On the other hand it appealed to me that we would sink or swim together.

That investment turned out to be the source of most of our family’s wealth.

Lessons learned

Transparency, education, and talking about money are all good: There was never any effort by my parents or Ganky to hide anything from me. I did receive some suggestions about what to do with wealth––don’t squander and use the money to become an owner. But no one ever spoke to me about the negative feelings that naturally come when you inherit money. It can cast a pall on your achievements and it did for me for quite a while.

As well, it takes effort to make an adult child feel ownership of money that’s given to them. It’s not automatic and you don’t want it to come about because of your own demise.

I previewed this post with our children (in their thirties) to see if they were okay with it. All gave their approval, although one said:

“I think I’ll always be uncomfortable with these revelations. But this [essay] doesn’t really reveal more than has already been revealed so I’m good with [it].”

If you give money, let go of it: Ganky was generous and kindly with me. But his complaints about expenses made my mother feel that the money he gave her was not really hers to use freely. It was only after Ganky died that she felt free to use her money to pursue her passion, which was her medical philanthropy.

Share your good fortune with your heirs when it can be most helpful: I think of Brooke Astor and her son Tony, her only child, who started stealing millions from his mother, beginning when he was in his fifties and she was in her seventies. This continued until his arrest when he was 83 and upon Brooke Astor’s death at 105. Tony Astor was turned in by his son.

Of course that’s an edge case. But the point is if you’re wealthy and don’t share your money, you can create a dynamic where your children may be waiting for you to die so they can “finally get on with their lives.” And why wouldn’t you want to see your children and grandchildren thrive while you’re still around to enjoy seeing them thrive?

I think some wealthy people have a fear that their children really only show them their love and respect because of the money.

Avoid lifestyle whiplash: When you raise your children in an affluent household, they should not expect you to support them in the same manner after they’re out on their own. However, it seems similarly wrong to withhold support you could afford to give and see your children live in a manner drastically different from how they were raised.

Whatever you do, don’t be King Lear: Foolish King Lear abdicates and divides his kingdom between his two sycophantic daughters, Regan and Goneril, experts at false flattery. Lear falls for their overwrought compliments. He disinherits his third daughter Cordelia because she speaks plainly. She merely loves, obeys, and honors Lear as her father.

Once he’s given everything away, Lear is betrayed by Regan and Goneril. Lear feels the bite of their treachery as “sharper than a serpent’s tooth.” Cordelia flees to France. Not only has Lear given away too much too soon, he’s made the blunder of treating his three daughters unequally. A civil war breaks out in which all three of Lear’s daughters die. Lear dies in grief.

You have to have a very good reason to treat your children differently when it comes to providing them with financial and any other support.

The ethical tension

I’ve written repeatedly that excessive economic inequality in America is a problem. Yet if I take steps to ensure the financial prosperity of my children I’m contributing to that inequality. My attempt to soften the edges of this conflict is to make giving to others a significant use of my resources. Still, the conflict remains.

The parental urge to protect and provide for my children is stronger in me than any remorse over contributing to an unjust and dangerous societal condition. Sometimes, there’s no way to square the circle, and the best we can do is to acknowledge that we can’t.

Question for the comments: What say you from experience and observation about this “touchy” subject?

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If you find this subject interesting, I recommend ’s and ’s Substack newsletters. I benefitted from their thoughts and their posts on this issue.

Lindsey’s post is Why do we get so mad about parents supporting their adult children?

Allison’s post is Planning the Perfect Trust Reveal.

I also recommend and am grateful for the thoughts of Michelle Teheux who writes about wealth inequality at .

Finally, check out this clip from King Lear, literature’s all-time worst estate planner.

Following are

• Two recommendations of lesser-known novels that Debbie and I loved this year.

• Six other, better-known novels that both of us read and liked.

• An embarrassing list of our favorite TV shows and movies. The list contains nineteen entries that represent only our top 12% of over 150 shows we watched this year. We rated these nineteen shows 8 or 9 out of 10.

  Our list is embarrassing because, having done some calculations, the inescapable fact is that we must have watched at least 25 hours of streaming per week. That said, we are not making a New Year’s resolution to watch less. It’s one of our favorite activities to do together.

