Right now I’m reading a book– the Soul of Money, by Lynne Twist– that should be required reading for law students. Out of almost any profession, law is arguably the one that has the most potential for provoking and amplifying unhealthy relationships with money. This is largely, but not merely, a result of enormous debt (national average, $80k; personally I’ll have rather more than that, a concept I’ve had to wrestle a lot with this year), coupled with the carrot of large salaries. It is also a by-product of the sense of scarcity built into the law school system (as well as the big law hiring system it feeds into) at every turn, from the strict curve to the limited slots for law review. It is easy to forget that this scarcity is an artificial construct, not a faithful microcosmic representation of “how the world works.” I think that such an intense emphasis on scarcity must itself, even apart from students’ actual financial constraints/prospects, tend to engender significant changes in law students’ relationships with money.
(On that note: it has been nice to follow 1L year with an internship this summer in a very different environement. My time out here so far has served as a pleasant reminder of how satisfying it is to take on cooperative projects. It’s also nice to be doing something that is not being taken on by several hundred others, and yet which produces something of meaningful value to the world precisely because there are not hundreds others redundantly tackling the same parameters– but more on my summer in a later post).
Anyway. By way of introduction, Lynne Twist is a renowned guru in the field of fund-raising for philanthropic causes. The Soul of Money aims to prompt people to reexamine the emotional and spiritual role that money plays in their lives.
An excerpt:
“[The] mind-set of scarcity . . . lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life, and it is deeply embedded in our relationship with money. In the mind-set of scarcity, our relationship with money is an expression of fear; a fear that drives us into an endless and unfulfilling chase for more, or into compromises that promise a way out of the chase or discomfort around money. In the chase or in the compromises we break from our wholeness and natural integrity. . . . We find ourselves trapped in a cycle of disconnection and dissatisfaction.”
She then addresses the the idea “that scarcity is the true, natural and inevitable basis for our relationship with money and resources.” In rebuttal, she cites author Bernard Lietaer, former senior officer of the Belgian Central Bank and a chief architect behind the Euro currency:
“[Lietaer] says that greed and fear of scarcity are programmed; they do not exist in nature, not even in human nature. They are built into the money system in which we swim, and we’ve been swimming in it so long that these shadows have become almost completely transparent to us. We have learned to consider them normal and legitimate behavior. He concludes that Adam Smith’s system of economics could more accurately be described as the allocation of scarce resources through the process of individual greed. The whole process of Smith’s ‘modern’ economics actually has its roots in primitive fears of scarcity, greed, and the implementation tool — the process by which this became real — was money.”
Twist maintains that scarcity is a lie, a product of psychology in reaction to a particular system:
“It would be logical to assume that people with excess wealth do not live with the fear of scarcity at the center of their lives, but I have seen that scarcity is as oppressive in those lives as it is for people who are living at the margins and barely making ends meet. It is so illogical that people who have tremendous excess would be thinking they don’t have enough, that as I encountered this time and again, I began to question the source of their concerns. Nothing in their actual circumstances justified it. I began to wonder if this anxiety over having enough was based on a set of assumptions, rather than circumstances. The more I examined these ideas and the more I interacted with individuals in a broad range of circumstances and a broad range of cultures and ethics, the more I saw that the fundamental assumptsion of scarcity was all-pervasive. The myths and the language of scarcity were the dominant voice in nearly every culture, often overriding logic and evidence, and the mind-set of scarcity created distorted, even irrational, attitudes and behaviors, especially around money.”
