SNAP Disaster and Our Un-Free Market

By the time you read this, you’ll already know whether America’s federal government has suspended SNAP (“food stamp”) benefits, or whether President TACO has done what he regularly does, reversing himself at the last minute. This of course matters for millions of American families. But in the long term, I question whether the event itself matters more than the systematic weaknesses it exposes in the American economy.

Walmart, America’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer, receives almost a quarter of all SNAP benefit spending, according to Axios. This reflects multiple factors: for instance, that Walmart exists in all fifty states and most territories. But it also reflects their decision to place themselves in chronically underserved neighborhoods and communities. Walmart has a near-monopoly stranglehold on many areas’ food supply, and they use it.

I can’t be the only news junkie who remembers the Great EBT bollix of 2013. I’ve already written about the event itself, and the moralistic outrage it precipitated online. The ways in which Walmart has no only gobbled up its captive market, but has become the necessary go-to for its market’s rush buying, reflects that America’s consumer economy is not free. The corporation has established permanent colonies in its market’s collective imagination.

This didn’t just happen. Informed critics have described how Walmart utilizes public subsidies to corner markets. Their government largesse often totals in the billions of dollars, and includes many of their own employees relying on SNAP benefits. This isn’t news; I discovered it in the 1990s. Economist John C. Médaille even asserts that even the interstate highway system functions as a subsidy, as Walmart’s just-in-time restocking method depends on reliable, wide roads.

Nominally, Walmart remains a private entity controlled by shareholders, mostly the Walton family. But its success has relied heavily on public-private partnerships and government welfare. Given this symbiosis, and the corporation’s ability to manipulate Defense Department levels of money, it bears asking when Walmart, and corporations of its size, stop being private companies, and become de facto shadow government bureaus.

Current events, however, reveal how precarious that market stranglehold really is. The threatened SNAP shutdown has caused fears of Walmart riots—not from the company itself, which rejects the rumors, but from ordinary customers repeating scuttlebutt online. If Walmart controls a neighborhood’s access to food, clothing, and domestic goods, then cutting off that access doesn’t just hurt the community. It also radicalizes its members to demand the goods hidden behind the wall.

Nor do I use the word “radicalize” lightly. The French Revolution happened amid a combination of massive imperial wealth, and unequal distribution, to the point where Jean Valjean’s loaf of bread has become iconic. Argentina came close to a populist revolution in 2001 because people couldn’t afford groceries, although groceries remained available. Argentina kept exporting food, especially beef, during its economic nadir; regular Argentinians just couldn’t afford it.

Appallingly similar conditions exist now. Elon Musk is currently tracking to become the world’s first trillionaire, money he can never possibly spend. Meanwhile, Walmart, as the largest SNAP vendor, has food available to sell, but SNAP recipients, most of whom are employed, simply can’t afford to buy it. If working-class Americans go hungry long enough, one wonders whether we might, for the first time since Bacon’s Rebellion, develop a sense of class solidarity.

Before continuing, I’ll acknowledge I’m slightly contradicting my past self. I recently made excuses for the influence which dollar stores have on America’s rural communities, saying that they create a nascent sense of economic self-determination. Of course, Dollar General has an almost Walmart-like grip on many communities, and they’re as vulnerable to a SNAP shutdown as any other monopolistic retailer.

Yet I stand by my prior opinion. I admitted that Dollar General is imperfect, and called it a transitional stage for rural economics. By teaching country dwellers that they, too, deserve nice things, I’d argue they also teach country dwellers to join forces to demand nice things. I still believe that’s true, and it encourages small town people, who often swallow a “rugged individualism” economic pill, to see their situation as collective, not atomized.

These events reveal that Walmart, Dollar General, and other near-monopolies rely upon government support on both the supply and the demand ends. A market economy in a massively technological society requires a stabilizing hand that remains responsive to the populace, not the plutocrats. We may reorganize that stabilizing hand, but if it does the job of a government, then that’s what it is. Modernity demands, not negates, a strong state.

