Last month we explored what the annual salary of some of history’s most famous scientists would be if they were being paid today. As it was so much fun we decided to revisit the topic, but instead took a look at some of the most iconic composers from Europe (and one from America).
Is Going Into Finance Good for Society?
Whatever banking’s post-recession connotations may be, the historian William Goetzmann argues that monetary innovations have always played a critical role in developing civilization.
.. So the question I would ask my students over the years is: Why are you doing it? What I was hoping is that they would think about the benefits to society. So the answer is pretty clear, if you take a look at the role that investment banking has played in concentrating capital into enterprises—essentially helping to raise money for businesses.
.. So it was really when capital markets opened up that investment bankers could get money to build railroads around the world, canals, help raise money to electrify cities, and so on. So, that’s the way I think about the benefits of that intermediary role.
.. Even though now, we think about it as a source of great inequality. It’s ironic. You think about Kickstarter now, it’s got that same kind of democratization theme to it.
.. I love the world of asset management, because most of that is devoted to people’s retirement and preparing them for an economic life in the long term, after their working life has passed. The invention of something like bonds and annuities and stock that people could buy with some level of trust—those created this possibility of people being able to save for themselves or for their family members. It created an economic future that they couldn’t really create before. Before capital markets and financial innovations like that, a retirement plan was to have a lot of kids and then make sure enough of them lived long enough to support you when you got old. Finance, on the one hand, reduced the need to have a savings plan that was based on reproduction. Then, also, in some sense, it freed up the children to do what they want.
Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961-1973
If success and prominence were Johnson and Baines bloodlines, LBJ’s childhood also contributed to his larger-than-life personality. Johnson was an emotional orphan. He was the offspring of “absent” parents: his father was a self-absorbed character who was often away from the household, and his mother was usually too depressed to fill her children’s emotional needs. LBJ’s childhood is an object lesson in the formation of a narcissistic personality. Yet it does not explain how so self-centered a child, adolescent, and mature man was able to translate his neediness into constructive achievements that were the envy of healthier personalities. LBJ is also an object-lesson in the complexity of human behavior. He may have been, as New York Times columnist Russell Baker says, “a human puzzle so complicated nobody can ever understand it.”
.. Throughout his life Johnson had demonstrated a compensatory grandiosity that spawned legends. In one of them, German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard asked Johnson whether he had been born in a log cabin. “No, no, no,” LBJ answered, “you’re confusing me with Abe Lincoln. I was born in a manger.”
.. Johnson’s behavior largely came from the conviction that intimidation was indispensable in bending people to his will. It was gratifying to have people love you, but it was essential to overpower them if you were to win on controversial public issues.
.. I remember once asking him, `Why did you cast that vote, Mr. President?’ `Bob,’ he said, `one thing you’ll learn someday is that you have to be a demagogue on a lot of little things if you want to be around to have your way on the big things.’ I’ll never forget him saying that. A lesson in primer politics from the Master.”
..The son of a famous father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Harvard-educated, handsome, charming, urbane, a northeastern aristocrat with all the advantages, JFK appeared to be everything LBJ was not. As painful to Johnson, Kennedy’s claim on the presidency seemed unmerited alongside of his own. “It was the goddamnedest thing,” Johnson later told Kearns, “here was a whippersnapper…. He never said a word of importance in the Senate and he never did a thing. But somehow … he managed to create the image of himself as a shining intellectual, a youthful leader who would change the face of the country.” Behind Kennedy’s back, Johnson called him “sonny boy,” a “lightweight” who needed “a little gray in his hair.”
Which Rock Star Will Historians of the Future Remember?
The most important musical form of the 20th century will be nearly forgotten one day. People will probably learn about the genre through one figure — but who might that be?
.. the worldwide memory of Bob Marley will eventually have the same tenacity and familiarity as the worldwide memory of reggae itself.
.. The defining music of the first half of the 20th century was jazz; the defining music of the second half of the 20th century was rock, but with an ideology and saturation far more pervasive. Only television surpasses its influence.
.. (the Doors, R.E.M., Radiohead). It still projects the illusion of a universe containing multitudes. But it won’t seem that way in 300 years.
.. The symbolic value of rock is conflict-based: It emerged as a byproduct of the post-World War II invention of the teenager, soundtracking a 25-year period when the gap between generations was utterly real and uncommonly vast. That dissonance gave rock music a distinctive, nonmusical importance for a long time. But that period is over.
.. what we’re left with is a youth-oriented music genre that a) isn’t symbolically important; b) lacks creative potential; and c) has no specific tie to young people. It has completed its historical trajectory. Which means, eventually, it will exist primarily as an academic pursuit.
.. But it might work in reverse. A more plausible situation is that future people will haphazardly decide how they want to remember rock, and whatever they decide will dictate who is declared its architect. If the constructed memory is a caricature of big‑hair arena rock, the answer is probably Elvis; if it’s a buoyant, unrealistic apparition of punk hagiography, the answer is probably Dylan.
.. Gioia is touching on a variety of volatile ideas here, particularly the outsize memory of transgressive art. His example is the adversarial divide between punk and disco:
.. But I’ve noticed — just in the last four or five years — that this consensus is shifting. Why? Because the definition of “transgressive” is shifting. It’s no longer appropriate to dismiss disco as superficial.
.. More and more, we recognize how disco latently pushed gay, urban culture into white suburbia, which is a more meaningful transgression than going on a British TV talk show and swearing at the host. So is it possible that the punk‑disco polarity will eventually flip? Yes.