I have been re-reading Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’ hilarious book about his experiences at Salomon Brothers, where he earned $250,000 a year as a young bond salesman in the 1980s. Lewis, who also wrote The Blind Side, Moneyball and a slew of other books, has a keen eye for American culture.
Here’s an excerpt from the epilogue to the book, in which Lewis describes the money culture that first drew him in and then drove him away from a lucrative career on Wall Street:
“My father’s generation grew up with certain beliefs. One of those beliefs is that the amount of money one earns is a rough guide to one’s contribution to the welfare and prosperity of our society….
When you sit, as I did, at the center of what has been possibly the most absurd money game ever and benefit all out of proportion to your value to the society (as much as I’d like to think I got only what I deserved, I don’t), when hundreds of equally undeserving people around you are raking it in faster than they can count it, what happens to the money belief? Well, that depends. For some, good fortune simply reinforces the belief. They take the funny money seriously, as evidence they are worthy citizens of the Republic. It becomes their guiding assumption – for it couldn’t possibly be clearly thought out – that a talent for making money come out of a telephone is a reflection of merit on a grander scale. It is tempting to believe that people who think this way eventually suffer their comeuppance. They don’t. They just get richer. I’m sure that most of them die fat and happy.
For me, however, the belief in the meaning of making dollars crumbled; the proposition that the more money you earn, the better the life you are leading was refuted by too much hard evidence to the contrary. And without that belief, I lost the need to make huge sums of money. The funny thing is that I was largely unaware how heavily influenced I was by the money belief until it had vanished.”
Liar’s Poker was published 21 years ago. Not much has changed.
Terry O’Keefe
