heartfelt terms about how time-consuming and expensive it was for her company to “educate” the lawmakers in Washington.
Duke’s Dan Ariely has done research to gauge this very human tendency to come to believe in what suits us. He has found that when something is in our personal best interest, we come to see it not just as “good for me” but as unqualifiedly “good.” “It turns out that if I pay you lots of money to see reality in a certain way, you will,” he told me. “Imagine I paid you $5 million a year to view mortgage-backed security as a good product. Now, I’m sure you could pretend to like them, but the question is, would you really start believing that they are better products than they really are. That turns out to be the case. People actually can change their deeply held beliefs.
“When you have a financial incentive to see reality in a certain way, you will see it that way, not because you’re bad, but because you are human,” Professor Ariely said.
And we wear spectacles shaded not only by our self-interest, but also by that of our friends. “We are deeply social animals,” Professor Ariely told me. “We see things from the perspective of our friends, not of strangers. One of the things that inequality does is it creates not a single society, but it creates multiple societies. It might be that inequality is creating another layer of separation between the in group and the out group.”
JOHN DASHWOOD’S HALF SISTERS
Jane Austen lived at the dawn of the industrial revolution, before the leisured, landed gentry faced the coming full assault on its position from the rising meritocrats of manufacturing and commerce. But even then, and without the assistance of experimental setups like Ariely’s, she was an acute observer of this human tendency to self-justification.
Recall the opening scene of her 1811 novel
But as the newly minted squire of Norland Park talks it over with his wife in the ensuing weeks, John gradually reduces the intended amount: “Perhaps, then, it would be better for all parties if the sum were diminished by one half.—Five hundred pounds would be a prodigious increase to their fortunes!” Note that the reduction is in the interests of “all parties.”
Then John wonders whether an annuity, paid solely to his stepmother, might not be best: “A hundred a year would make them all perfectly comfortable.”
Upon further thought, he decides that would be excessive, too. “I believe you are right, my love,” he tells his wife. “It will be better that there should be no annuity in the case; whatever I may give them occasionally will be of far greater assistance than a yearly allowance, because they would only enlarge their style of living if they felt sure of a larger income, and would not be sixpence the richer for it at the end of the year. It will certainly be much the best way. A present of fifty pounds, now and then, will prevent their ever being distressed for money, and will, I think, be amply discharging my promise to my father.”
By the end, John decides that even this is too much: “He finally resolved, that it would be absolutely unnecessary, if not highly indecorous, to do more for the widow and children of his father, than such kind of neighborly acts as his own wife pointed out.”
CONCLUSION
We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.
The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.
The lagoons off the north Adriatic coast that eventually became Venice were first settled by refugees from more salubrious inland cities fleeing successive invasions by the Huns and sundry Germanic tribes. These marshy islands, plagued by fog in the winters and insects in the summer, made a good hiding spot—not only were they hard to reach, they were so grim and inhospitable there was no point in sacking them.
But by the early fourteenth century, Venice had become the richest city in Europe, three times the size of London and as big as Paris. Venice was an imperial power—the republic financed the Fourth Crusade and established suzerainty over the fertile plains to the north, reaching Lake Garda and the river Adda to the north and west, along the Dalmatian coast deep into what is today Croatia, into the Mediterranean, where it controlled Cyprus, and into the Aegean, where it ruled Crete.
La Serenissima’s true power and vocation was commerce. At the republic’s zenith, it dispatched thirty-six thousand sailors and thirty-three hundred ships into the world’s maritime trade routes. Venice dominated the salt business—the oil of that era—and trade with Byzantium and the Near East. A Venetian merchant, Marco Polo played a central role in introducing China to western Europe, with his pioneering account of his visit to the Middle Kingdom; his father, also a trader, had done business with the Golden Horde of the Tatars. Francesco Petrarca, sitting at a Venetian window overlooking the Basin of St. Mark and writing a letter to a friend in the fourteenth century, was awed by the trading prowess of the Venetians and the commercial ambitions that drove it: “If you’d seen this vessel, you would have said it was not a boat but a mountain swimming on the surface of the sea…. It is setting out for the river Don, for this is as far as our ships can sail on the Black Sea, but many of those on board will disembark and journey on, not stopping until they have crossed the Ganges and the Caucasus to India, then on to farthest China and the Eastern ocean. What is the source of this insatiable thirst for wealth that seizes men’s minds?”
Venice owed its might and money to the super-elites of that age, and to an economic and political system that nurtured them. At the heart of the Venetian economy was the
Venice’s elite were the chief beneficiaries of the rise of La Serenissima. But like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. We think of social mobility as an entirely good thing, but if you are already on top, mobility can also mean competition from outsider entrepreneurs. Even though this cycle of creative destruction had created the Venetian upper class, in 1315, when their city was at the height of its economic powers, they acted to lock in their privilege. Venice had prospered under a relatively open political system in which a wide swath of the people had a voice in the selection of the republic’s ruler, the doge, and successful outsiders could join the ruling class. But in 1315, the establishment, which had been gradually tightening its control over the government, put a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro D’Oro, or Book of Gold, which was an official registry of the Venetian nobility. If you weren’t in it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.
This political shift from a nascent representative democracy to an oligarchy marked such a striking change
