Is it bad to want to be rich?

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Sally Herships (1:02)

Do you want to be rich? What if someone just offered you a check for $15 million, no strings attached? It's a no-brainer, right? The answer is yes. But at the same time, how would you feel about showing off your new money? Maybe a little funny, right? When it comes to money in this country, we often have split personalities. We want it, but we're also taught that money corrupts, that it's the root of all evil.

I'm Sally Herships, sitting in for Sean Illing, and this is The Gray Area.

My guest today is philosopher Jason Brennan. He's a professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business, and author of a book with an unforgettable title, Why It's OK to Want to Be Rich. I invited him on the show to walk me through that idea, and maybe even to persuade me. This is an argument I would love to buy into. Jason says, we've got wealth all wrong, that we're biased against it, that profit is good, not just for the individual making it, but for society as a whole. But how much wealth is OK in this new world? And if we do get rich, what are our responsibilities as individuals?

Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason Brennan (2:38)

Thank you for having me.

Sally Herships (2:39)

So you wrote a book with a fabulous title, Why It's OK to Want to Be Rich, and I love what it explains, which is like the schizophrenic nature of our country. On the one hand, being rich is considered to be gauche, not OK, guilt-inducing, the root of all evil. On the other hand, if you open Instagram or TikTok or social media, it's filled with get rich quick schemes.

So which is it? What is our country feeling and wanting right now?

Jason Brennan (3:16)

Yeah, I think this schizophrenic attitude is not just inside the country, it's for every individual one of us. I think we're all kind of torn in these two directions where we want more money. It's very rare for someone to say no to a raise or to think, if only I had an extra like 50 percent more income, things would be worse rather than better.

At the same time, we feel bad about it. So I really wanted to take a look at why we're torn in these two directions. I think there is a point to the skepticism. We can all name examples of like miserly attitudes and cases where the desire for money corrupts us and corrupts the people around us and corrupts our institutions. But fundamentally, there is something about money worth wanting. So a lot of this book is exploring why it makes sense to want to be rich in that sense. To be clear too, it's like, I'm not here talking about billionaires or multi-deca millionaires and so on. I'm thinking about ordinary people like the typical sort of upper middle class person in the United States who is not only rich by world standards but rich by American standards. So when we think about the rich, I'm often thinking about people like me and people like the typical listener probably to the show who are historically quite rich. Should we feel guilty about how much we have and should we feel guilty about wanting more?

Sally Herships (4:29)

So you're talking about individuals. Maybe let's start with society as a whole.

Why is being rich potentially good for society?

Jason Brennan (4:40)

Yeah, the funny thing is I think one of the best defenses of wealth comes from a Marxist philosopher. So there's this philosopher named Jerry Cohen, who I've had some arguments back and forth with over the years.

But he says, if you think about what money is, it's fundamentally a ticket. He's like a $20 bill doesn't matter in and of itself, but what it is to have money and to have wealth is to have access to the world. It is a ticket to do things. It is a kind of freedom. The more of it you have, all things equal, the more freedom you have to live a life that might be authentically yours, to pursue the things that define who you are, to meet new people, to see interesting things. The less we have of money, generally speaking, the more our options are set for us by the world and the people around us, unless we tend to be able to live authentically. I don't want to exaggerate that neither would he.