Seeing Clearly                                  

Francesca Gino and Cassie Mogilner, professors from Harvard and Wharton, respectively, conducted research of the impact on morality of time versus money.  The results were reported recently in “Time, Money, and Morality” with little surprise.  

According to the professors’ report (and even supporting our common sense) when people focus on money instead of time-related values such as quality of life, happiness, passing of years, etc., we act significantly less ethical and moral.  

As I read the digest of the report I must admit that my cynical nature kicked in.  Why do we need research to determine an obvious truth that money and our increasing insatiable desire and obsession for it drive us to moral and ethical compromise?  As I thought about the rather apparent truth about a misplaced emphasis on money I recalled that early on in my Sunday School life I was warned about money.  “The love of money is the root of all evil” is the verse we were given to hopefully steer us toward less emphasis on things and more attention to life values. 

And after considering my warning from scripture, it dawned on me that we from early childhood have been introduced to and at times bombarded with similar instruction and guidance from spiritual leaders of all religions, philosophers, gifted authors, poets, and even politicians.  Perhaps some of the following admonitions about money will be familiar to you: 

•        Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.  (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

•         Surely there never was so evil a thing as money, which maketh cities into ruinous heaps, and banisheth men from their houses, and turneth their thoughts from good unto evil.  (Sophocles)

• ·         Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled.  (Barack Obama, speech, July 12, 2006)

• ·         Money ... is like a beautiful thoroughbred horse--very powerful & always in action, but unless this horse is trained when very young, it will be an out-of-control & dangerous animal when it grows to maturity.  (Dave Ramsey, Financial Peace Revisited)

• ·         It is forbidden to be dishonest or cheat in any business transaction, as we are commanded, "When you sell… or buy [property] from your neighbor, do not cheat one another" (Leviticus 25:14). Maintaining strict honesty in business dealings is equivalent to upholding the entire Torah, and is the first thing for which one is judged in the heavenly court.

• ·         Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.  (P.T. Barnum)

• ·         I rob banks because that’s where the money is.  (Willie Sutton)

• ·         A strange think about the color green in money:  it’ll go with anything you wear.  (Anonymous)

Now this is not a treatise on the evils of money.  No, only a reminder that the uncontrolled, run-away craving and lust for “filthy lucre” can transform the best of us into the next Bernie Madoff. 

As the Corporate Auditor of a Fortune 500 company early in my career, I had the doleful responsibility to confront controllers, sales and marketing VPs, corporate execs and other officials in the divisons, subs and branches when their cheating schemes became known and exposed.  I never got the sense that these people woke up one day and just immediately decided to become a crook, to cheat, to embezzle, to overstate sales or to do anything sinister and dishonest.  No, what I recall is that for whatever causative factor whether gambling, living above one’s means or just wanting more and more, these people developed and nurtured a craving for money and things.   They lost their focus.  Their life scales were simply tilted too much in the direction of stuff over substance.  They, like other misguided, dishonest and unethical people reflected all too well the truth of author Jim Collin’s “Five Stages of Decline” (How the Mighty Fall):

1.       Hubris (Pride)

2.       Undisciplined pursuit of more

3.       Denial of risk and peril

4.       Grasping for salvation

5.       Capitulation to irrelevance (being fired, criminally charged, incarcerated)

Yes, Sabbath and Sunday Schools, Mom and Dad, poets, philosophers, religious leaders and many others diligently admonish, instruct, warn, and continually inform us about the dangerous path of misplaced focus in our lives and where the “undisciplined pursuit of more” leads.  And yet some still fall.  

And they that fall are often reminded of another old quote:  “He who takes what isn’t his’n must give it back or go to prison.”

David A. Costello, CPA

Ad astra

Per aspera