Two lesser-known novels we loved

Little Known Facts by is about a Hollywood A-list movie star (think Clooney, Pitt) whose family and friends are sucked into his charismatic and selfish gravitational pull. Debbie and I felt like Hollywood insiders reading this story. It also made us appreciate how extreme fame is like a juggernaut––both a triumphant spectacle and a trampler of everything in its path.

If you watched and liked, or even tolerated, the movie Jay Kelly starring George Clooney, we think you’ll like and prefer Little Known Facts.

We discovered Little Known Facts via ’s Substack Beyond when she posted a guest essay by called “The Best Books You Never Read.” The relative obscurity of Little Known Facts is particularly puzzling because it was featured on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review by Curtis Sittenfeld who gave the book a strong recommendation.

“[the book is] juicy enough to appeal to our prurience but smart enough not to make us feel dirty afterward.”

“[Sneed’s] depiction of both proximity to celebrity and celebrity itself had me totally convinced.”

Happiness & Love by Zoe Dubno is a wonderfully executed and entertaining rant against the pretensions, hypocrisy, and status hunger of the contemporary visual and literary art scenes. The unnamed narrator may be unreliable but through her hyper-critical lens, she skewers the status obsessed, awful people who populate the novel’s world. She turns some of the sharpest skewering on herself.

At the center of the book’s “little group” of strivers for artistic fame is a wealthy couple, Eugene and Nicole, whose flaws and faults are described with great wit and detail. Nicole lives large on the money she inherited and trades the luxury of her homes and dinners for the company of struggling young artists who she delights in distracting and sabotaging.

It’s emotionally exhausting to cater to Nicole’s whims:

“Nicole…had created an entire social world around her that was ruled by flattering her just enough so that she didn’t notice…[we] were actually working much harder to flatter Nicole without her noticing.

Nicole’s partner, the philandering and clownish Eugene, sponges off Nicole while resenting his role as a “kept man.” As an artist he’s “clever but untalented.” He steals the ideas of the younger artists who gather for pretentious dinners in the couples’ vast Bowery loft. Pretentious in that every served course has to make some sort of statement or be an experience. Like a honey cake sprinkled with actual dirt to be forced to taste the grit along with the sweetness.

Eugene and Nicole deserve a place in the literary pantheon of corrupting, “self-involved and predacious” couples alongside the Buchanans of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and the Verdurins of Proust’s Swann’s Way.

We discovered “Happiness & Love” via a recommendation by who writes the Substack newsletter Personal Canon.

Six other novels

We have included only those novels liked and read by both of us in 2025.

The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis: we hosted a Book the Writer discussion of the Stolen Queen at our home. An archeology dig in 1930s Egypt and a 1970s era Met Gala are masterfully and suspenseful connected,

Bring Down the House by Charlotte Runcie: recommended by . An acerbic critic issues a devastating review of a one-woman show at the Glastonbury Festival and much mayhem follows.

Trust by Herman Diaz: recommended by our brother Samuel Roberts. Four varying views of a financier’s life. Deservedly one of the best reviewed books of 2022.

The Stranger/L’Etranger by Albert Camus: I read it as part of ’s Book Club. Debbie read it in French on her own. It led me to write the post My Mother the Absurdist

The Ten-Year Affair by Erin Somer: I saw a blurb promoting it as the “best book on adultery since Madame Bovary.” In part we liked it because it made Debbie and me feel great about our own marriage.

Heart the Lover by Lily King: I’m yet to meet any reader who does not rave about this book.

Our top nineteen streaming shows and movies

Apparently, we enjoy made-up stories of crime, war, sickness, and tragedy. A bonfire of fictional schadenfreude. The titles link to Rotten Tomatoes.

The Well-Known

The Pitt: Enjoyably stressful.

Adolescence: Painful but somehow necessary to watch

Task: Worthy heir to Mare of Easttown.

A House of Dynamite: Nuclear war. Very scary, especially if you lived through the Cold War era.

One Battle After Another: Debbie thought it started a little slow. I liked it all.

Train Dreams: Slow and spare and beautiful

Slow Horses-Season Five: Misanthropic, gaseous, and brilliant Gary Oldman makes us laugh.

Warfare: Debbie’s pick more than mine. I thought it was too realistic.

Nuremberg: We watched it on Christmas instead of eating Chinese food.

Crime, mostly UK

Accused: Each episode starts just prior to a courtroom verdict and then traces the crime back to its start.