An Economy of Hot Air

Henry Ford

Henry Ford, who was nobody’s idea of a flaming communist, purportedly said: “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” This is, in fact, a paraphrase; the actual quote, from his 1922 memoir, is much wordier and more difficult to parse. But it accurately reflects his belief, that most people don’t realize money doesn’t objectively exist.

Money, Ford acknowledged, isn’t the currency in your pockets. That’s a government-approved substitute which makes money circulate. Money is, functionally, a philosophical abstract, not a thing at all. Money comes into existence when banks loan it, and when the economy contracts—as we’re seeing now, surrounding COVID-19—the missing money simply ceases to exist. Money is the ultimate placebo, functioning entirely because we believe it does.

I remembered this lesson from one of America’s greatest capitalists yesterday, when reading the newest Robert Reich op-ed. Reich, who famously quit the Clinton Administration because he considered it too accommodationist, excoriates rich people’s behavior during this crisis. Some already-rich people, like Jeff Bezos, are hiring new workers to meet the demand placed upon their businesses. But they aren’t offering these new hires basic perks, like sick days, during a pandemic.

Let me flout Leftist orthodoxy and say: Jeff Bezos possibly deserves to be rich. He controls material resources and distribution networks which ordinary workers don’t want and lack skills to maintain. But he also relies upon workers, both his own (warehouse order pickers) and others’ (road maintenance crews) to conduct his business. Therefore, he maybe deserves to be rich, but does he deserve to be, at this writing, $125 billion rich?

Possibly more important, is he really $125 billion rich?

If money doesn’t really exist, as über-capitalist Henry Ford said, what wealth does Bezos really have? Once your accumulated wealth exceeds quantities necessary to pay your bills and we’re dealing with literal fiction. Bezos moves bank data around a fiduciary Shangri-La and, by possessing this fictional resource, changes the value of money possessed by everybody else. Like a supernova, he bends time, space, and the value of a buck.

Jeff Bezos

Unless he converts this money into something which has substance, though, like gold or land or new factory resources, that money remains fictional. Perhaps that’s why, just before COVID-19, Bezos bought the most expensive house in California, a state known for exorbitant real estate values. Only when his fictional money becomes something material, does he actually have wealth. Bezos, who hoards houses, banks on their value tracking forever upward.

That’s why, when Robert Reich suggests taxing Bezos’ wealth at levels consistent with his ability to manipulate the economy, I wonder what he intends to tax. Unoccupied houses? Idle resources, like land, economic futures, and… I’ve literally run out of ideas. Because we cannot confuse “wealth,” something actually taxable, with “money,” which is fictional. When individuals accumulate Bezos-level monetary wealth, it becomes functionally immune to taxes, because it’s like taxing air.

By this I don’t mean Bezos could move money overseas, though he certainly could. Rather, I mean that money at this level serves primarily as a mix of incentive, bargaining chip, and threat. When Amazon offered to expand resources in Staten Island, the entire effort centered on dumping money into a regional economy, and when critics like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez balked, Amazon took the money away. But the money was never there, so it never really left.

Instead, the money simply loomed, like the statue of Christ overlooking Rio de Janeiro. Like Christ, that money had power over people’s lives to exactly the degree they invested faith in it. The money was never really present, just as Christ’s presence (or absence) isn’t dependent on artwork. You can’t tax the population’s general faith in money, because it doesn’t exist in material form. It’s a big, shapeless nothing which nevertheless dominates because we expect it to.

COVID-19 gives us new perspective on this reality. Watching the government basically pull money from thin air, it’s tempting to rhetorically question where wealth comes from. It isn’t from the value of labor, not while work is disappearing. But such rhetorical questions are hot air, because we know the answer. Like Henry Ford wrote nearly a century ago, money is fictional. Like a novelist, the government simply tempts us to believe its story.

Maybe the revolution is upon us. Not a violent revolution, just the realization that we’ve been lied to.

