Get Rich Quick...Or Slow

America has a schizoid perspective on the acquisition of great wealth. For convenience sake, we could call them “Get Rich Quick” and “Get Rich Slow” modes. Those who Get Rich Quick are characterized as anonymous, lucky, opportunistic, unreliable, annoying, likable, humble, arrogant, and unassuming. They are the ones who win the big lottery, have a jaw dropping fortune stuffed into their bank accounts upon the passing of a jaw droppingly rich relative, stay on Jeopardy for three years, pan for gold and hit the mother lode, or win so big in Vegas that they are banned from ever reentering the state of Nevada.

The Get Rich Slow folks are slugs like the late Steve Jobs, the not late Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey, who work very hard on an ingenious set of ideas or a fabulous talent for which the time was right to coax enormous amounts of money from the pocket books of people eager to partake of the fruits of those ideas and talents. This is called entrepreneurship, invention, wealth creation, the American Dream, or, statistically, something that happens to staggeringly few beneficiaries of free enterprise considering that it’s pretty much the main argument for it.

People opt for the Get Rich Quick method when (a) they see how few people get rich the other way; (b) they see how devilishly hard those few people work to get rich the other way; (c) they know they will never have a generous rich relative or an idea or a talent anyone will want to pay for, which is essential to the other way; (d) most likely, all of the above.

There is no impediment to living your life either way. You can choose either without breaking any laws. OK, you can’t choose to inherit a fortune, but you can pretend you chose it. Lots of heirs do. There is a problem, though, with counting on one of those two Get Rich methods happening in your life. When neither happens, you will become sad, maybe angry, and you will despoil the contentment of people around you. You will vote for candidates who tell you to blame the people who vote for the other candidate. Blame them for what? For you not Getting Rich — quick or slow.

The easiest Get Rich Quick technique is also the least likely to succeed: entering the 200 million dollar lottery. There really is no object on earth quite like the lowly lottery ticket. You pay a dollar for it, but it will never be worth a dollar again. In fact, it will be worth (1) nothing or (2) 200 million dollars. The odds that it will be worth nothing are terrific. The odds that it will accrue many millions in value are approximately zero, about the same probability that you will invent the next billion dollar advance in digital technology. Or acquire a previously unknown aunt who will leave you $250 million. Or die in the next three seconds.

Yet we buy lottery tickets. Or we pack up and grab a wagon train to Sacramento because someone tweeted that there is a gold rush happening there. Or we stand in an enormous queue of disturbed would be entertainers in the hope of becoming the next American Idol. Or we answer emails that start, “Esteemed American Citizen,” and promise a large cash deposit if we send a small cash deposit first.

Somebody somewhere got rich quick, so lots of people hope the same for themselves. The fact that it pretty much never works is small deterrent. The fact that somebody somewhere hit it big (there really is an American Idol each year) emboldens that eternally springing hope.

Amid the fever of the gold rush or the iron man triathlon that is entrepreneurship, there thankfully exist regular folks for whom great wealth is a curiosity but not an obsession. These are the folks who wake up each morning grateful for the heater that works, the roof that keeps the rain out, the cupboard that isn’t bare, the car that chugs to and from work, and, most of all, grateful for relative good health or support when health fails.

They are the middle class, the ones content to be middle class, aware that their kind is something novel in human history, which, after all, is a centuries old story of a few big lottery winners surrounded by hordes of starving, destitute losers. The middle class, not the very rich, is the real creation of the American Experiment, the real gift of our nation to a sick and weary world.