A Place of Execution: We liked it a lot but can’t remember exactly why.

American Crime: Seasons One, Two, and Three: Anthology series from ten years ago. The storylines of drug abuse, child sex-trafficking, school violence, and migrant mistreatment are, sadly, as relevant as ever. Felicity Huffman is excellent in each series.

Depart. Q: We love misanthropic, underdog, smartest-in-the room-and-they let you-know-it detectives.

Say Nothing: The Troubles in Ireland based on the book about a woman who was disappeared. Quietly terrifying.

Unforgotten: Catching up on Seasons Four and Five: Character-driven cold case mysteries.

Blue Lights: Season Three: Our favorite police procedural.

Two Scandinavian shows

Force Majeure: a husband shows cowardice on a ski vacation when an avalanche threatens his family.

Quicksand: A school shooting mystery handled deftly.

Debbie’s Ethan Hawke Obsession

Juliet, Naked: Discussed in my post Vanity, Marriage, And A Hall-Pass Trap

Curating is an art form

Reading and watching choices today are unsurpassed in both availability and excellence. Yes, the explosion of quantity imposes greater care in selecting what we’ll enjoy. But the resources to do so are wonderful. They include crowd-sourcing review sites, using AI with a prompt of “If I liked book X or show Y, what else do you suggest and why?” and word of mouth from friends, in real life and online. Curating books and shows is one of my most important marital duties.

As for the term binge-gift, I tried to introduce it into circulation a few years ago hoping it would catch fire as a clever phrase. So far, it’s suffered the ignominious fate of “fetch” from Mean Girls.2 I have not given up. After all, what can possibly be a better gift to someone than suggesting a book or show they might want to binge?

Question for the comments: Calling for your binge-gifts of novels and shows.

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Anne’s interview post starts here.

ANNE KADET

DEC 15, 2025

DEPT. OF BONKERS NUMBERS

Meet the Man Spending $28k on Substack Subscriptions!

Last year, I ran a Q&A with Upper East Side resident David Roberts, “What it’s Like to Be (Very) Rich in NYC.” The 63-year-old, who retired from a career in finance and writes his own fascinating newsletter, Sparks From Culture, was very open about his typical day, the silliest thing he’s ever splurged on and his tipping habits. It was one of my most popular stories ever. Readers seemed to enjoy learning that when David summers in East Hampton, his main chore is making sure there are enough paper towels on the paper towel holder.

I recently learned another fun fact about David: he maintains paid subscriptions to literally hundreds of Substacks!

When I found out, I did a little Anne math. That’s not just a lot of money, that’s a lot of reading! We’re talking at least 10 million words a year. What was up with my favorite Fifth Avenue multidecamillionaire? Earlier this week, David and I had a little Zoom chat about his Substack habit.

Please note: the following interview has been edited and condensed from a 90-minute convo.

According to a recent video interview of you produced by Substack, you have paid subscriptions to hundreds of Substack newsletters. How did that happen?

As I began to read Substacks, anytime I read something I really liked, I felt like I wanted to support them. It felt like a very inexpensive way to be a patron. And if I’m not going to do it at scale, who is? I’ve become more picky now, because I don’t want to have 1000 paids. Beyond a certain point, it might be ridiculous.

How do you decide what newsletters to support?

It’s a matrix of the value I think I’m getting from the author, whether my support is meaningful, and whether they have a paywall or not. If I really want to read what they’re writing and they have a pay wall, then I’m going to go paid. And then to the extent that I want to comment—some people have a paywall where you can only comment if you’re a paid subscriber.

If it’s up for renewal and I feel like I’m not getting a lot of value, I might not renew. I’d rather make room for a newer voice. And for some of the larger ones where I’ve been paid, I might let those lapse—they don’t necessarily need me, and I may not be reading them all the time.

But let’s say they’re a big-name author and they’re responding to my comments—that definitely influences me wanting to continue, because it’s cool to get a response. I always wonder, “Am I getting the response from the author, or do they have someone who’s helping them?” But I’ll suspend my disbelief and assume it’s them responding.

Who are some better-known authors you get responses from?

I’ve gotten some responses from Tina Brown. She’s a big name, and I think it’s her, because they’re very short. The poet Sherman Alexie, he’ll respond, and I I love his poems. Nate Silver responded to me once when I caught him in a statistical error—he tried to defend himself.

