The Protestant Ethic and American Capitalism

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That's odoo dot com slash heartradio You caught it This episode is presented by Odoo Before Benjamin Franklin whatever, flew a kite in a thunderstorm, before he edited the Declaration of Independence, before he met with kings He was mainly two things One, a successful businessman T best selling writer in what would soon become the United States of America And these two things, being a bestselling writer and being a successful businessman, they were actually related because at the time, most writing was religious or philosophical, it was very high minded Benjamin Franklin's writing was not like this at all. It was the writing of a businessman. It was practical on the ground advice. we call it mass market For a mass market. We call it self help, right? We call it financial self help Because what he wrote about was How to make money Ben Franklin basically invented this American genre of the Bus self help book. And on top of that More importantly, he created a new way to think about work. He created this American value system and gave us the language to live in the industrial age I'm Jacob Goldstein. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Business. I show about the history of business And today And todayoday we are starting a series two episodes. I can't even say not one because I that wouldn't be a series. Three your favorite episodes and we're calling it American Gius As a part of a celebration of America two hundred fifty baby, we are telling the stories not necessarily of business people as we've done. on this program, we're telling the stories of writers, three writers who chang the way we think about business and money in America. And we're starting with Ben Franklin, who was their Jump And you know, he did real work as a scientist, was a father of our country, but that is not what we are here to talk about today Today on the show Benjamin Franklin, businessman and writer reason he's on the hook Benjamin's baby Lady. In seventeen eighty eight, when Benjamin Franklin, no middle name, was eighty two years old. He wrote his last will and Testament Robert Smith, give us the first six words, my bifocals. invented by Ben Franklin, of course I Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia. Ca Printer, Ca printer. At this moment. Then Franklin was the or a sort of governor ish of Pennsylvania. He was a world famous scientist. He'd been U. S. minister to France during the American Revolution But he starts with his job Pinter which In the context of this historical moment is a baller move. People at this time did not identify themselves by their jobs, at least people of the status of Benjamin Franklin. Gentlemen didn't work, right? Work was for the lower classes And so Here is Frank Clinton who you know, could be a gentlemine at this point if he wanted to, but he is owning his identity as a tradesman. And in this Will in Testament, which is a piece of writing, he is already starting to create this new value system for America, where your trade is your identity, where you take pride in your work where we admire self made people, which is the opposite of the way it worked at the time. You didn't want to be self made, you wanted to be born to a family of oldmen. And Franklin truly was self made. His father was a Puritan who came to Boston and worked as a chandler ob you don't hear about so much anymore making candles out of out of tallo, out of animal fat, a hard dirty smelly job. Jacob knows this because for a planlet Money episode, Jacob actually ordered beef fat and made his own candles at home smmells very bad. takes a long time and the candles aren't very nice at least if I'm making them. So this is the family Ben Franklin is born into. He is not particularly religious And he doesn't want to be a chamler And he threatens to run off to sea likeike one of his older brothers had done. But that brother had died at sea. And so Ben Franklin's dad tucked him into becoming an apprentice. Another older brother A brother named James And James was a printer in Boston and being an apprentice was a formal legal thing at the time and in fact twwelve year old Ben Franklin signed a legal binding contract promising to work for his brother until he was twenty one years old and went to work as a printer as a printer. Yeah. Wow with your brothers, like sign the contract, dude.. And printer at the time meant something quite different than it means today Tod I hear printer and I think of Kinkos probablyro showing my age, but remember Kinkos was a big deal. I spent a lot of time at Kinkos' twenty five years ago. You get the bond paper for your resume and like it has the watermark and like so there pr So luxurious. Goldstein resume ero three, final, final, really final. Anyway, in the seventeen hundreds, printer was sort of more like we think of publisher today. You know, like Ben's brother James, like a lot of printers, published his own newspaper. It was called The New England Current. And in fact, in April of seventeen twenty two, Ben had been printcing for a few years, he's sixteen years old He sneaks off after hours, disguises his handwriting and starts submitting articles to his brother's paper undernder the pseudonym, Silence do good. No way. Silence do good. do good. No a very pseudo nym. I mean, at the time, people did often write under pseudonyms. Did his brother know? No, his brother didn't know. And his brother loved the articles. So Silence do goodood is this widow from the Massachusetts countryside, who's kind of plain spoken, plain thinking, poking fun at the higher classes, being written by a teenage