The New Color of Money

Grey haired wealth, cheating, the power of Quakerism, and more in this week's digest

Tim Challies wrote an interesting piece about how the rising wealth of senior citizens means the new color of money is now gray.

Here’s the reality I am thinking about: human beings are far wealthier than they have ever been and are, on average, living far longer than they ever have in the past. This is leaving vast amounts of wealth and power in the hands of people who are not merely senior citizens, but who are often well into their 80s or 90s.

He talks about the implications in terms of inheritance. I was particularly struck by his observation that if current trends continue, we may end up in a world where wealth is passed down from old person to old person to old person.

While lifespans have increased dramatically, our traditions for passing wealth through the generations have remained relatively static. In the early 1900s, when the average person died in their 40s or 50s, a man would most often be leaving an inheritance to his children when they were quite young. They were probably still in the years of grinding and building—the stretch of life when they had not yet reached their peak earnings, but when expenses were elevated as they bought and paid for a home, raised and educated children, built a business, worked their way up the corporate ladder, and so on. An inheritance came to them at the period in life when they needed it the most and when it would do them the most good.

Today, though, that same man may not die until he is well into his 80s or even 90s, which means his children may already be in their 60s or 70s when they receive an inheritance. In many cases, they will have already passed through the most difficult life stages and already stored up wealth of their own. Most of them will presumably add that inherited wealth to their own accumulated wealth, then pass it down a generation when they themselves are 80, 90, or even 100. It is not hard to imagine ever-growing sums of money being passed from one elderly generation to another, with a lot of that money never accomplishing much other than offering an ever-increasing sense of security.

He also shares his thoughts on how we should respond to this situation, so click over to read the whole thing.

Yes, Cheating Is Bad

Freddie deBoer is out with a new piece about why we should in fact shame students who cheat and hold them accountable for that.

After all, in every class there is that inconvenient kid who didn’t cheat, the kid who turned down the chance to use the easy machine and sat with the blank page and produced something worse than what the cheater produced, because that’s what learning looks like - it looks like producing worse things slowly until you can produce better things. Sadly that kid’s watching and learning, watching his peers and his teachers, and this white-knuckled dedication to never judging cheaters is teaching them the worst possible lesson. That kid sees the cheaters get the same grades, or better ones, and witnesses the adults who rush to explain that the cheaters are the real victim here, and that kid learns the actual lesson of contemporary American education: integrity is a sucker’s bet, a tax that only the honest pay. I don’t know if there’s a name for a moral system that consistently rewards deception and punishes cooperation, but I can tell you that it leads to a collapsing society, and we’re living in one. If it makes you feel better, those most responsible certainly aren’t the teenagers.

And this connects with what I’m constantly saying about education and how our romantic notions about it ruin everything: yes, we have to force students to be ethical and to not cheat, and this should not surprise us because the basic act of schooling is forcing students to do things. Coercion is at the heart of education.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Normalized cheating is an example of where bad social practices can drive out good. When people have to pay a penalty in order to do the right thing, only the most morally committed are realistically going to do that.

Quakerism as a Superpower

Speaking of cheating and more commitment, I periodically bring up that in pre-20th century England, the Quakers were unusually successful in business, in part because in an era when “buyer beware” really meant just that, the Quakers were counterparties you could trust.

Will Manidis and Nabeel S. Qureshi wrote a great essay earlier this year taking a look at how this developed. (Manidis himself was raised Quaker). They note the unusual level of success Quaker businessmen had relative to their small numbers:

The Barclays, the Lloyds, the Cadburys, the Rowntrees, the Clarks, and the Wedgwoods were all prominent Quaker merchant families. A religious minority that at its peak numbered almost 60,000 people in the country of 6 million – just under 1% – at that time produced an overwhelming share of England’s commercial and industrial infrastructure, so disproportionate that it still puzzles economic historians.

The Quakers were unusually honest, and unusually devoted to doing business fairly.

Quakers are a strange people….The Quakers earnestly enforced a near-militant allegiance to the truth. Through meetings, through discipline, through expulsion, a friend who cheated a customer or misrepresented a product faced not only civil liability but spiritual reckoning before his entire community.

Everyone knew this, and everyone could trade with them safely as a result. You could trade with a Quaker even across the ocean with minimal contracts because the contract was already written in something more binding than paper: a spiritual agreement. In a place like early England where transaction costs – entire apparatus of verification, enforcement, legal recourse – were extremely high, and which in turn made long-distance commerce expensive and slow, the Quakers were able to drive that cost to nearly zero.

The trust was inherited by the faith and carried into every transaction before the partners even met. Even things like fixed pricing were a Quaker invention. Before Quakers, commerce meant haggling. Every transaction consisted of a negotiation and every price was a contest. Quaker shopkeepers posted a single price and held it. You paid what everyone else paid. And you never worried about being cheated because the man behind the counter believed that cheating was a mortal sin, not in the casual way that most people believe in sins, but in the way where he ordered and structured his entire community and his life such that he could remain true to his word. Customers came in enormous numbers. Of course they did.

As America becomes a lower trust, more scam ridden society, I can’t help but wonder if this type of reputation for probity will end up paying increased dividends in the future. As much as I’d like to think it will, I also think we have to be honest that today’s world is still rewarding people who falsely claim to be disabled to get more time to take tests at Harvard, promote conspiracy theories, or “ensh*ttify” some previously reliable business experience. But it’s something to keep an eye on.

The Quakers also cultivated personal habits that were good for business, which you may recognize as being related to the Protestant work ethic.

Quakers also refused ostentatious behavior and conspicuous consumption. Quakers did not display wealth because display was vanity and vanity was a sin. What other businessmen extracted to furnish lavish estates and carriages and display the visible performance of success, Quakers treated as excess cash flows to reinvest in their businesses. They built for the long term because they understood their work to be stewardship, a core Quaker value. The businesses existed to participate in God’s purpose.

The essay goes well beyond Quakerism, talking about the lack of moral purpose in today’s institutions, criticizing effective altruism, and much more. Highly recommended, so click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

As a follow-up to my recent piece on the lack of a playbook for marriage and the consequences of aging alone, Steve Eide sent me his 2024 piece from the Institute for Family Studies on how a lack of family can contribute to a risk of senior homelessness.

The Guardian: Euphoria mirrors the nihilism of a generation raised on Andrew Tate and Bonnie Blue - A very good piece that’s in line with John Seel’s essay on nihilism with a business model.

Ross Douthat: Graham Platner and the Amoral Center (gift link)

Ryan Burge: The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ledger Doesn’t Balance

Anthony Bradley has a great piece on the coming reckoning for evangelical colleges.

New Content and Media Mentions

This week I got mentions from Conor Friedersdorf, Scott Greer, American Reformer and File 770.

New this week:

• There’s a Playbook for College. There Should Be One for Marriage. - The costs of putting off marriage and children don’t show up for decades — and by the time they do, the window to choose otherwise has often closed

• My podcast this week is with AEI Senior Fellow Brent Orell on how AI might be the next NAFTA.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash