- Doug Belshaw: Cash Value: Katherine Ryan, William James, and… getting on with it. Katherine Ryan is apparently a comedian (comedienne?) who:
…doesn’t spend time worrying whether the entertainment industry should work the way it does. She describes how it actually works and moves forward accordingly. “I love money,” she says simply, without apology or shame. This is pragmatism: the view that some approaches succeed and others fail, so you’d better figure out which ones work and act accordingly.
See what makes money and do it! A plan so fool-proof it is a true mystery why everyone isn’t a billionaire.
- Andrew Gelman: The pantheon of celebrity billionaires. In which Gelman comments on the following comment from an older post of his:
Pretty much nobody worships billionaires as a class. Most people worship at least one billionaire; that’s THEIR billionaire. Think old school paganism. Pantheon of gods, but a tribe will focus on one. A lot of immigrant Chinese Americans worship Elon Musk. Maybe it’s Donald Trump, or Kanye West, or Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, or Charlie Munger, or Warren Buffet, or Steve Jobs, etc.
Spot on! Somewhat surprisingly, Gelman’s never heard of Charlie Munger but if I had to pick a billionaire to “worship” (not that I would ever do such a thing), he could be the one. Certainly not Stevehole Jobs, and certainly not Munger’s partner Warren B.
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Hunter Walker: Triumph Of The Bill: Amazon’s $75 Million ‘Melania’ Movie Is A Corrupt, Fascistic Cinema Fest. One billionaire scratches another’s back; hilarity ensues. The story is outlined further in the NYT, but John Gruber has the correct headline. I hope Mrs. Trump will be able to brush off the harsh reviews and use her $28M direct payment from Amazon to finally gain the much-needed financial independence to which every American woman aspires.
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Clare Moriarty for The Irish Times: No, objecting to the enormous wealth of billionaires is not begrudgery.
This is the meat of the issue, and kudos to Moriarty for putting it so bluntly. Each billionaire’s billions were built on the backs of real people doing real work while missing family events, growing stomach ulcers and ultimately dying of cancer. If you think this is an exaggeration, do read a few accounts of what happens in even supposedly “good” multinationals. Well-meaning and good-hearted minnows never grow large enough to have to hide their money in Ireland. Financialization squeezed out their blood, sweat and tears and concentrated them into a handful of people who were clearly not well. Mirroring what happens to companies, those who have a firm grasp of morality and a sense of self never get to the first billion. In that light, I don’t think relying on the billionaire class to “fix” anything — or even to correctly identify the problem — is a sensible idea, so it is a good thing indeed that the country celebrating its 250th birthday this year has a track record of putting them in their place.