boy, being written by a teenage boy. And there's one in particular, I think that's worth looking at from a minute. Robert, give us this paragraph is from an artle where Silence Do Good is making fun of Boston's Harvard boys They learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely and enter a room gentely which might as well be acquired at a dancing school And from thence they return after abundance of trouble and charge as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and self conceited. There's only like a handful of universities in the United States at this time. It's before there was a United States. There's only like five universities and they already hate Harvard. Yes. Well, Ben Franklin in particular does, right? because he is a brilliant young man. who only has two years of formal schooling and is never going to get more. He's not going to Harvard. So he has a kind of a chip on his shoulder, perhaps, right? Some class resentment. And one other thing that's worth mentioning here is Harvard is a religious school. It's essentially a seminary, right? And Franklin is going go on in his life to create what will become the University of Pennsylvania which is a very different kind of college, right? Not a religious school, but a school to train students for practical jobs in business and government. very much in keeping with his get your hands dirty in the world persona. He's pulling one over on his brother, but he's learning how to triangulate all these different parts of what will be American society by using humor and being clever. Yes, he is very witty and that becomes sort of core to his identity as a writer, as we'll see. So these articles do well. He writes them for a few months and then stops because he thinks his brother is ono him basically, silence do good. And ultimately, he decides he can't bear serving out this apprenticeship in part because his brother actually beats him physically, which You know, was more common at the time, but Franklin didn't like it. He bound by law to keep working for his brother, but he decides he's gonna break the law And he flees. he's going to flee Boston. He has a friend book him a passage on a ship to New York cover story he was a boy who had an intrigue with a girl of bad character Whse character was bad. So he gets to New York, he can't find work in New York. and a printer there tells him to go look for work in Philadelphia You know, at the time, even getting from New York to Philadelphia is a journey. It takes him several days to get there. First he sleeps in an open boat in New York Harbor And then he go, you know, goes ashore in New Jersey and sleeps in some old lady's house there the next night. eventually he finds some people in a rowboat going down the Delaware River to Philadelphia and he gets in And they roow through the night and they get kind of lost, but you know, it's a river. you can't get that lost and Eight o'clock in the morning, I believe it's Sunday morning, they roow up to the wharf in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is going to be the center of the revolution. It's going be the city where Franklin makes his fortune. And so there is this moment that he memorializes later in his autobiography itself an important piece of his writing This moment when he makes his landing in Philadelphia, Robert, give it to us. I was dirty from my journey. My pockets were stuffed out with shirts and stockings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for lodging. I was fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest I was very hungry and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper pooor man at eight AM on the docks of Philadelphia And you know, he's writing this much later in his life consciously creating this image of himself I do want to emphasize how unusual this model is at the time, this self made man myth because you don't want to be self made. It's low class to be self made. You know, this idea that we have today is the opposite, right? And it comes from Franklin. Today. there is the derisive term neepo baiting. Well, exactly right. And these days, if you are a billionaire, you had better have a Benjamin Franklin story about starting in a garage, coming up with the idea from nothing. And here is Benjamin Franklin inventing it right before our eyes So he's in Philelphia And there are two printers already working in town He gets a job with one of them who basically sucks,'s just bad at running the business, doesn't know what he's doing And in a few years, Franklin sets up his own shop initially with a partner partnerers, Dad bank rolls the business a few years later Franklin buys the partner out. I Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia prter Here he is working for himself got his business and in seventeen three when he's not yet thirty years old findinds the formula That's going to make him rich publishes the first edition of Poor Richard's Almanet Do we know who poor Richard is? It's like Silence, Do good. It's Richard Saunds. It's a character he makes up, a plain homespun man who, you know, knows the basic earthy truths of the world So let's talk about almanax for a minute. Oh, I love alman. I loveve an almanax. An amazing business model, right? Because You got to buy one every year. There's an almanac for the year. We should describe this an almanac It's like a calendar, but it has predictions for the weather and planting seasons. It tells you when the sun is going to come up, how long the days are, super important. tells you when holidays are and Saints's Days and all these things you might want to know. I noticed from looking back to poor Richards Almanaxs that it's always like