Rivers of wealth

For some years now I've been reading Nick Murray's Around the Year, a daily reader for financial advisors and planners, in the morning when I'm at home. From his newsletter I know that he's to the right of me politically and I don't agree with him on everything about practice goals, equity allocations, etc, but he's generally a thoughtful guy and has been around and thinking about the role of the advisor for a long time, so he remains absolutely a solid read. If someone else would come up with another daily reader for advisors, I'd probably check that out.

Here in late December, Murray ruminates on the nature of wealth and postulates that wealth is something that transcends generations and allows families that have it to do good. It's true that lots of families with wealth do focus on giving to causes they believe in and that in the best cases philanthropy becomes a driving force within the family. But few of them really trim their living standards to give a ton away. And philanthropy can also evolve into a greenwashing myth that validates peoples' lifestyles.

We quickly get back to the questions of what is the best way for society as a whole to allocate funding between the effecting of public vs. private goods and how to balance economic dynamism and the desire to provide for one's own with making sure that everyone can live a decent life. Europeans always tout the relative lack of extreme human privation in their countries, but that is balanced by the fact that they don't make much of anything new that the rest of the world wants much of. Luxury goods and a pharmaceutical here or there are the obvious exception. Plus tourism

By now I'm oversimplifying dramatically because my work bell is ringing pretty loud. This always happens. One of these days I'm going to have to stop skirting around the edges of problems and write a book.