Marie Kondo's Anti-Economic Economy

Marie Kondo (Netflix photo)

I first heard of Marie Kondo, like many middle-class white people, from a meme. When the English translation of her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up appeared in 2014, the story began circulating that we should hold everything we own, and discard everything that doesn’t “spark joy.” The immediate response, half affectionate and half derisive, gained meme traction: “Sorry, Electric Company, but your bill definitely doesn’t spark joy.”

Now that the American leg of her career has second wind through her Netflix series, she’s become a remarkably divisive figure. I don’t mean her controversial opinion about minimizing your library, which is mostly crap anyway. I mean the collision between people who want (but mostly fail) to enact her principles in life, and everyone else. Let’s start with one important principle: expecting anything inanimate to “spark joy” contradicts every economy everywhere.

It’s easy to say Kondo’s principle of anti-acquisitiveness doesn’t jibe well with contemporary capitalism. Poet and philosopher Wendell Berry has observed that late capitalism depends heavily on advertising, which is the art of creating dissatisfaction. Capitalism, as practiced today, makes people unhappy with what they have, and sells them temporary gewgaws to mollify that unhappiness. Which we then have to become unhappy with, and buy the next gimcrack.

Capitalist philosopher Adam Smith justified his Invisible Hand of Economics with this famous quote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Which, taken literally, makes sense: small operators want to get paid, so they provide a service. When Smith wrote in 1776, when start-up costs for bread-making were high and competition was scarce, this was hard to dispute.

But it doesn’t explain the present. Meat, bread, and beer are today absurdly cheap, a value distorted by public subsidies. Instead of providing the necessities of life, capitalism floods us with luxuries, distractions, and empty pastimes to make the hours go away. Does anybody really derive joy from watching television? Literally following Marie Kondo’s principles would require you to discard, don’t fool yourself, virtually everything you’ve ever owned.

Still, I’d go further than mere anti-capitalism, because all economic theories, eventually, assign monetary value to invaluable commodities. Even Marxism, which pooh-poohs ownership, or Chestertonian Distributism, which opposes all forms of bigness, necessarily assign weighted values to things you cannot buy. All systems seek rules and standards which monetize things you cannot buy, like family and community connections.

Consider a piano. We know the monetary value of a piano’s workmanship, the price of maintenance, the worth assigned to the space it occupies which we could, hypothetically, fill with other stuff. But what value do we assign the effort needed to learn to play? Because, lemme tell you, when my parents required me to spend thirty minutes every day practicing scales drills, that huge, pricy slab of mahogany sparked no joy in me whatsoever.

The list continues. Anybody who’s ever aspired to a writing career knows we don’t, generally, enjoy writing; we mostly enjoy having written. (There are exceptions.) The finished manuscript may “spark joy,” but the process of creating it seldom does, and the tools necessary to perform that creation often feel like a burden. This computer sits here, black and silent, mocking me for the four incomplete manuscripts which appear whenever I press the power button.

Seeking joy, as a tactile response, is innately anti-economic. To assign value based on my response to a thing reflects the care I’ve invested in it. I value my bodhran exactly in proportion to the time I’ve previously invested in practicing, though you might value my playing distinctly less. And the craftsperson who made my bodhran values it according to their skill investment, which distinctly doesn’t resemble my skill investment.

Let me try another approach. If I handed you the manuscript of my current work-in-progress, I’d be entrusting you with something that sparks profound joy in me. However, my manuscript is bulky, unbound, incomplete, and unedited; it probably would spark no joy in you, and indeed would feel like a burden. What economic value, then, does my manuscript have? Does it have any?

Marie Kondo essentially exposes the lie in assigning any dollar (pound, euro, yen) value to anything. Value derives from our relationship to a product or service, which is unique and intangible. Once we price that value, we’ve debased the human interaction. KonMari housekeeping doesn’t just eliminate our clutter; it rebalances our relationship to value itself.

The “Gig Economy” and the American Work Ethic

Wages, insurance, guaranteed work? Screw you, who needs 'em?

Here’s a riddle for you: how can we call somebody “manager” of a facility if we never see him? I wondered that when the titular factory floor manager visited our shift one night. And when I say “one night,” I mean for forty-five minutes at the beginning of the shift. In over three years working third shift, I never saw our supposed factory manager before or after that all-crew meeting. Third shift was organizationally disconnected from the rest of the company.