I emailed you yesterday to let you know that I’d be asking for exactly how many Substacks you have, and how much you’re paying a year. And you replied, “I try not to know exactly how many, and what it might cost, but I will dig it out.” Why didn’t you want to know?

I felt like it could be like a big number. But now that I’m talking about it, if you compare it to other patronage I do for the arts, it’s probably not a lot for what I’m receiving.

So did you find the actual number?

I don’t know any way of getting the specific number, except to ask Substack. But I think they have it.

I did little estimate. I said, “If he’s got at least 200 Substacks, and let’s say minimum, they’re $50 a year, that’s $10,000 a year.”

Many are more expensive than $50. I would say the average is certainly not $100, but it’s not $50. So if you take the middle, that would be $15,000, because it’s definitely over 200.

Maybe we can get the actual numbers from Substack. I also sent them a note yesterday to see if you’re the person on the platform who spends the most on subscriptions. Would you guess that you are?

I might be, because—if you think about it like a Venn diagram— there aren’t that many people who could spend $15,000 where it’s totally discretionary. There also aren’t that many people who would have the time to actually benefit from getting all these Substacks. So, yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was number one. They should have a competition! This could be a great marketing thing for them.

I track my own numbers very carefully. I support ten Substacks which will cost me $539 this year. I wish I could support more, and I bet a lot of people might say that.

Yes, I think it’s a luxury to be able to do this, because when you support a writer, you feel really good about it, and it’s an interesting form of being a patron of the arts—where $50 is meaningful to that artist and they know that it’s you, right? When you buy a book, they don’t necessarily know it’s you.

Are there Substacks you read for free?

Oh, absolutely. There are more free Substacks I subscribe to than paid Substacks.

How many subscriptions total?

I think around 800. I looked it up but didn’t write it down because I was embarrassed.

I’m being a little disingenuous because I actually have the number—this is a stat that’s publicly available on anyone’s profile. You’re subscribed to 877 Substacks! What do you have to say for yourself?

I don’t think I’m receiving anywhere near 877 because I think a lot of those Substacks are no longer active.

I was looking at some statistics about this the other day and yes, something like half the newsletters on the platform are zombies. So you’re probably getting around 450 newsletters.

And then the question is, what’s the average publishing rhythm of those? There are a few that do three to five times a week, and a few that may do once a month, or every two weeks. I might be getting 60 a day.

I’m currently subscribed to 137 Substacks, but only read every single issue of the newsletters I pay for. I’m curious about your situation.

I don’t read every one that I pay for, and certainly not every issue. The exception might be Feed Me, because I can go through it so quickly. If I become friends with someone, that’s also an influence. It’s like I’m getting a letter from my friend. So like, Eleanor Anstruther, when she’s writing about what’s going on with her life, I’ll always read that because I’m curious.

What’s your Substack reading routine?

I usually start my morning going through my emails, and a big part of that is seeing what I want to read that’s come in. It could be business emails, personal emails, or whatever—but a big percentage are Substacks, so it’s the author and the topic, and whether I find that interesting.

So maybe I’m opening 20 to 25 of them. Some I’ll skim a bit, and then decide if I really want to read this as a careful reader. Total time spent reading? I’d say maybe 90 minutes.

It sounds like your Substack newsletters are coming into the same inbox as everything else.

Yes, they are. And you say that quizzically, because most normal people probably would have a separate place for all the Substacks coming in.

I filter all the newsletters into a special email folder and then only read them in the app.

I’ll sometimes go on the app and find I missed one, or the email never came through, so then I’ll read it there.

Have you changed your Substack reading strategy over time?

I’ve refined it. I really try to look for quality of expression and thought, and I try to find writers who have different views than I have, who are outside my bubble.

It’s like the opening up of my mind, now that I have this time to think and write and read a lot of other opinions. I feel I now have a much wider view of the world, and much more of an appreciation for how my prior views were very much off-the-shelf, if you will. I’m reading about people who have very different circumstances than I do, and that’s fascinating.

I often roll my eyes at people who have clearly not really taken the time to form their own ideas. They’ve just taken some views off the shelf, as you said, and presented them as their own. But maybe most people just haven’t had the time and opportunity that you’ve had—to do their own reading and thinking and reflection.

