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If you were me, you were born in early January. That makes your sun sign Capricorn, and nowhere near a cusp. You never studied astrology, and you were skeptical when you encountered it in 1967, but there was no avoiding it then. You were a freshman at Cal, and “what’s your sign?” was asked more often than “what’s your major?”
You were a creative individual – you aspired to be a writer – but you couldn’t ignore the zodiacal feedback you got. They said you were practical and sensible and really good with numbers. You’d do well in business. There was nothing in your chart about art.
By then you’d already received the message in other ways. Your two uncles were accountants, and you were accused of taking after them. You’d been prevailed upon (by your math teacher) to run for the office of student body bookkeeper in eighth grade, and you acquitted yourself well in the job, all of your ninth grade year. You managed the little supply window at lunch. You supervised the popcorn sales at the afternoon football games. You learned to make the faces on the currency always look up and in the same direction. Your till was never out of balance.
You majored in English at Cal, but that didn’t include any creative writing. You signed up for classical Greek as a break from the subjectivity of literature, and discovered it was as neat as arithmetic and as orderly as bookkeeping. You never bounced a check. You helped friends reconcile their bank accounts and, when necessary, you even created budgets for the most disorganized.
So it probably shouldn’t have surprised you when you landed a clerk/typist job in the financial district and flourished at it. But surprised you were. You didn’t commit to the job. You wondered how many other entry-level positions would have worked as well. You left and returned and went part-time and then back to full and even set out your own consulting shingle before you realized you were into it.
You made a career out of that first job. Your accidental field was retirement plan consulting. It was a subject utterly uninteresting to your friends in the 1970s. Forty years later, it’s one of your generation’s favorite topics. You discovered that you enjoyed it. You learned that money is a metaphor for just about everything.
You knew you were helping your clients reduce their taxes, and you couldn’t admire that as a life work. You kept at creative writing, sometimes, and engaged in active philanthropy to offset your financial district career. You maintained ironic distance from your own field by scoffing at its two bases: the concept of income tax and the theory of compound interest. As far as you’re concerned, income tax is unconstitutional. And you know that money is a medium of exchange; civilization’s alchemical tendency to turn it into a tradable commodity is just plain wrong.
Sometimes you ponder your job philosophically. You’ve been trying to figure out the purpose of existence all your life, so it’s natural for you to ask the question from the framework of market valuation and recordkeeping.
You specialize in small plans. They usually cover one or two business owners and a handful of employees. They hold too little to attract the power money managers; the business owners sometimes make plan investments that are closely held, not publicly traded, and therefore difficult to value. But the federal rules require that all plan assets be revalued and all plan accounts updated, at least once a year.
Then the challenge is to price an investment that has no readily ascertainable market value. It’s expensive to hire a valuation expert, especially once a year, especially if the plan is small. In your quest for a method, you find some IRS guidance about the matter.
The fair market value of an investment, that guidance suggests, is the price at which a reasonably sophisticated seller, under no obligation to sell, will let the investment go to a reasonably sophisticated buyer, under no compulsion to buy.
You latch onto the concept. “Oh excellent,” you sing within. You envision two people in a room, sitting across from one another. On a table between them is the object-to-be-valued. You laugh. It’s obvious to you that any two competent human beings would strike an agreement about the sale price within a few minutes.
That begins a train of thought long enough to cross continents. You understand a bit about linguistics and evolution; you know Chomsky wasn’t quite right with his Language Acquisition Device theory, but you also comprehend that your species has language because it is a tool for survival, and that a person will speak whether taught to or not. The reason a newborn baby sounds like a cat is because its voicebox is high in its throat. A few months later it will drop, permitting all sorts of phonation. When that happens, the airway intersects the esophagus, and opens up the possibility of choking. It turns out that choking is one of the main causes of accidental death. You get it: Evolutionarily speaking, humans “chose” vocalization even though it came with the risk of choking.
You see that the species is also well adapted to the marketplace. You theorize that human beings have a genetic predisposition for valuation and exchange.
And you find underpinnings for this idea. You come to the conclusion that bookkeeping must have been the first true profession. Sure there is general agreement that sexual prostitution led the way in human business endeavors, but that can’t be so. Undoubtedly women had been trading consent for food and other creature necessities since the beginning, but that’s not business. As soon as the trade became regularized and managed, there would be a need for someone to keep track of transactions. That’s bookkeeping. That’s record keeping. That’s first.
“Hah!” you think. “Aristotle was wrong. He said man is a political animal.”
You apply your college Greek. You look up the original phrase:
ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζᾤον
(ha anthropos fuzay politikon zo-on)
And yes, the first two words mean “man” or “person.” The third one translates “by nature.” But “politikon zo-on” doesn’t exactly mean “political animal.” “Zo-on” can be translated “animal,” but it’s more of a “life-form capable of mobility” within the larger class of “bios.” One would never use “You Zo-on” as an insult or a description of wild behavior. And “politikon” means “of the polis.” It’s not about campaigns, but about living in a village or city or other (small) community. For us, it means “civic” or “social.”
Yes. We are social beings. We live in the marketplace and we use money as a medium of material (and other) exchange. We invent social networks. We are not primarily about running for office or lying about promises.
Aristotle was correct. And yet …
Man isn’t the only social being. There are bees and ants and many primates, there are marine mammals – there’s a whole lot of socializing going on.
What makes humans unique? The marketplace. The ability to invent media of exchange. In truth, man is by nature a mercantile mobile life form.
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