Halfway through that meeting, a virtual monologue of bromides reheated from Stephen Covey and Kenneth Blanchard, the “manager” asked the assembled workers: “How many of you have second jobs outside this company?” About a quarter of workers raised a hand. “See there? That’s what I call initiative. When my son asks for a bigger allowance, I tell him to be more like the workers at [Company Name] and get a job. Take responsibility for yourself.”

Let’s be clear. In a room entirely comprised of adults working full time, with frequent mandatory overtime shifts, this manager considered it an indicator of high ethical character that roughly one in four workers cannot make ends meet. These workers, the majority of whom have spouses, partners, and/or minor children at home, spend half their waking hours inside this man’s facility, then decamp to another entire job to cover their bills.

Earlier this week, New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino published a short article, “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death.” Tolentino quotes PR from inside “sharing economy” companies like Lyft, which praises a pregnant contract driver who picked up another fare after labor began, and Fiverr, which encourages freelancers to forego sleep. The images are pretty terrifying, especially if you amortize actual pay across work done.

But frankly, it isn’t surprising to anybody who’s worked jobs with little growth potential recently. Readers may recall the notorious McDonald's Employee Budget, which assumed workers had two jobs, while including no money for groceries or childcare. The jobs available to people lacking skills or connections, or who simply cannot reconcile their skillset with local economic demands, literally assume you can’t make ends meet on full-time employment.

Companies like Fiverr, which charges five bucks for skilled actions, are merely the culmination of economic trends, since the 1970s, that have progressively separated work from reward. They literally invite workers to charge five dollars for services like graphic design, a field that often charges in the hundreds, if not tens of thousands, of dollars for services rendered. These costs aren’t unreasonable, because buyers often reap rewards disproportionate to the value of actual performed labor.

Political cartoonist Ted Rall. Click to see source.

If you pay five dollars for, say, the cover design on your next self-published book, you’re either getting a substandard product done hastily in Microsoft Paint, or you’re profiting off somebody else’s desperation. The latter option, to the current economy, isn’t so bad. Thing is, when Tolentino associates this trend exclusively with the “gig economy,” she’s arguably missing the larger point. This isn’t a niche flaw; it has become characteristic of our entire working economy.

White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney last week defended President Trump’s proposed budget, which controversially cuts block grants to school lunch programs and Meals on Wheels to near-zero, by calling it “compassionate.” This is common reasoning in conservative circles: refusing to protect the poor gives them incentives to work. If there isn’t a floor through which people are prevented from falling, the logic goes, people will work even harder to prevent their own total economic collapse.

Yet at that same factory where I worked, where the absentee manager praised employees who needed second jobs to feed their children, I watched one young woman forced to quit a job she actually loved. She received a merit-based pay raise, which gave her just enough money to no longer qualify for protected childcare subsidies. Forced to choose between paying more out-of-pocket or leave her kids home alone unsupervised, she had only one choice: find another job that paid either more or less.

The gig economy makes visible something that’s been real but concealed for two generations now: Americans no longer value work. We give lip service to the American work ethic, to myths of self-reliance and bootstrapping. But our structural refusal to pay for the things we buy reveals our actual core values. My manager, and the PR flack who praised a Lyft driver working through birth pains, couldn’t have been clearer: If you’re poor, go fuck yourself. That’s all you deserve.

The Best Little Whorehouse On Wall Street

Michelle Miller, The Underwriting

This book's pre-release literature compares it to recent films like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Social Network, but I'd prefer another parallel. Edith Wharton's 1905 classic The House of Mirth had moments of hilarity without ever resorting to jokes, episodes of tragedy without ever descending into despondency. Throughout this debut novel, I repeatedly recognized Miller and Wharton as kindred spirits. I also cringed to realize, in 110 years, how little Manhattan has changed.