Yeah, it’s a lot easier to just read a few editorials from your favorite newspaper and adopt those. There’s this line in Anna Karenina—not a major character, but he’s part of minor nobility—and Tolstoy talks about how he picks up his views like he’d pick a hat to wear that day. That hat has to be appropriate for someone in his station, and so do the views.

So yes, that was me. To legitimately form your own views does take a lot of time. And if your work doesn’t involve thinking and writing about these wider cultural issues, and you’re busy with other things, it’s hard to make that a priority.

I got a funny email recently from a reader who said, “Hello, please remove me from your mailing list. I am overwhelmed with emails and cannot keep up!”

Because the best thing for you is to get an email from her that you now have to respond to.

But she sounded so desperate, right? I think a lot of people feel completely overwhelmed these days with newsletter subscriptions.

I think that’s the case. The idea of getting a newsletter—that novelty has clearly worn off, and now the question is, “Who do I want to read, and what’s going to supply me with value?”

Yes. Suddenly everyone has a Substack. It’s the new podcast. And everyone has ten friends who just launched a newsletter. There’s too much to read! But most probably won’t last more than a few months. We might actually be at the peak right now.

That may be! It’s past the early adopter stage. It may winnow out.

So what’s worse—an unread backlog of Substacks, or a pile of unread New Yorkers lurking on your coffee table?

I would say unread Substacks. I used to save Substacks I wanted to come back to. I stopped for that very reason—I didn’t want to have a backlog. If I miss a Substack, so be it. I don’t like feeling the pressure.

Last question: any concern that when this interview comes out, you’re going to be bombarded with people asking you to support their newsletter?

It certainly could happen, but I think that’s fair game. I agreed to this interview!

A few days after we spoke, Substack’s senior communications manager replied to David with the data we’d requested regarding his specific numbers, and she cc’d me.

When I read the email, my eyeballs nearly popped out of my head:

“David, on our side, it looks like you pay for more than 390+ Substack publications, totaling more than $28k per year. We can confirm that you hold one of the highest spots on the platform for active paid Substack subscriptions.”

Haha! It was nearly twice what David estimated! l gave him a ring later that morning…

So what was your reaction?

I was surprised! I wasn’t upset so much as, “Wow, when I got started, I must have gone on a tear.” I did feel somewhat embarrassed, and I’m not sure if it was because I was so off the mark in my estimation, or the size of it. I think it’s smart of Substack not to give you a report because a lot of people might think, “I don’t really want to spend that much.”

Are you going to prune your subscriptions now?

No. There are certain Substacks that even if I don’t read, I feel a certain loyalty, and I don’t want them to get the “unsubscribe” email. That’s not a nice email to get. If you’re relying on this income in any way, shape or form, I don’t want to be the deliverer of that bad news.

From what Substack wrote, it sounds like someone might be ahead of you when it comes to the number of paid subscriptions. Are you going to find that person and take them down?

I think Substack was very smart to say I hold “one of the highest spots” on the platform. Because if I’m the highest, I look like I’m out there. What if the next highest is $18,000—or much lower than that? There’s something at an auction called the “winners curse”. You won, but you also paid the highest price, so I don’t think it’s necessarily an honor. I don’t think Substack would say I was the highest, even if I was.

Alright, but I’m going to think of you as the highest.

You can! But I’m going to continue in my blissful ignorance.

Anne does a great job of getting the most out of me. We’re on a roll! Let us know in the comments what you’d like from us for a third Q&A in 2026.

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, a free weekly newsletter about NYC, is created by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. Subscribe to get the latest issue every Monday.

What would a society look like if it achieved enough wealth to free everyone from scarcity.

John Maynard Keynes predicted that this might happen and bring about a disorienting change in what people prioritize and value. Instead of admiring the false gods of wealth and avarice, we would “honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well.” 1

But “virtuously and well” are ambiguous terms. What do they really mean in the context of a society where there is no economic hardship.

The problem that remains will be what to do with all that free time.

I realize that the “problem” I’m writing about will seem absurd to anyone currently struggling with scarcity. Today there remains the urgent problem of absolute scarcity––insufficiency of food, shelter, childcare, and healthcare.