The third year since Lap year. Okay. Good to know. Yeah Thanks for reminding us.. So it's a good business because they sell them every year. bad business because everybody sells them. It's not a secret that it's a good business. So it's a commodity, right? And one of the great themes of business history, the show and the history itself is that Commodity businesses are terrible businesses to be in because there's all this competition, they drive down the price. That's the only thing you can compete on, and you're just not going to make any money American businesses love being a monopoly being a commodity. Yeah. so if you're in a commodity business, you want to differentiate your product and Franklin differentiate his product to make it a premium brand instead of a commody, creates this character, creates Poor Richard And poor Richard writes these little aphorisms in the margins of the almanat And we've actually got a page And it says in this, by the way, that this is for Philadelphia, but it will serve all the easastern seaboard down to the south.. Right. because I suppose some of the details would vary by geography. And so you look at this page and it's an incredible amount of information jammed in. It's one page and the days in the month are laid out in two columns to say I'm looking at something more than twenty hundred years ago, right kind of nails the weather a little bit. I guess the weather hasn't changed that much in New York City over two hundred years. So there's Cloudy wet weather. and perhaps Thunder w Check, check, check and check nailed it. But then again, it's like a horoscope that says like an interesting person will cross your path. This is every almanac so far, right? The thing that makes poor Richards different, the thing that sets it apart is jammed in over there in the right hand column where it's like talking about the phases of the moon and stuff, jammed in there in italics are these aphisms And in fact, there's one here in late May in this eighteen thirty three almanac where we're reading read it to us. pooor have little Beggars none, the rich too much. Enough onene Pretty good. I know. two hundred years later, that's still pretty good good. You could scrawl that on a wall somewhere and people would be like Yeah do. Yeah. put it on your T just just tik Tok, think of just like the ocean. These aphorisms going to distinguish the book, and they're going to become part of the American vernacular, maybe part of the American psyche. You know them already, read some of them Yeah, and think about it, by the way, in an almanac, everyone's kind of checking the same day at the same time. And if you have poor Richards, everyone's sort of reading the same inspirational quote at the same time. So when you go down to the tavern water cooler TV show. Yeah. And when you go down to the tavern and it looks like the proprietor of the tavern is stressed out, you say, no gains without pains one of the aphorisms. God helps those who help themselves. I just feel like everyone knows this, right? He who multiplies riches, multiplies care M money, more problems, we say today. Necessity never made a good bargain. Subtler but smart. I feel like these are all just things dads say. Yeah. Would you persuade speak of interest, not of reason? I love this one for like convincing people on social media, right? Don't tell them why you're right. T them how you're early to bed Early to rise Do I even need to finish this one? You do not. We are all wise to it. Now, I should say that most of the aphorisms, including this one already existed in some form or another. right? Franklin didn't make them up. He didn't claim to have made them up. He said he took them from elsewhere. But a lot of them he sharpened, he edited, he punched them up There's this Walter Isaacson biography of Ben Franklin good biography. and he has some nice examples of how Franklin did this So for example There was an English aphorism that went Fresh fish and newc guests smell They are three days old. And Franklin, the printer, by the way, he has to fit this in such a tiny little space He rewrites it as Fish and visitors stink in three days That's a great edit hate at it. People must have Must have Gfod. People must have Gfod. Okay, another one The original version Three may keep a secret if two of them are away Franklt had notes. He made it, threeree may keep a secret if two of them are dead Very good. Por Richards is a best seller. It's the best seller. It sells more copies than anything but the Bible. Ben Franklin is on his way Give me one more aphorism before the ad break, Robert Smith You know, there are only two things inevitable in life. Deff. and go into the ad broak. If your business runs on five different apps, twelve browser tabs, and one spreadsheet that everyone's afraid to touch P'srobably time for Odu Odu is an all in one business management software that connects every part of your business into one powerful, easy to use platform So instead of wasting time switching between disconnected systems Your entire business works together in real time. Your team moves faster, your data stays accurate, and you can actually focus on growing your business. Let one unified system run your entire business From the first opportunity to the final payment, everything works together in one place Whether you're a small business or managing a large operation Odoo gives you one flexible platform built to grow with you. Try for free today at odoo. com slash iheart radio. That's Odoo d. com slash iheart radio We back from the ad And Den Franklin is doing great sell and tons of copies of pooor Richard He does this thing where when he's got promising employees He