My late mother in law, a school district superintendent in Queens, was not rich but (after growing up dirt poor in Hell's Kitchen in the Depression) was very well off, thanks to the NYC teacher's union and its pension program, and worked for less money than she would have received under her pension under less than ideal conditions three years past her retirement date -- that is, she not only worked for the city public schools three years for free, she paid for the privilege. And this was not a woman who didn't know what to do with herself outside the job or know how to keep herself occupied on her own. She used every inch of the city up to the day she died.
I think in her case it was a combination of the iron cage and the identity and community that work gave her, as well as the meaning and structure it imposed on her life, although she was happily able to recreate those for herself when she did finally actually retire. Lots of people aren't.
Doug, don't the statistics show that there's a big spike in mortality shortly after retirement? Not working can be hazardous to your health even when you don't have to work. I don't mean to say that the rich work because they know this and view work as a health measure, but it shows that the work they do is fulfilling and beneficial, thus good for them, and that's a reason they do it.
--- Michael McIntyre <mcintyremichael at mac.com> wrote:
> Yes, but why do they? The returns to the "hard
> work" of the rich can
> be broken down (analytically, if not empirically)
> into:
> *interest: what the rich could earn from their
> accumulated capital as
> rentiers
> *rent: what the rich earn due to ability to exploit
> deviations from
> the mythical market
> *pure profit: the residual - a sort of
> entrepreneurial wage
>
> I don't think there's any reason to believe that
> "pure profit" is a
> large fraction of the total. I wouldn't want to
> have to try to live
> off of "pure profit" - what I could earn with a
> price-taking business
> capitalized entirely through loans in a competitive
> market. That
> leaves two possible explanations (that I can see -
> maybe there are
> more):
>
> (1) Weber was right: the rich work compulsively in a
> post-Calvinist
> iron cage.
> (2) The real money is in rent. It takes a lot of
> work to identify
> and take advantage of rents, so the rich work hard,
> event though the
> social product of that labor could be negative.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Michael McIntyre
> mcintyremichael at mac.com
> http://morbidsymptoms.blogspot.com
>
> On Feb 9, 2007, at 2:14 PM,
> lbo-talk-request at lbo-talk.org wrote:
>
> >> In fact, the love of The Market is grounded in
> the antithesis of
> >> hard work
> >> and diligence - it is the shortcut from rags to
> riches, the
> >> quintessence of
> >> the American Dream that bypasses the drudgery of
> education, the
> >> toil of hard
> >> work, the burden of moral obligations, and the
> pomposity of high
> >> culture.
> >
> > Though hard work is very often not rewarded, most
> rich people today
> > work hard. The rentier is mostly a thing of the
> past. The ideal for
> > the rich today is to work; even our socialites
> have a little handbag
> > business on the side.
> >
> > Doug
>
> > ___________________________________
>
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