But there’s also relative scarcity––call it status insecurity––a pain with which I’m familiar and which should not be underestimated even if it can seem irrational and self-inflicted when it’s the affluent who are afflicted by it. Nothing’s good or bad that thinking can’t make it so. 2

And, yes, of course, cue the world’s smallest violin.

Keynes’ predictions

In 1930, as the Great Depression was just beginning to bite, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a remarkable essay looking ahead one hundred years. Keynes predicted that the problem of economic scarcity in the developed world would be solved because the standard of living would be eight times higher per capita. Technology advancement would drive productivity increases and then the magic of compounding would do its part––over 100 years, annual gains of just 2.1% produce an eight-fold increase.

At that level of increase, Keynes believed that the new problem, the “permanent problem” would be “how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for [people], to live wisely and agreeably and well.” Another set of terms that resist any precise meaning.

About the economy of the United Staes, however, Keynes was precisely right. America’s real (adjusted for inflation) economic output per capita was about $9,000 in 1930 and is now about $70,000. That’s almost exactly eight times in 95 years. Pretty cool.

Keynes thought this achievement of abundance could rid a society of the worship of wealth accumulation, which he considered a necessary evil until the economic problem of scarcity was solved. Once solved, right about now in 2025, Keynes thought that the “love of money as a possession” would be viewed as a “semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensity,” and that those unfortunates who still suffered from this illness could be “hand[ed] over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

He did understand, however, that envy and status competition were inherent in the human species so that an insatiable desire for more wealth would not be universally eliminated. But Keynes could not have imagined that the eight-fold increase in wealth would have been shared so unequally or that those at the top would accumulate such massive amounts of individual wealth. Nor could Keynes anticipate how acutely social media has intensified status insecurity.

The dread of the promised land

Keynes wondered whether this new life of abundance might start with a “general nervous breakdown” as people tried to rapidly readjust the habits and worldview “bred into [us] for countless generations.” He goes further and writes of a “…dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”

He thought that wealthy people like me, with independent incomes and no need to work, could serve as an “advance guard spying out the promised land.” But when he considered the lives of the wealthy in 1930 Britain––presumably the desiccated aristocracy–– he writes that “they have failed disastrously” to solve the permanent problem of how to live after their economic problem was solved. 3

A perverse silver lining

Keynes was an economist and a realist. He recognized that just as there would always be avarice beyond rational purpose or reason, there would always be some people, dwindling in numbers and need he hoped, who had not yet completely solved their individual economic problems of scarcity.

“…there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed. The critical difference will be realised when this condition has become so general that the nature of one’s duty to one’s neighbour is changed. For it will remain reasonable to be economically [purposeful] for others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself.” 4

There is a perverse silver lining in the continued opportunity to be “economically purposeful for others.” If I imagined a world where no neighbors needed my help, where peace and plenty were universal, what then would happen to my sense of relevance or my sense of virtue?

Under those monstrously placid conditions, my self-esteem would surely plunge. I’d still have my family but my usefulness to them in this strange new world, free from strife, would be scant. I could offer no advice about how to live in such a changed world.

With such a decline in being needed by neighbors and family, I might very well suffer the dread and the nervous breakdown Keynes warned about.

But the reality is that I don’t have to worry about that state of affairs. There is no shortage of problems, no shortage of neighbors who need help. The most vulnerable of our neighbors have become even more vulnerable this year and every sign points to their vulnerability rising in 2026. The world seems anything but placid.

As Auden said of the decade of the 1930s, the time we live in now is “low [and] dishonest.” 5

I doubt myself

Perhaps I have not successfully leapt off that treadmill of material ambition. I have evidence for this doubt––when I’m asleep and my control over my thoughts loses its grip, I often dream of being back at work in a fevered version of my office, trapped in situations I’ve devised to maximize my humiliation and anxiety.

If I were still “in the game,” working like my peers, my status insecurity would be driving and plaguing me often, not just in my dreams. Keynes was right. It’s not so easy to change our ingrained habits. I have suppressed my will to strive. I’ve not silenced it.

Question for the comments: In another one hundred years, if our society again is eight times wealthier per capita than it is now, will Keynes’ prediction finally come through?

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5

Auden’s poem September 1, 1939. The first stanza has particular resonance for me:

“I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.”

I think of this famous Hopper painting while reading this poem, imagining Auden in this diner, even though it’s not a “dive.”