Assholes (11 page)
Authors: Aaron James
In other words, ideas of deserts just don’t justify the going rate of rewards. Bar Patron 1 cannot infer his IQ or his deservingness from his paycheck.
Some bankers inadvertently confirm the point by offering plainly bad arguments in place of the appeal to deserts. Some argue, for example, that bankers should be appreciated because, as one money manager put it, “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it.”
23
This, again, is not exactly credible after the banking sector has just caused the largest crisis in seventy years. In any case, the financialization of the economy is less a matter of inherent skill than decades of political decisions that in effect passed up opportunities to invest in infrastructure and education that might have supported high-skilled manufacturing. Globalization might then have had a chance of bringing rising wages instead of a three-decade period in which increasingly productive workers have in effect not seen a pay raise.
Given the thinness of the arguments,
24
the honest bankers
are perhaps those who resort to cosmic grandiosity. Thus Lloyd C. Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, quips—with a definite whiff of Rockefeller or Beveridge or Rhodes—that bankers are “doing God’s work.” Blankfein may not be an asshole,
25
but this is an asshole remark, even if it was mildly ironic. It implies not
just
that bankers are “doing good things” but that their work is somehow within God’s plan or somehow brings them closer to God. Even if the comment was merely a joke, it was a “fuck you” type of joke, given that it was made in public in the wake of a crisis that had just upended millions of lives. It suggests complete obliviousness to how others will hear the remark, though not simple cluelessness. The man is hardly an idiot, and so his obliviousness is better seen as expressing a sense of entitlement, in this case, apparently of an unspecified God-sized kind.
This attitude among the new bankers stands in marked contrast with bankers of an earlier era. Consider the former Goldman CEO John Whitehead, a member of the civic-minded “Greatest Generation” that ably steered the dynastic wealth of Rockefeller and the like toward the social good. In lamenting that executive compensation today discourages the long view, and so has “got to be changed,” he explains why Blankfein, and by implication the new generation, “doesn’t get it.”
[Blankfein] never thought that if the public is losing their jobs and we’re in a recession, it isn’t a very good time to talk about the justification for a $60 million bonus. He doesn’t get it!… He says, “I’m the CEO of the best
financial service firm in the world. And I’m the CEO, I’m its head man. I deserve to be paid more than anybody else. And I’m prepared to fight for it, and boast about it. Because I’m proud of it.”
26
But, much as with Bar Patron 1, Blankfein’s appeal to deserts rings hollow in an industry that almost drove the global economy off a cliff.
We might put the general lesson this way: the banker’s position of high reward is a
privilege
. The position itself exists only because of societal need and design. That any particular banker holds a given position is in large measure good luck. Since many people are hardworking enough and smart enough to do the job (again, financial markets worked better from a crisis-avoidance point of view before they became mathematically sophisticated), any given banker is replaceable: it would be equally well for society, or indeed better, if someone else took his or her place,
especially
if he or she is very talented, since talent is more important in medicine, teaching, or science. For those who do work in finance, the enormous benefits are a societal gift but with conditions attached. The financial system needs to be organized so that it reliably works to the benefit of real people in the real economy. When this requires significant reorganization—including such things as reserves requirements, international securities taxes, the segregation of investment and finance, expansion of IMF and ECB last-resort lending capacity, breaking up “too big to fail” banks—then bankers have no reasonable complaint. If a given banker doesn’t like the gift, he or she can give it back (and seek work at Starbucks, a good high school, or a biology lab).
The banker’s sense of special entitlement is therefore akin to that of our imagined failed asshole artist. Neither the banker nor the failed artist has produced the goods, and yet both go on complaining about not getting what they deserve, seemingly unable to grasp how this could be a colossal, delusional mistake.
27
This hardly means that all or even most bankers are delusional assholes; some genuinely do understand why the public would be enraged. Carmine Visone, an older-school Lehman Brothers managing director, could never believe his social worth was what he was being paid and so served the homeless out of gratitude and responsibility to society.
28
Still, a delusional banking culture makes being an asshole especially easy, which may itself explain why asshole bankers seem in abundance lately.
1
. Falwell did eventually defend civil rights for gays (as an “American value,” “not a liberal or conservative value”). Could this have reflected a change of heart? Many assholes do ease up as death approaches. We can hope so for Falwell, even if he never did publicly repent.
2
. Some might consider Trump’s getting President Obama to release the long form of his birth certificate a blow for justice, as Trump does. In that case, one could count this morally motivated act as an exception that proves the rule; Trump doesn’t normally act from a sense of higher cause, even if he did in this one case.
3
. Which appears to be some combination of being a “clown” and being an “ass,” but perhaps without the entrenched sense of entitlement that we take as the mark of the asshole.
4
. Thus the element of truth in Ben Affleck’s
SNL
spoof (see
www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/countdown-with-keith-olbermann/805561/
). On a personal level, Olbermann is also apparently irascible, hypercontrolling, and generally not a team player. He, for instance, refused to share the spotlight on Current TV. See Brian Stelter, “Olbermann in a Clash at New Job,” January 4, 2012,
www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/business/media/olbermann-in-a-clash -at-new-job.html?_r=1
.
5
. Sam Stein, “Neil Cavuto Called an ‘Asshole’ by AFL-CIO Economist on Live TV,”
Huffington Post
, June 25, 2010, with video,
www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/25/neil-cavuto-called-an-ass_n_626211.html
.
6
. Thus David Letterman cleverly spoke for the common man (or at least the registered Democrats) in an exchange with O’Reilly over comments made about the Iraq war: “I’m not smart enough to debate you point to point on this, but I have the feeling … about sixty percent of what you say is crap.”
http://newsbusters.org/media/2006-01-03-CBSLSDL.wmv
.
