Welcome back.
It's been a while.
Maybe this is the new cadence, every once in a while randomly, when I have something that I hope is interesting to say.
And what I want to say today, talk about today is a question that I get more often than anything else when I speak about money to families.
And let me start by saying this is not just wealthy families, but a lot of families, even lower income families, will have a thought and I'll get to this in a second about the relationship between kids and generational progress and those kids becoming spoiled.
And the question that I often get is how do you use your money in a way that's going to not spoil your kids?
And again, that's not just high net worth people saying this, because a lot of people will look at the lives their kids are living today and say something along the lines of they don't have to struggle in the same ways that I did when they were kids themselves, or looking at their own parents' generation, grandparents' generation.
It's a very interesting topic.
And I think about this with my own kids as well.
And so I want to share some thoughts on the relationship between generational progress and kids and money today.
Adam Smith, the 18th century economist, wrote that it is not uncommon to meet a mother in the Scottish Highlands who has born 20 children, not to have two alive.
That was life back then, and it hardly mattered whether you were rich or poor.
Queen Anne of England had 18 children, not a single one of whom made it into adulthood.
In the 1800s.
American President James Garfield died in 1881, in part because the best doctor in the country was not yet a believer in germs.
Two weeks before he died, President Franklin Roosevelt's blood pressure was 260 over 150.
If you're not familiar, that is horrendous.
And his doctors could hardly do a thing about it because basic blood pressure medicine didn't yet exist.
Now, if you could show any of those people a modern grocery store, they would faint with disbelief.
They could not comprehend that the biggest challenge of grocery shopping in modern times is deciding which of the 19 brands of jelly to buy, or that in January you can buy papayas in Minnesota.
But most shocking to them, if they were to see the modern grocery store, would be the pharmacy in the back, which they would find magical.
And so, in this situation, where someone from 100 or 200 years ago could see a modern Safeway or Kroger, what do you think their response would be?
I don't think they would say, you're so amazing.
This is so incredible.
I think what they would say is, you people are so spoiled.
They would watch us getting frustrated at having to wait in line at the pharmacy, and they would just be in disbelief at how unappreciative we are for the magic pills that would await us at the end.
They could not fathom that we complain about the price of food rather than just being gobsmacked at the mere possibility of how much food is in front of us.
And so look.
The irony is that every generation toils and innovates to create a more prosperous world for their heirs, for their children, their grandchildren.
But when you watch those future generations interact with their own world, sometimes your feelings can shift from pride to disappointment, because our kids won't suffer in the same ways that we did.
And maybe they won't even appreciate how easy their life has become.
Again, this is a very common problem.
Wealthy families wonder how they can support their kids without turning them into brats.
And whole societies have a very long history of feeling disappointed in youngsters who look lazy and entitled relative to their elders.
I had a conversation with a guy a few months ago whose immigrant parents came to America and worked tirelessly in low wage jobs to make ends meet.
And those kids are now adults.
And this guy who I was talking to felt a sense of shame that, as a college educated white collar worker, he would not have to suffer in the same ways that his parents did for him.
And he said, look, his parents instilled in him the lessons of frugality and grit.
But he wondered would his own children learn the same thing from him if they watched their father live a comparatively easy life?
And he gave a great little example.
He said when he was a kid, all books were borrowed from the library.
And now his young daughter today demands and gets to purchase 15 Taylor Swift books that pile up in her room.
And he had the sense of shame that, like my parents struggled and now I'm not, and my kids are even going to struggle even less than that.
And my response was look, If we talk to his immigrant parents right now, I bet they would say that was the goal.
That the entire reason that they worked so hard was to catapult the family's standing to a point where one generation had to grind their fingernails down to the bone just to get food and shelter and the next can indulge in Taylor Swift books.
And so the granddaughter's spoiled appearance was not a side effect of wealth.
It was the entire goal.
And so let me put that a little bit differently.
The goal of some parents is to work so hard that their kids and their grandkids get to live a life that appears spoiled by the standards of previous generations.
And here's why I think that's important.
Like wealth, there is no objective definition of what counts as spoiled.
Everything is just relative to somebody else.
And so I can look at my own kids today and see how spoiled they are relative to my own childhood.
But couldn't my parents and grandparents do the same for me?
My grandparents' generation.
They had to worry about polio and scarlet fever and all these other things that never crossed my mind.
And couldn't their own grandparents do the same to them?
If we go back 100, 150 years ago, their transportation was limited to horses, and a bad crop could mean losing some of your children, which was a life inconceivable just a generation or two later.
And so what is common to miss here is that when one generation's life becomes comparatively easier than the ones before them, their life does not become objectively easy.
They just move on to worrying about higher order problems that were previously deemed not urgent enough to worry about by the earlier generations.
And so one generation worries about how to get food and shelter.
The next doesn't have to worry about food and shelter, but they fret about security and safety.
The next generation has security but they worry about disease.
The next generation tackles disease but they worry about education.
The next generation gets education, but they worry about work-life balance and on and on and on.
There's a classic John Adams line where he said, I'm paraphrasing this.
He says, I studied war so that my kids will have the liberty to study engineering.
They will study engineering so that their kids will have the liberty to study philosophy.
Whose kids can have the liberty to study art.
And so I hope that my kids and my grandkids won't have to worry about cancer in the way that we do today.
I hope they have incredible technology that makes their jobs easier than ours.
I hope that everyday frictions that we deal with today, that you and I deal with today, will disappear for our kids.
I hope that their energy is so abundant that they consider it unlimited.
And would you call that spoiled?
Even if they go through their day not even thinking about those things and not being appreciative that let's say They've solved cancer in the future.
Is that spoiled?
I suppose you could call that spoiled, but I think a different way to think about it would be lucky or fortunate.
Or maybe most important, the way that I would frame that attitude is they are the beneficiaries of the accumulated hard work of those who came before them in a way that leaves them able to spend their days solving new problems, which is what you and I are today.
That's it for this episode.
Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.