sends them off to other cities to start their own print shops stakes them gets a share in the profits. Ls like he's Inubator loope Chop C. And in seventeen forty eight, when he is forty two years old, Ben Franklin makes a deal with the foreman of his print shop for it'll take over the business Franklin will retire and get half of the profits for the next eighteen years forty two years old and retired Living the dream. This is the dream. He'd be huge on Reddit, right? He'd be huge on Reddit And you know, he's going invent eye foocals. He's going be a founding father. He's going to fly a kite in a lightning storm and make fundamental discoveries about the nature of Electricity. And I should also mention that as a wealthy man, Ben Franklin will buy at least seven enslaved people who will work for him as household servants over the course of the next several decades. Although at the end of his life, Franklin will become president of the Philadelphia Abolition Society. and will petition Congress to abolish slavery successfull He will also Keep writing. For the rest of his life Poor Richards keeps coming out every year, even after he hands over the business. It is a cash cow after all. Until finally, in seventeen fifty seven Then Franklin decides that's enough of poor Richard. He's dispensed all the wisdom he has. That's it. There's no more apharisms. Shut it down seventeen fifty it's gonna to be the last ever, poor Richards Almanac and a big retirement tour. How are we gonna know what the weather in New York City in May is gonna be? You're gonna have to guess. Cloudy And by this time, he's already Benjamin Franklin, American statesman. He gets on a ship to England going to go petition some people in England about a fight over taxes, of course, what peopleople are always fighting over But his ship gets stalled. It has to anchor just off the New Jersey shore for a couple of weeks because there's a French squadron nearby and the captain's afraid they're going to get captured by the French Here's Ben Franklin, stuck on a ship pulls out his quill And he starts writing. And what he writes is going to become the most widely reprinted work about economics for the next two hundred and fifty years. This is before Adam Smith, but of course, Adam Smith wrote like five volumes Yesconomic most influential. You're asking, why wasn't Adam Smith? Adam Smith was not a best seller the way he was. Having tried to read Wealth of Nations You could say why I wasn't a best sell seller?ot a best seller. It's a little dense. Yeah So what Franklin writes is a much easier read than Wealth of Nations. It's basically Poor Richard's greatest Hits. It's a greatest Hits album. The best aphorisms from over the past decades And this time The aphorisms are not going to be sprinkled throughout the tide charts and the horoscope entries. They'll be published as an introduction right at the beginning of this final almana And you know, the way he puts them together becomes this guide to living. and crucially for our purposes It becomes a guide to business, a guide to making and keeping money, whichich is super interesting the time because you imagine that for hundreds of years There was no guide to living other than the Bible. There was a moral guide, but you expected to do the same job as your father. You didn't expect to make more money. you expected to just get by. So having someone give you advice about how to climb the ladder and be successful wouldn't have even tracked But we're seeing the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and a society where people are changing. They are rapidly becoming richer in the colonies and they're about to set their own destiny. Yes, yes. Franklin is coming along at this profound transformation in economic history, right? This is the very beginning of the industrial revolution. It hasn't even come to the U.S yet. And he is writing to meet this moment So There's a couple pieces of his writing that we're going to talk about in detail. This is the first of the two. So let's talk about it. This piece of writing is of course written in the voice of poor Richard, but the opening is classic Ben Franklin, give it to us. I have heard that nothing gives an author so great pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors pleasure I have seldom enjoyed. Thank you. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Well played. tooast fas. Okay, so right, so self deprecation, fine. But then look at the pivot in the next paragraph. I concluded at length were the best judges of my merit, for they buy my works It's sure I didn't get a great review in the New York Times but I'm top of the best seller list, baby. It's kind of a radical notion to be like I am proud of the fact that I sold a bunch of copies. Ben Franklin, man of the peopleeople. R? It's very man of the peoplee. Poor Richard, man of the peopleeople. And then It gets a little bit kind of Russian dolly pooor Richard tells a story, right? Franklin's writing, poor Richard's telling the story where Richard says I went to this auction And everybody's standing around before the auction starts And they ask this old man named Father Abraham what he thought about Texas. To be clear, Father Abraham's another made upthing's made up. Ben Franklin is a real guy Everybody else is made up. In response to this question about Texas, father Abraham gives this talk, which is kind of a sermon But it's not about religion. it's about work and money, and it is Father Abraham explicitly quoting poor Richard. So it's like a Rusianll Franklin Poor Richard, Father Abraham, poor Richard in the middle. And Father Abraham lays out this very coherent worldview about Money First he says You guys are complaining about paying taxes But the way you waste your time It's like you're taxing yourself Rbert, give us a little bit We are taxed twice as much by our idleness Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of, as poor Richard says There will be sleeping enough in the grave as Poor Richard says And as everyone says onm LinkedIn to this day. Yes, yes, I'll sleep when I'm dead. And then a bunch of writing about the value of hard work. And then interestingly, the idea that work itself makes you happy Trouble springs from idleness and grievous toil from needless ease, whereas industry gives comfort and plenty and respect And finally Classic poor Richard Favorite of cheap dads everywhere? Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship Dick says, 'tis easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it. Don't spend money, you don't have to spend. Sometimes when you see this save your money work hard kind of advice, you suspect that like, eh probably runs a corporation or something, like he sits on a boat and lives a life of leisure. And Franklin iss literally sitting on a boat as he's riding this. I don't think he is cynical in that way. I think he truly believes it. I mean, to me, like a more resonant critique is like DH. Lawrence wrote this down we'd call it today of Franklin's writing, which is basically like it's so hemmed in. He says Franklin like built himself a corral. Franklin was a horse and he built himself a corral of these kind of bourgeois morals and lived inside of it. And Dagege Lawrence is like, I wantanna be, you know, the wild man in the woods. Don't fence me in, Ben Franklin. To me, that's a more resonant This is the end of the Father Abraham sermon inside of this little essay And at the end Franklin cuts back to poor Richard who's been watching the talk and who describes what happens in this, you know, fictional scene at the end People heard it and approved the doctrine and immediately practice the contrary just as if it had been a common sermon. Right. He says they immmediately afterwards, the auction starts and they buy all this stuff they don't need You know, All of these aphorisms, all this advice, it reads very generic today, right? It reads very kind of obvious and not that interesting. Te a sort of coherent essay about kind of money and how you should handle money was a new thing in the world for ordinary people. They're about to write all men are created equal And what he's saying here is that all men can also be rich and save money and make the most of their lives through work. Yes, orr at least the right men. We know in fact that all men are created equal was a lie at that time, but yes This idea of a business book for the masses This is new which is why it becomes wildly popular, separate from poor Richard. just this little introduction gets reprinted titled The Way to wealth And It's a runaway bestseller in America. It's translated into, I believe twenty six languages published and republished in a thousand different editions well into the eighteen hundreds. And it, you know, it creates this genre of financial self help I imagine a lot of those copies were passed on to a wayward youth from a concern father and mother. It's perfect, perfect graduation gift. There was this interesting article that was published in twenty fifteen about this book. made the argument that it was the most widely reprinted economic work until Chairman Mao's little red book, two hundred years later Not such good economic advice in that one. Also not willingly bought, but There was no money. How could you willally buy something if there's no money ere's the interesting thing from this article. The author writes that the way to wealth is the moment at which the colonies began their ascent to global predominance in the production and dissemination of economic ulture, Economic culture Yeah. Yeah. so he's saying this little essay by Franklin, The Way of Wealth, this is the moment when colonies, what will become the United States starts to become the place that the world looks to to think about the meaning of economics and business. Which is fascinating, right? We talk about Adam Smith as the intellectual father of capitalism. We talk about the birth of the Iustrial Revolution. but this is saying something slightly different which is this way of valuing work and money that in fact money and work is culture and will become this export of the United States. It happens here This is the moment it starts to happen. And in a minute, we'll talk about the other iece of Franklin's writing that actually takes this idea further And if that goes deeper than these aphorisms to talk about The meaning of making money After the break All right, that's the end of the ads. G back to Ben Franklin. There is one other piece of Den Franklin's writing that's worth spending some time on It's an essay he wrote in seventeen forty eight Right after you retired And it's called Advice to a young tradesman written by an old An old one meaning him. I not it's not a fake name. There is no silence, do good here. Yeah. And this one was not an airport style bestseller like The way to Wealth or poor Richard SoZlmaneck Mbe because it was a little bit more complex, it got a little deeper into ideas and In the twentieth century, historians and social scientists would come back and look at this essay as like key to understanding how business and work fit into sort of the soul of America So Robert Give me the first Five words from advice to a young tradesman And everyone listening at home can read along by memory because you know this one. The first five words are remember Time is money. Time is money I think