Eck. (Oh, and money matters, too.)

Funny thing happened on the way to posting on this blog. I got up this morning and felt...weird. I puttered around a bit, ate breakfast, read some stuff online, and all the while, I had this odd sensation that something was wrong. Did I forget something? Do I have an appointment today that I didn't write down on my calendar? Did someone steal my identity again? Is there a Cylon hiding out in the garage? What the heck?

And then it hit me as I was cleaning the kitchen. Ohhhhh. Yeah, okay. I'm getting sick. Again.

Argh.

Anyway, on to more important things.

Recently I posted a question about a subject I'm genuinely curious about: What do the French think about money? I've read in many places that the French are very cautious -- to the point of being closed-mouth -- about discussing money. I find that intriguing because obviously out here in the good ol' US of A, Americans are absolutely obsessed with it. Getting more of it, winning it, making it work for us, how much more someone else makes compared to our own piddling sum, how much something costs...it's a source of endless fascination. When the go-go years of the '90s seduced everyone into thinking that the Internet was where all the money was (and at the time, it was true), an awful lot of otherwise unremarkable people poured into IT programs at colleges around the country hoping to be the next Jerry Yang or Jeff Bezos. I first started messing around on the Internet in the fall of 1993 when a friend who moved to Singapore for an internship with the American Embassy there encouraged me to pick up an account at the university so that we could communicate in real time without spending a dime in overseas telephone charges. I would spend hours and hours and hours -- sometime two days straight -- online, exploring FTP and Gopher and the world of UNIX and God knows what else.

But I never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine that I was sitting on a potential moneymaker. A huge moneymaker.

Others did, though, and pretty soon people were becoming kajillionaires overnight simply because an idea of theirs could have a .com attached to the end of it. Never mind that a single product was never created. No, the idea was gold enough.

Of course, we all know what happened. When the bust happened, it really crushed a lot of people. Friends of mine who were making six figures a year providing tech services suddenly found themselves begging for $9/hour tech support jobs. IT programs in higher ed saw rapidly shrinking enrollment. When the money shriveled up, so did the interest among people.

Now, of course, the big thing everyone wants in on is business. MBA's are attracting recruiters like IT grads used to. Never mind that a lot of these people are going to hate -- absolutely despise -- their jobs in a few years, if not sooner. The key is to make money and to grab as much of it as one can before another boom industry takes over and swallows up all the eager jobseekers and fresh college graduates.

When did Mammon replace God and faith and humanism as the new religion?

I received some very interesting responses to my query, all of which are quoted below.

Randal Graves wrote:

This seems to tie in to your post below about everything moving faster, 35-hour work weeks and something I saw at Chris Late's place, a link about how France is still churning out well-rounded, erudite students, but without the skills that corporations want.

If this isn't an indictment of the way society is currently structured, I don't know what is. I'm not saying we all just lie around and indulge the whims of our respective muses - okay, I am - but we're becoming more and more chained to the idea of profit as the only worth. I wish I had a grand solution for it.

On the same note, I read somewhere that the majority of Americans would trade their vacation days for higher salaries. Europeans answering the same question had the opposite answer. What would a society be like if its citizens chose to pursue their intellectual interests rather than whatever moneymaking venture attracts them? Is France really like that? I'm sure that there are lots of profit-seeking French entrepreneurs, but how are they perceived by their peers? We idolize Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and yet I'm betting that the vast majority of people don't even know who our current national Poet Laureate is. (It's Charles Simic, and yes, I had to look it up, too.) We know who the big names in Hollywood are, but who knows who won last year's Nobel Prize for Literature? (Doris Lessing, and yeah, I had to look that one up, too.)

Camille C. commented:

This is one subject I really haven't heard much about. Maybe the French are to money as Americans are to Sex?

Hmm. Interesting thought. So perhaps the French consider money as a taboo subject in public but are secretly obsessed with it? I'm not actually sure that sex is all that taboo in American life anyway, considering how pop culture and advertising love to saturate their audiences with images and icons all somehow related to sex. When an independent investigation is opened by the White House to explore the sexual proclivities of the nation's president, I don't think one can argue anymore that sex is a touchy subject among Americans.

Or perhaps Camille means that while Americans have a love-hate relationship to sex, the French are tortured with the same conflicting feelings towards money. Fair enough. We Americans are such ghastly prudes about sex and yet can't stop thinking/reading/talking about it. Does this mean that the French loathe lucre and refuse to discuss it, but secretly hoard obsessive thoughts about it?

Jacqui wrote:

It is definitely not done, talking about money. It is considered gauche to comment about how much something costs or how much money one makes. It just is not done at all.
In the past, and to some extent it still goes on, people hid any sign of wealth for fear the tax man would come. The Tax authorities also take anonymous tips so one is leary of nosey neighbors as well. the only comment my Parisian friends will say with a smile is "tres chic tres cher."

Is it still all about a fear of the mysterious bogeyman from the tax office? Japan -- which in my opinion is France's cultural sister in the Far East -- shares a similar stance as their French counterparts. Money is not to be discussed unless absolutely positively necessary, and even then it should be a very discreet and very brief conversation. However, no one really fears the tax man -- it's a solidly middle class society with a strong central government, and dodging the tax man would be very difficult in such a cloistered, homogeneous environment -- so it's not really due to any concerns of losing one's funds to the government.

