http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7808009.stm
Getting rich quick - and having much more money than you ever need - will look as pointless as taking bodybuilding too seriously, says Clive James.
This is my last broadcast until my next spell and I'm in a summing up mood. I have no New Year resolutions apart from the usual one about tidying my office in case the body of my missing cleaner is lying mummified under that pile of magazines.
But I do feel like making a New Year prediction. I want to put down a marker that proves I have a grip on world events. The best way to prove this is to make a prediction that everybody knows has already come true, but that few people are yet ready to admit.
I hereby predict that from now on, starting today, nobody will look good who gets rich quick. I can predict more than that, in fact. Even getting rich slowly is going to look silly, if getting rich is the only aim in mind.
Getting rich for its own sake will look as stupid as bodybuilding does at that point when the neck gets thicker than the head, and the thighs and biceps look like four plastic kit-bags full of tofu. And on the men it looks even worse.
Just before Christmas, as if the collapse of some of the world's relatively honest financial institutions had not already been unsettling enough, hedge fund boss Bernard Madoff was accused of swindling the world's smartest investors out of a grand total of $50bn.
How, it was asked, could the world's smartest investors have fallen for this character? The answer, surely, is that they were all like him. They thought they had found a way of making money out of nothing. Unfortunately for them, the ineffable Mr Madoff appeared to have found a way of making money out of nothing. All he allegedly had to do was tell them he had invented something called "a split conversion strategy" and they handed over their money.
But most of them had got their money the same way, by promising vast returns on money from other people who were trying to make money out of nothing.
Many profound articles were written by the financial experts to explain how the whole mad Madoff cycle had been generated, but the question that was never asked is the one that bears most closely on my theme. What was he going to do with $50bn?
Back at the start of this series, I raised the issue of what the multibillionaires who owned yachts were hoping to achieve (see The name's Bond in the Clive James archive, top right). At best, their ridiculous unarmed battleships, permanently parked in the teeming marina of the sort of city where the world's well-dressed dimwits gather to gamble at the casino, were described as floating palaces.
Bill Gates got to the point where he started to look for useful ways of giving some of his money away
What kind of numbskull wants a palace that floats, when he could just have a palace, out of whose front door he could stride with some confidence that he would not plunge face-first into the harbour? I was really asking a question about what you can do with too much money, and the answer was obvious: never enough.
How much money is too much? It's too much when you've already got all you could possibly need, and there's nothing to do with it any more except count it.
[....]
Excess wealth is gone like the codpiece. The free market will continue but any respect for the idea of free money is all over. If you've got it, flaunt it by all means, but if you haven't earned it, forget about it. There isn't going to be a change of consciousness, there's already been one, which is why I can be so confident when I predict it. Until next time.
Getting rich quick - and having much more money than you ever need - will look as pointless as taking bodybuilding too seriously, says Clive James.
This is my last broadcast until my next spell and I'm in a summing up mood. I have no New Year resolutions apart from the usual one about tidying my office in case the body of my missing cleaner is lying mummified under that pile of magazines.
But I do feel like making a New Year prediction. I want to put down a marker that proves I have a grip on world events. The best way to prove this is to make a prediction that everybody knows has already come true, but that few people are yet ready to admit.
I hereby predict that from now on, starting today, nobody will look good who gets rich quick. I can predict more than that, in fact. Even getting rich slowly is going to look silly, if getting rich is the only aim in mind.
Getting rich for its own sake will look as stupid as bodybuilding does at that point when the neck gets thicker than the head, and the thighs and biceps look like four plastic kit-bags full of tofu. And on the men it looks even worse.
Just before Christmas, as if the collapse of some of the world's relatively honest financial institutions had not already been unsettling enough, hedge fund boss Bernard Madoff was accused of swindling the world's smartest investors out of a grand total of $50bn.
How, it was asked, could the world's smartest investors have fallen for this character? The answer, surely, is that they were all like him. They thought they had found a way of making money out of nothing. Unfortunately for them, the ineffable Mr Madoff appeared to have found a way of making money out of nothing. All he allegedly had to do was tell them he had invented something called "a split conversion strategy" and they handed over their money.
But most of them had got their money the same way, by promising vast returns on money from other people who were trying to make money out of nothing.
Many profound articles were written by the financial experts to explain how the whole mad Madoff cycle had been generated, but the question that was never asked is the one that bears most closely on my theme. What was he going to do with $50bn?
Back at the start of this series, I raised the issue of what the multibillionaires who owned yachts were hoping to achieve (see The name's Bond in the Clive James archive, top right). At best, their ridiculous unarmed battleships, permanently parked in the teeming marina of the sort of city where the world's well-dressed dimwits gather to gamble at the casino, were described as floating palaces.
Bill Gates got to the point where he started to look for useful ways of giving some of his money away
What kind of numbskull wants a palace that floats, when he could just have a palace, out of whose front door he could stride with some confidence that he would not plunge face-first into the harbour? I was really asking a question about what you can do with too much money, and the answer was obvious: never enough.
How much money is too much? It's too much when you've already got all you could possibly need, and there's nothing to do with it any more except count it.
[....]
Excess wealth is gone like the codpiece. The free market will continue but any respect for the idea of free money is all over. If you've got it, flaunt it by all means, but if you haven't earned it, forget about it. There isn't going to be a change of consciousness, there's already been one, which is why I can be so confident when I predict it. Until next time.
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