this one he may have come up with. I look to see if like the other aphisms what did everybody say this one. as far as I know This is Ben Franklin, and you could argue that time is money is the capitalist worldview in three simimple words. Think about America and business and time is money. You know, I think about railroads and standard time and Frederick Taylor in whatever, eighteen ninety standed on the factory floor with a stopwatch and Henry Ford inventing the moving assembly line and the time clock and FedEx and fast food and Sunday delivery and high frequency trading And I think of before this moment when people were farming and you waited for seasons and it was more that weather was money, honestly. Yes. Yeah. This is a real pivot point. Yeah. So time is money is a pivot point. But he goes deeper here Give me that whole first paragraph. Okay,. Remember the time is money earn ten shillings a day by his labor and sits idle one half of that day has really spent or rather thrown away five shillings. If you take half a day off It's like you're throwing away the money you would have made if you had worked. We call that opportunity cost Yes, Yes. It's the cost of the option you don't choose. We actually talked about it in the Ice King show. We did Reason. One of the first things they teach you in business school is about opportunity cost. Now to be clear, The phrase opportunity cost isn't going to be coined for like, you know, a hundred plus years at this point. So so Franklin is articulating this big idea here But something bigger is going on here and you were getting at it a minute ago And that is You know, he's writing this. just at the start of the Industrial Revolution, right? He's writing this in essentially the pre industrial age And he is starting to change the way people We'll experience time arguably. There's there is this Fous Dove this that historian wrote EP. Thompson is the name of the historian. He wrote this paper in nineteen sixty seven. It was called T, work discipline and industrial capitalism and paper draws on Franklin. it draws on this revolutionary idea that time is money. And Thompson says, you know before industrialization Your experience of time was totally different. If you were a fisherman, timeime was the tides. You know, if you were an artisan It was, well, you have to do this thing in your cottage, right? It was a cottage indust. You have to the wool or whatever. It wasn't, oh, there's eight hours when I have to start working and then I stop because of what the clock says And Thomson says that the biggest proponent of this shift, not the external shift, but the way people actually felt about time was Ben Franklin. He says, Franklin gave this idea its most unambiguous secular expression Time is money He is telling you, Ben is telling you feel that. It is amazing, right? It doesn't feel t Sometimes people say. Yeah, ye. no, It's a big change, I think in human life, frankly. Okay That's paragraph one. That's paragraph one. we got more. We got more. Paragraph three, we got another big idea. Give it to me. This is like a tweet storm here, you know. O end one of end. Okay. The third one's a banger. It really is Remember that money is of the prolific generating nature. Money can beget money and its offspring can beget more and so on Five shillings is turned to six, turned again, it is seven andthrpence and so on till it becomes hundred Money makes money Compound interest.' bigger than compound interest. It's bigger than compound interest becausecause it's saying that Money has a value beyond your time and what it can buy, it says that money is Not just an end of itself, it is a self creating thing that will create more power. Yes. It is perhaps replacing don't say God I will say that okay He wouldn't have gone quite that far. We can talk about that It's a short essay, nine paragraphs in total. So far he's taken care of the meaning of time and of making money and of your money making money And most of the rest interestingly, is about kind of the other side of the capitalist coin, which is borrowing money. You know He's enough of a realist, enough of a practical businessman to know that sometimes you need to borrow money. He doesn't have the kind of overly simplistic, o, never going into debt mindset thing he says is to have good credit, to be able to borrow money at, you know, good rate. And he gives very specific advice on how to have good credit The most trifling actions that affect a man's credit are to be regarded. the sound of your hammer at five in the morning or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer. But if he sees you at a billiard's table or hears your voice at a tavern when you should be at work He sends for his money the next day. Hilar rule number one Look busy Look busy. And he goes on to say, you know, pay back your creditors early when you can. They love that. Whatever you do, don't wear fancier clothes than your creditor Basically he's telling you Before a credit score has been invented I have a good credit score Okay, one more paragraph, Robert, give me the end of advice to a young tradesman, and then we'll talk about what it all mean He that gets all he can honestly and saves all he gets, necessary expenses accepted, will certainly become rich If that being who governs the world to whom all should look for a blessing on their honest endeavors, doth not in his wise providence otherwise determinine Basically he's saying, If you do what I tell you, you'll get rich unless God decides to tell you Yeah, or if you're unlucky. Yes, that's another way to put it. Yes, the modern version And this last phrase that we're talking about actually gets us to what is