Karen, who lives in Paris, has this to say:

Because of this reticence to talk about money, it's hard for outsiders to get a solid perspective on french attitudes about money. Some generalities I've picked up on:

The idea is to work to live not live to work. You want to earn a decent living so that you can enjoy your life. I suspect twice the salary but only 2 weeks vacation would be unappealing to a lot of people.

Also, security seems to be more important than earning a lot of money. I read somewhere last year that the ultimate dream job for most university students is a civil service job. I found that somewhat sad but understandable given their job prospects upon graduation. Judging from the bureaucrats I've encountered recently, the draw is definitely not job satisfaction but rather the security.

In addition, the concept of shifting into a different line of work than the one you originally trained for seems a bit foreign. You really are what you majored in. So if you can't find work in that field it is better to stay on unemployment benefits until something appropriate comes up. In other words working in one's own profession is more important than making money doing something else.

I'm not sure whether this answers any of your queries or even whether my take is at all accurate. But they are good questions! Just difficult to do the field research here.

I like Karen's comment about job security in the bureaucracy. Frankly, I think that many Americans at this point in our history would agree with her statement: security is more important than money. Having twice been laid off unexpectedly myself -- with little or no financial compensation -- I understand how potentially devastating and stressful it can be. I think that most Americans would respond the same way, that they would much rather have a decent job that they could depend on and be able to enjoy their life without having to worry about losing their retirement or their savings because of a medical catastrophe. The dream of becoming the next Bill Gates entices a lot of people, but because he's such a singular person, most people recognize that such a dream will never happen, and would be content just knowing that their medical insurance and retirement are secure.

Randal wrote in again with more thoughts:

I think the idea of sharing an artistic vision is what, for most creative types, is the root cause of writing or painting or composing or what have you, and money does come into play, but I'm not sure it's a greed thing. We'd all like more money, but almost as the fuel to propel more creative acts. For example, I'd like more so I could travel and see the world, which, in turn, will help me create further. Material trappings - giant home, cars, fancy clothes, all that - is unimportant.

At least for me, the things I would want to do with money always tie into creation or exploration of the self, the human condition. Sure, I'd probably buy a new suit if I could afford a subscription for box seats to the Cleveland Orchestra, but I'm not looking to be upper-class man about town. Just jet off to France now and then. :)

I think it helps tremendously that the French have such a strong social welfare system. Sure, they have higher taxes, but with a smaller population and economy than the United States, they can afford to spread the wealth. Given that kind of security, they are freer to pursue their personal interests -- travel, music, art, literature, sailing, backpacking, whatever -- because they know that they have a backup plan if anything goes awry. How many of you spend your free time worrying about finances, calculating how much you can put into a Roth IRA or your company's 401(k) without sacrificing your current standard of living? How many of you have ever checked out a personal finance book because of the latest news report about the upcoming implosion of Social Security? How many of you have ever had to face a dwindling bank account in the face of a sudden illness or accident that the insurance company won't pay (if you have insurance at all)? When you're dealing with those kinds of life-or-death issues, it can be hard to refocus your life on what many would consider "non-essentials."

Aveyron-based Betty C. writes:

I could go on forever about this, but I think chicamericaine has made a cogent analysis -- I agree with all of her points.

It seems to me that the recent grumbling about the falling pouvoir d'achat, or purchasing power, though, has lifted some of the taboos about talking about money. I've heard people saying things like "Can you imagine? That's a month's salary!" Maybe they don't say directly that it's their monthly salary, but you get the idea. And consumers are less reticent about asking how much things cost, which I think is no longer really taboo AS LONG AS you yourself are interested in buying the same object.

Also, with Internet, employees have been able to communicate with people doing similar jobs in order to compare salaries, where they might not dare ask their immediate colleague who does the same work how much he or she makes.

Appealing as the "work to live, don't live to work" philosophy is, it has worn on me to some degree. Here I feel like it is almost, or truly, looked down upon to love your job. Put it this way: you sure don't see anybody dragging around mugs, wearing badges or sporting T-shirts related to their profession.

I know that the French economy has slumped, and that some fear that their long-cherished welfare system will find itself a victim of critical circumstances. If so, perhaps that will open up more discussions about money. I'm thinking that one downside to not talking about money is that it leads to ignorance. (My family didn't talk much about money when I was growing up other than the fact that we had little of it, so it wasn't until I was well into adulthood that I began to have a better understanding of how it affected many of the choices I've made, for good and ill.) If the French want to save their economic system, perhaps talking about money is the first step towards finding a solution to their fiscal dilemmas.

I enjoyed Betty's comment about the French disdain for employment. (Read my book review of the French bestseller, Bonjour, Laziness.) I have to say, as a vehemently anti-9-to-5 person myself, I understand the sentiment. How many of you have cringed when a person you meet at a party or on a plane or wherever opens up a conversation with, "So....what do you do?" It's not that the person's being rude, obviously, as it's just the way our culture has evolved. It's become short-hand for "Hello, how are you, nice to meet you." Not that that's either good or bad, and you have to admit, considering that most Americans spend at least 45-50 hours a week either at work or going to and from, it's a perfectly normal thing to ask someone where they spend so much of their life. On the other hand, it also does reinforce the idea that a person's identity is intimately tied to his or her job. We make judgments of people based not just on their looks anymore but on their profession, and that loaded question (posed by the wrong person) can reveal all kinds of prejudices.

What do you think?