Todd Kent has ambitions. He wants a managing directorship at historic investment bank L.Cecil before he turns thirty, and he needs one cream assignment to accomplish this. When a wildly successful dating app offers Todd a no-bid contract on its lucrative IPO, he thinks his toast is buttered for life. But managerial interference, manipulative colleagues, and shady internal dealings jeopardize Todd’s high-rise fantasies. When it appears this app was involved in murder, everything goes south.

Miller worked a brief Wall Street hitch before deciding her real love was words. I struggle to decide which character in Miller’s satirical roman à clef represents herself. Tara, the financial whiz granted a VP title, but no autonomy, at the absurd age of 27? Amanda, the jilted lover whose attempts to remake herself inadvertently uncover festering corporate rot? Kelly, the idealistic English major who accepts an L.Cecil job offer—then dies under mysterious circumstances?

I wonder because Miller clearly has real people in mind. Her characters’ motivations, and their flaws, reflect a world where early achievement isn’t just common, it’s mandatory. Her milieu reeks of privilege, steadfastly immune to the lessons of 2007. Todd and Tara work aggressively, sleep at their workplace, manhandle fortunes larger than some city budgets, and make paper billionaires at their computers. But only one successfully squelches their conscience; a brutal awakening awaits the other.

Given an impossibly short two-month window on their IPO, Todd and Tara begin a marathon journey from Manhattan, to Palo Alto, to London and beyond, turning digital promises into real money. Miller’s telling of this odyssey is educational. She demonstrates how financial rainmakers spin facts, skirt the law, and anchor massive monetary promises on foundations that don’t yet exist. People who play nice don’t last. Before long, the ambiguity becomes too much for one player.

Michelle Miller

Hook, the startup app, combines Tinder’s sexual abstemiousness with Über’s gender equity and regard for safety. Boasting 500 million users, it secretly collates users’ data, contra its own security agreement, granting one ethically conflicted engineer unique insight into an open murder investigation. Hook’s founding CEO, a computer engineer who places dollar values on every interaction, spotlights his app’s social aspects, yet his dispassionately forward conversations leave everyone feeling like they’ve been groped by a Vulcan.

Meanwhile, Juan, Hook’s lead programmer, makes a discovery. Hook is stockpiling user data which it specifically denies even exists. A secret database which only the privileged few can even find contains quantities of information on half a billion people worldwide, information that can be used for super-advertizing… or for blackmail. When Juan realizes Hook has invaluable evidence in Kelly’s murder, which shouldn’t even exist, all his dreams of benevolence, funded by startup millions, become poisonous.

Though Miller never resorts to jokes, her satire often stings of cutting hilarity, because she succinctly spotlights the absurdities her characters blithely accept. Manhattan finance requires ambition and egotism enough to make Donald Trump blush, because billions turn on single deals, and reputations live or die by one day’s work. The Defense Department would blanch at these numbers. I’d think Miller’s fast-paced style was mere slapstick exaggeration, if my 401(k) balance sheet didn’t say otherwise.

Admittedly, this book isn’t for everyone. The press material describes Miller’s story as “sexy,” but maybe they mean something I don’t. These characters have sex to mark time, blowing through other people like leftover goulash; the “romantic” encounters, which begin as a Fifty Shades-ish turn-on, quickly become anti-erotic. Ordinary practices of everyday life—sex, conversation, work—become a destructive narcotic for these characters. Children, the easily offended, and aspiring Rockefellers will find this book imposing.

Okay, so Miller’s style isn’t for blue-hairs. But her story, of a financial sector willfully blind to its own consequences, matters because it’s familiar. Miller, like her characters, worked Wall Street after the collapse, and saw firsthand how big-shots refuse to learn. The conditions that imploded America eight years ago still exist. And in Miller’s capable hands, the story of characters completely immune to basic self-reflection becomes a madcap farce, when it isn’t painfully sobering.

Blind Businessman's Bluff

Ram Charan, The Attacker's Advantage: Turning Uncertainty into Breakthrough Opportunities

Authors and audiences alike have heckled me with names like Socialist, “an obvious Communist,” and “far-left” for my business book reviews. Not so. I keep agreeing to review business books because I have entrepreneurial aspirations, and I await the one that’ll mentor me through my planned shoestring start-up venture. And awaiting. And awaiting. Clearly I’m not done waiting yet.