going to be the last big idea in today's show which was inspired by this essay And it comes from Max Weber. recall as the famous German sociologist of the early twentieth century. That's all I know about him. You might remember, if I remind you that in nineteen oh five, he wrote The Protestant Eethic and the sppirit of Capitalism And as it happens in that famous book, the main example, the main case study was our man, Benjamin Franklin in this in this book Weber looks at Franklin's writing and he says, An Franklin. It's not really just telling you here how to get rich. He's telling you how to live a good life. You know, you read advice to a young tradesman, you read pooor Richards and you got this message that work is virtue And frugality is virtue and idleness is vice These are not just rules. these are morals. These are Ethhics But their ethics entirely concerned with making and keeping money And this Weber argues is a new thing in the is weird, is new is different. And look, he says, you know, people have always wanted money Of course we have always wanted money, but it has not been viewed as a virtue Right? Of course the contrary. It was a necessity. You borrowed money when you needed it, you lent money when you had. It was greed. It was avarice, right. And crucially the point of getting rich was To buy fancy stuff, not to save all your money, right? Not to save it to make more money. You got rich so you could get stuff And Weber looks at Franklin, who's like, yes, get rich and no, don't bu stuff. And he's like What is going on here? Oh I want to do a vapor. Yeah, do a vapor The passages we have quoted from Franklin and which called forth the applause of a whole people, the Americans, both in ancient times and in the Middle Ages have been prescribed as the lowest sort of avarice and as an attitude entirely lacking in self respect I feel like that's the way Europeans still look at Americans. am I right? Have some self respect. broon if you're going to be so money grubbing at least tend otherwise. And so they were arguing that this is a whole new thing. You know, he's flipped morals upside down and he wants to understand where it came from. Why is this suddenly appearing in America at this time in the work of Ben Franklin And he comes up with this very Wgo take Mat's neighbor says Yes belief system comes out of The Puritans, you know, the Calvinists, this sect of Protestants who came and settled Massachusetts, sort of Boston, the town where Ben Franklin grew up, right? His father was essentially a puritan and The Puritans believed in pred destination, right? a key Part of their belief was that God who knew all things knew before you were born whether you're going to go to heaven or hell Nothing you could do about And In Weber's telling, people responded to this very kind of weird, stressful state of affairs by trying to prove to themselves in the world that they were the elect, that they were on, you know, in the happy book, that God had chosen them to go to heaven. And the way you prove this By being successful at your job by making a lot of money. because If you made a lot of money, if you were successful at your job then clearly you were one of the elect. Yes, like Ben says at the end of the advice to a trradesmen, you know, you'll get rich unless God decides otherwise. Well, I got rich. I guess God didn't decide otherwise And also by the way The Puritans disapproved of, you know, taking too much sensual pleasure in the world, right? So classically, if you hadd made a lot of money, you would buuy fancy clothes and eat delicious foods and whatever. And like, you know, maybe the Puritans might buy like a fancier black silk shirt or something, but they're not going to like be, you know, crowned in furs and jewels and whatever. What an interesting conundrum though You want the money prove that you are God's elect. Yeah. but you don't want to spend the money on yourself because That's just not done. That's just not done. And so you just you just make it so that everyone knows you have money. And you know what happens if People are behaving in that way accumulate capital which is a great way the capitalist flywheel going. Boom, boom. And Weber argues and this is a crucial turnerm that this Puritan worldview and pattern of behavior persists even after the religious belief falls away You're not so worried about heaven and hell anymore or whether you're one of God's elect, but you still have this itch to show the world, to show yourself that you are someone special, you know? And look at Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin wasn't a puritan. He was a deist. He wasn't so religious as his father but he still has this desire to make money and to at least present himself as this fruitgal man. and in fact to tell the world, you should go make money and not spend. And we see this to this day. People sort of look down upon the rich son or daughter of some rich family who just jets around the world and goes to festivals and buys expensive clothes we look up to those business people who started small, grew their own wealth and sleep under their desk and work, you know, twenty hours a day to accomplish something, that is considered virtuous wealth. Yeah. Yeah so long after the Puritan. I don't know. I mean to be clear, you know Vers argument was controversial as a sort of work of history. When it came out, it still is, Is it true? I don't know. I do find it resonant, right I don't even know that I personally admire somebody who works twenty hours a day and sleeps under their desk. It depends on what they're working on, frankly I certainly get that feeling of the desire to like prove through my work that I am