Tag Archives: money and happiness

I’m A Socialist

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Weight loss drugs inventor Lotte Bjerre Knudsen says proudly adding, “I don’t care that much about money.”

One two-part myth people in the (dis)United States ignorantly perpetuate about socialism is that it fails everywhere because it zaps people’s motivation to work. That absent economic incentives, people won’t achieve much of anything.

Ethnocentric capitalists maintain their collective ignorance of socialists, and socialism, by not knowing the Lotte Bjerre Knudsens of the world. Cue a recent LBK interview.

DER SPIEGEL: You have made Novo Nordisk Europe’s most valuable company, with a greater market capitalization than Daimler, Bayer, Lufthansa and BMW combined. Do you benefit financially?

Knudsen: I don’t care that much about money, I’m a socialist! Here in Scandinavia, we teach our children teamwork from an early age. It’s not about the individual. And that’s how I am too. I have never asked for a raise in 34 years.

DER SPIEGEL: You never got more money? Not even now?

Knudsen: Yes, of course. But I didn’t push. I can’t see that capitalism and money make people happy. At Novo Nordisk, I have always preferred to use my credibility to demand more funding for science, not more salary for myself. I also have no intellectual property rights. They belong to the company because I gave them up when I was employed.

I don’t care about money? It’s not about the individual? I can’t see that capitalism and money make people happy?

Holy blasphemy.

Choosing Debt

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Something’s wrong.

I just finished reading a batch of student essays about whether money is important or not and what recent social scientific research suggests about money and happiness.

Some of my students’ families struggle financially. Those students touched upon their parents’ debt and the negative consequences that have resulted from it, strained relationships marked by stress and unrelenting tension. Being well-to-do is more important to them than to my students who take their family’s financial stability for granted.

Many of these students describe the loans they decided to take out. “You have to spend money,” one explained, “to make money.” They are desperately in need of adults who model financial self discipline.

At age eighteen, they are eerily comfortable with five figure debt. And if statistics are any guide, their precarious family foundations make graduating less likely. Even if they graduate, there’s no guarantee they’ll find work that pays enough for them to dig out of their debt.

It’s great they want to continue their education, and I like having them in class, but someone has to wake them from their slumber and tell them there are much less expensive paths to getting a good education. In particular, community colleges and public universities.

Their fallacies overlap and multiply. The first is that loans are a logical solution to financial problems. The second is that attending an expensive university leads to higher paying jobs.

Universities absolve themselves of this problem, saying it’s up to the lenders themselves to assess peoples’ ability to repay loans.

I don’t know what to do. If I tell the “loaners” that there are much less expensive paths, they’ll probably conclude that I don’t think they can cut it at our pricey, private university. And if I follow my university’s lead and simply close my eyes when I know the train is about to jump the track, the students will continue down a very treacherous path.