Here's another recent
article by Thomas Friedman, whose wisdom I am beginning to revere. Tom says:
"I have a friend who regularly reminds me that if you jump off the top of an 80-story building, for 79 stories you can actually think you’re flying. It’s the sudden stop at the end that always gets you.
When I think of the financial-services boom, bubble and bust that America has just gone through, I often think about that image. We thought we were flying. Well, we just met the sudden stop at the end. The laws of gravity, it turns out, still apply. You cannot tell tens of thousands of people that they can have the American dream — a home, for no money down and nothing to pay for two years — without that eventually catching up to you. The Puritan ethic of hard work and saving still matters. I just hate the idea that such an ethic is more alive today in China than in America."
The article goes on to talk about the ethics of business and closes with:
"Charles Mackay wrote a classic history of financial crises called “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” first published in London in 1841. “Money ... has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
And so it must be with us. We need to get back to collaborating the old-fashioned way. That is, people making decisions based on business judgment, experience, prudence, clarity of communications and thinking about how — not just how much. "
I have now had several colleagues in the financial sector - titans of industry all, masters of the universe, and, yes, wealthy beyond belief - who have said to me, "Carol, this was just all about greed." One said, "Carol, I'm an Ayn-Rand style capitalist, totally in favor of free markets, but this was just too much. How much is enough?" Now the conservatives are bashing Barack Obama, for suggesting that wealth in this country is not equitably distributed. And maybe we should do a little more for those who have a little less. How bad could that be? I have to respect those who made their piles - and then gave them away. OK, they kept a lot for themselves, but they knew the answer to 'how much is enough' - Gates, Buffett and Carnegie before them. Maybe our legacy is not that we died with the most toys, but that we died with the most schools and libraries and institutions of good works for all that bear our names. OK, sorry for getting preachy.