Ram Charan worked his way from his family’s rural Delhi shoe store, through Harvard Business School, to the heights of corporate governance. Along the way, he recognized two categories of business uncertainty. There’s operational uncertainty, like markets and labor values, that you just live with. Then there’s structural uncertainty, the unpredictability that breaks weak leaders and makes strong ones. Charan wants to help you master and exploit structural uncertainty.

I realized I’d let myself in for a bumpy ride when I read this early quote: “The single greatest instrument of change… is the advancement of the mathematical tools called algorithms and their related sophisticated software.” I’ve become allergic to Taylorist command-control management, reinforced by mathematical controls. Anyway I presume that’s what Charan means, because he repeatedly uses the word “algorithm” thereafter without bothering to define it.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines an algorithm as “a procedure or set of rules used in calculation and problem-solving.” Venn diagrams and logic grids are algorithms. Presumably Charan intends calculus-based algorithms, of the type taught in MBA programs, but he never says so. This, unfortunately, epitomizes what reading this entire book is like: strings of bromides and professional buzzwords, opaque to those not initiated into today’s business tabernacle.

Following this, Charan’s narrative becomes a laundry list of bromides so expansive, punch-drunk executives could make them mean anything they want. He anchors his declamation on platitudes like “Perceptual acuity,” “The ability to see a new path forward and commit to it,” and “Skill in making the organization steerable and agile.” No business professional would dispute these chestnuts. But ask five CEOs to define them, you’ll get five incompatible answers.

Ram Charan

Charan makes sweeping pronouncements on how you (yes, you!) can run your business like Fortune 500 CEOs using Charan’s principles. But very few of his object lessons run longer than two paragraphs. He dedicates occasional short chapters to unpacking some corporation’s success, but he repeatedly relies upon their self-reported media and press releases. Charan essentially becomes others’ unpaid press agent and mythmaker.

One example struck me. He wonders why Sony, inventor of the Walkman, failed to anticipate the digital revolution and got blindsided by Apple. But I’ve read Duncan J. Watts. Apple’s iPod soared; Sony’s MiniDisc landed with a thud. Really, that’s emblematic of business today. Watts’ take-away: businessmen aren’t soothsayers. “Sony’s choices happened to be wrong while Apple’s happened to be right.”

Beyond all this, Charan is an inveterate name-dropper. He wants you to know he’s had drinks with everyone from Indian telecom maestro Vinod Kumar to former GE CEO Jack “the Layoff King” Welch. Consider just some of these self-congratulatory statements:

“In the early 1990s… I ran into [Jack] Welch on an elevator.”

“I was in a board meeting at Seagrams, which at the time owned Universal Music, the world’s largest music company, when Napster had just recently come onto the scene.”

“In May 2012 a director of Conoco Phillips discussed with me an issue he had been considering: whether to expand in India.”

“One day I was sitting at a lunch table during Microsoft’s yearly CEO Summit with Warren Buffett and eight other people.”

It doesn’t take many of these to realize, Ram Charan’s greatest business asset isn’t his acquired acumen. If you hire Ram Charan as your in-house management consultant, you gain access to Ram Charan. And you get one space closer to the entire Fortune 500 in the Kevin Bacon game.

Ram Charan offers the false promise that, should you merely adopt his simple stipulations, your business will run like the great world-changers that… um… imploded America’s economy in 2007. But what makes Charan’s prescriptions better than the hundreds of others coming from America’s business press this year? Watts again: “we can never be sure how much these explanations really explain, versus simply describe.”

Maybe I’m the problem. Maybe because I live in Flyover Country, and don’t hope to start the kind of business that’ll ever merge with Chinese corporations, these books talk past me. But I doubt it. I really think this showcase of meaningless bromides is essentially a billboard for Charan’s management consultancy. And I can do without that moonshine.