7
. A former executive with Fox News’s parent, News Corp., suggests a culture of intimidation. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders.… There are people who turn people in.” Rush Limbaugh, a friend, explains the centrality of Ailes personality: “One man has established a culture for 1,700 people who believe in it, who follow it, who execute it.… Roger Ailes does not ever show up on camera. And yet everybody who does is a reflection of him.” Tim Dickinson, “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory,”
Rolling Stone
, May 25, 2011,
www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525
. Unless otherwise noted, the factual assertions about Ailes in the text below are corroborated in detail in this article.
8
. Ailes has an elaborate security detail and constant anxiety of personally being subject to an al-Qaeda terrorist attack. One false alarm with a dark-skinned man led him to order a lockdown of the Fox News building. The man was a janitor.
9
. Rupert Murdoch, head of Fox’s parent company, News Corp., reportedly says of his extremist politics: “You know Roger is crazy. He really believes that stuff.” Dickinson, “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory.”
10
. Brian Stelter, “Victory Lap for Fox and Hannity,”
New York Times
, October 9, 2011,
www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/business/media/fox-news-and-hannity-at-the-top-after-15-years.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=ailes&st=cse
.
11
. Harry G. Frankfurt,
On Bullshit
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
12
. Eric Wilson, “Kanye West, Designer (Yawn),”
New York Times
, October 5, 2011,
www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/fashion/kanye-west-designer-yawn.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=ericwilson&adxnnlx=1317923369-PMvObE5LYvsSTzJYBKN24A
.
13
. Jon Pareles, “The Ego Sessions: Will Success Spoil Kanye West,”
New York Times
, September 5, 2007,
www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/arts/music/05westhtml?ref=kanyewest
, offers these lyrics as evidence of West’s self-awareness, even suggesting the distinctive, West-inspired name “starcissism,” for “a pop star’s mixture of self-love, self-promotion, self-absorption and self-awareness.” Pareles wrote before the Paris fashion debacle, when the suggestion was more plausible.
14
. It is not easy, after all, living with a profound sense of divine purpose. As West explains, “God chose me. He made a path for me.… I am God’s vessel.” Except that his greatest worry is not letting God down. As he goes on to explain, “But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.” See “Kanye: ‘I Am God’s Vessel,’ ”
www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/565894-kanye-i-am-gods-vessel
.
15
. A particularly stark example is Buddy Rich, whose greatness as a drummer is nearly matched by his rudeness, justified in the name of his own artistic perfection. Observe his rancid eloquence in addressing those not quite up to snuff at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ssZeOZkWU
.
16
. It is still important that we feel different about the successful artist such as Gauguin. In “Moral Luck,” Bernard Williams argues that Gauguin’s success in Tahiti substantively mitigates our moral feelings about his having abandoned his family in France for a risky artistic venture. See
Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973–1980
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 23–26. Gauguin might thus seem less of an asshole than he would have been had he never made it to Tahiti, or never found inspiration, even if this resulted simply from a stroke of bad luck that reflected nothing about him or his character. But we might also say that he is equally an asshole whether he succeeded or failed. As Thomas Nagel explains, our specifically moral objection to Gauguin might consider only the choices he made when his artistic prospects were uncertain. (“Moral Luck,” in
Mortal Questions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24–38. Is this
ex ante
perspective the right one for assessing someone as an asshole? Or should we also look at who the person actually perchance becomes over time, including any ultimate contribution to human culture? We leave this deep problem unresolved.
17
. Carmen M. Reinhardt and Kenneth S. Rogoff,
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). part 5.
18
. Nelson D. Schwartz and Eric Dash, “In Private, Wall St. Bankers Dismiss Protesters as Unsophisticated,”
New York Times
, October 14, 2011,
www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/business/in-private-conversation-wall-street-is-more-critical-of-protesters.html?_r=1&ref=occupywallstreet
. One banker does argue that bankers contribute a lot in taxes. But of course the basic issue is why bankers should have incomes high enough such that they pay a lot in taxes.
19
. According to the Bank of England’s Andrew G. Haldane in “The $100 Billion Question,” a lecture available at
www.bis.org/review/r100406d.pdf
.
20
. Former IMF head Simon Johnson and James Kwak argue for breaking up the big banks on these grounds in
13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown
(New York: Pantheon, 2010).
21
. F. A. Hayek,
The Constitution of Liberty
(1960; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 158.
22
. Letter to
Fortune
, June 16, 2010,
http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/15/news/newsmakers/Warren_Buffett_Pledge_Letter.fortune/index.htm
.
23
. Schwartz and Dash, “In Private, Wall St. Bankers Dismiss Protesters as Unsophisticated.”
24
. For present purposes I am assuming that the arguments against taking aggressive measures to stop crises are thin. I offer a more developed defense of that proposition in
Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), chap. 8.
25
. Ron Suskind,
Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President
(New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 424, describes Blankfein as “whipsawed between cocky and penitent.” Penitence is usually a sign of not being an asshole. If he is an asshole, he’s a half-ass asshole.
26
. Suskind,
Confidence Men
, 425.
27
. Robert Nozick, the most famous philosophical libertarian, would defend banker pay not as a just deserts but as a matter of one’s natural right to exchange with others without interference, in this case, in labor markets. See
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
(New York: Basic Books, 1974). Nozick admited that such rights don’t allow one to harm others, however, so one wouldn’t have the right to create systemic risks that cause financial crises without also having to compensate those injured. Paying for the costs of crises may require dramatically scaling back financial markets with taxes that “make bankers pay.” In addition, Nozick allows only a minimal state, whereas large-scale financial markets arguably depend on robust enabling institutions supported by taxation that Nozick would regard as theft. In a Nozickian paradise, large-scale financial markets arguably wouldn’t exist.
28
. Suskind,
Confidence Men
, 54.