Virtue:
Simplicity
Other names:
Definition:
Not desiring things that are too fine
Advice:
Empirical Research:
Case examples:
Further reading:
Cloutier, David. The Vice of Luxury: Economic Excess in a Consumer Age. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015.
Vices opposed:
Luxury
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his autobiography, Made in America, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton explains the value of practicing simplicity in one's lifestyle even after achieving financial success. "So along comes Forbes in 1985 and says I'm the richest man in America. Well, there's no question that if you multiply the Wal-Mart stock price by how much we own, then maybe we are worth $20 or $50 billion, or whatever they say. The family may have those kinds of assets, but I have never seen that myself. For one thing, Helen and I only own 20 percent of our family's total interest in Wal-Mart. For another, as long as I have anything to do with it - and I'm confident this attitude will last at least another generation - most of that Wal-Mart stock is staying right where it is. We don't need the money. We don't need to buy a yacht. And thank goodness we never thought we had to go out and buy anything like an island. We just don't have those kinds of needs or ambitions, which wreck a lot of companies when they get along in years. Some families sell their stock off a little at a time to live high, and then - boom - somebody takes them over, and it all goes down the drain. One of the real reasons I'm writing this book is so my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read it years from now and know this: If you start any of that foolishness, I'll come back and haunt you. So don't even think about it." (Walton, Made in America, p. 9)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Made in America, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton explains how his company's corporate offices adhere scrupulously to the virtue of simplicity. "A lot of first-time visitors are kind of shocked by our executive offices. Most people say my office and those of all the other Wal-Mart executives look like something you'd find in a truck terminal. We're in a one-story office-warehouse building. The offices aren't real big, and the walls are covered with inexpensive paneling. We never had fancy furniture or thick carpet, or suits with bars for our executives. I like them just like they are. We sure as heck won't win any interior decorating awards, but they're all we need, and they must be working fine. Just ask our shareholders." (Walton, Made in America, p. 295)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his memoir, My Side of the Street: Why Wolves, Flash Boys, Quants and Masters of the Universe Don’t Represent the Real Wall Street, Investment Strategist Jason DeSana Trennert recalls a lesson in simplicity that he learned early in his career. When Trennert was starting out, his job required him to travel extensively by plane, and his tendency was always to pack more than was strictly necessary for the trip. “On the occasion of my first trip to Atlanta in 1991,” he writes, “I was so excited that I was actually getting paid to travel I brought a camera, a sandwich, my Walkman with several tapes of hair bands from the eighties, and a book by Garrison Keillor.
“Looking at the overstuffed mess sitting beside him, (colleague) Ed Hyman, who had been doing this for longer than I had been alive, looked at me – half-amused, half-disgusted – and said simply: ‘Players…travel…light.’ It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten and had been reinforced on no shortage of marathon sprints through airports from London to Los Angeles to Hong Kong and beyond.” (Trennert, My Side of the Street, pp. 51-52)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteAlthough John D. Rockefeller was the wealthiest American of his day, he maintained a scrupulous simplicity in his personal life, as biographer Ron Chernow explains. “Rockefeller could have afforded something showier than [his] $40,000 house [on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio], and pedestrians might have thought its owner a lesser light in business, yet this was exactly the misimpression that he wanted to convey. Far from trying to parade his wealth, he wanted to blend into the scenery. Even at home, Rockefeller was discreet and behaved as if he was concealing some secret from prying eyes. Beyond that, he had the Puritan’s discomfort with possessions, a nagging Baptist anxiety that decoration might appear idolatrous. Again, like Weber’s ideal capitalist, ‘he avoids ostentation and unnecessary expenditure, as well as conscious enjoyment of his power, and is embarrassed by the outward signs of the social recognition which he receives.’” (120)
Rockefeller’s devotion to simplicity extended even the way he raised his children. He took care not to indulge them or expose them to excessive affluence. “Until they were adults, Rockefeller’s children never visited his office or refineries, and even then they were accompanied by company officials, never Father. At home, Rockefeller created a make-believe market economy, calling [his wife] Cettie the ‘general manager’ and requiring the children to keep careful account books…Rockefeller never tired of preaching economy and whenever a package arrived at home, he made a point of saving the paper and string.” (124) [Chernow, Titan, p. 120 & 124]