New Millennial Economics, Part One

Louis F. Petrossi, The Richest Man in China: Harnessing the 8 Pillars of Wealth

With the political season upon us, in a time of continued economic uncertainty, I’d like to take this week to consider contrasting views on our future. I’d like to start by looking abroad, to the country which recently overtook Germany and Japan to become Earth’s second largest economy. The People’s Republic of China may soon outpace America, and international eyes study its patterns to see how we may mimic their success.

As Louis Petrossi points out, China has produced an unprecedented number of millionaires and billionaires in the last five decades. Not surprisingly, many Westerners want to know what about Chinese culture makes such runaway wealth possible. Petrossi weighs in with only the latest in a long string of books which pitches a broadly Chinese ethos of wealth creation. Readers may like him because his book is both brief and lucid.

Moreover, Petrossi’s sutra-like approach to wealth may appeal to people who see Asia as a place of mystic possibility. It melds the rhetorical styles of various Eastern religious traditions, including Buddhism and Confucianism, to create a system whereby achieving wealth becomes a sort of secular nirvana. After all, as Petrossi asserts, wealth makes it possible for us to do good for others.

The problem is, this book is about as Chinese as beef chop suey and fortune cookies: that is, not Chinese at all. Despite its “Confucius Say” aphorisms and ah-so language stylings, this book is plagiarized, body and soul, from Western business texts. Astute readers will recognize chunks transplanted from Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Joel Osteen. But beyond a doubt, the largest DNA donor is Rhonda Byrne.

Petrossi structures his book as a string of very short chapters in which a multimillionaire known as “Master” lays out his Eight Pillars of Wealth. These sweeping discourses on self-affirmation alternate with long dialogues in which Master answers questions from his intrepid scribe Liang. These dialogues are more specific than the chapters, but not by much. This book runs about as vague as a Sesame Street character reassuring viewers that you—yes, you!—are special.

Worse, Petrossi’s “Inscrutable Orient” idiom serves to obscure the real complexities of Chinese economics. While the self-described Middle Kingdom has produced staggering numbers of the obscenely wealthy, UN statistics reveal it has the world’s largest gulf between rich and poor. Shaun Rein, in The End of Cheap China, asserts that the state has begun to balk at this lopsidedness, but it will take years to overcome deeply ingrained inequities.

A Buddhist monastery in Shanxi Province, China

Even this fails to account for the real costs of economic “growth.” Beijing pollution has become the stuff of legend. Intricate irrigation networks that have survived since the Xia Dynasty have recently proved incapable of meeting modern demand. And the population has long since exceeded land yields. James Howard Kunstler’s upcoming Too Much Magic reveals that, in 2008, the formerly robust China became a net food importer.

This does not mean that we have nothing to learn from China. A country on the verge of collapse a century ago has become one of Earth’s great powerhouses through a unique mingling of state communism and selective market capitalism. Its strong ethic of order and industriousness has made it a model for development in uncertain times. But we must learn from China as it really is, not as our Western romanticism wants it to be.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, describes one important difference between Chinese and American cultures. Western wheat-based agriculture, he says, encourages fatalistic attitudes and an ethic that considers work an intrusion. Eastern rice-based agriculture requires intense attention and mathematically precise management. Rice-growing nations, like China, learn early the value of hard work, advance planning, and strategic thought.

Notice this does not involve chanting mantras for wealth, which Petrossi advocates. Though Petrossi does include some statements on the importance of wise saving, investment, and strategic residuals, he not only says nothing particularly Chinese, he also says little that isn’t either obvious or silly. Success does not come from believing the universe will kick money your way. It comes from perseverance, planning, and forward striving.

China has become a world-shaping force through very concrete means. Its respect for order, stringent learning networks, and system of social order have made it possible for some people to achieve previously unimaginable wealth. But not one Chinese billionaire became rich in a vacuum. And they certainly did not get rich by pleading to the universe. Chinese abundance came about through Chinese industriousness, and at no little Chinese cost.

On a related topic: Put Your Money Where Your Soul Is
Dissecting China for Fun and Profit: Troy Parfitt's Tourism Journalism