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COMMENTARY
April 5, 2006
Top ten
The “entertainment correspondent” of a website called “AskMen.com” has just provided the tabloid media with a list of the top ten richest men (“persons” if you prefer) of all time. And while I’m attracted to any calculation of “net worth” that sinks Bill Gates to fifth place, the writer does not tell us much about his methodology. He says economists, financiers, and historians were consulted, and that inflation, GDP growth, currency exchange rates, and share price fluctuations were taken into account.The winner was John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), founder of Standard Oil; with Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), steel-miller and captain of industry, well behind in second place; and Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), the steamship and railway baron, the only other to die formerly in possession of a fortune in 12 figures, inflation-adjusted to A.D. 2001. “AskMen” is an energetic producer of “top ten” lists, including such recent essays as “top ten richest men alive”, “top ten movie vixens”, and “top ten radio shock jocks”. I have little or no expertise in most of these areas, and can judge their authority only by the website’s last media splash, which, as I recall, was obtained by announcing the “top ten sexiest women”. In that case, my advice would have been, don’t “ask men”, just ask me -- for the list, fixated upon pop stars and supermodels, was all wrong. It made the common contemporary mistake of confusing eros with bubblegum. Far from opposing fun in principle, I think more of it could have been had with a better survey of the historically muchmonied. How, for instance, did King Croesus of Lydia fail to make the list, after pioneering the minting of gold? The ancients all agreed, he was the wealthiest, and we still say “rich as Croesus” of the financially advantaged, meaning it only figuratively. John Jacob Astor (1763-1848), the “self-made money-making machine” of the American fur trade, is the oldest gentleman to make the current list, but I can’t help thinking the previous 40-plus centuries of dimly recorded human enterprise should have yielded the odd candidate. There was no Rothschild, no Medici, neither Genoans nor Venetians. Rome, prior to its sack by Alaric in 410 A.D., was full of the filthy stinking rich, according at least to Ammianus Marcellinus. As was Suzhou in 11th-century China, prior to the arrival of the Mongols. Historical specialists can even provide us with a few prominent names. Imagine, in the latter case, what the builders of China’s grand canals were worth, in comparison with the 19th-century railway lords. Or, who made money building Roman roads. Since two Arab oil sheikhs make the all-time rich-list (King Fahd bin-Abdul Aziz al-Saud, of Riyadh, and Sheikh Zayed bin-Sultan al-Nayhan, of Abu Dhabi), I assume it is no disqualification to be just sitting on property. Someone should incidentally mention to AskMen that both are recently deceased. Or suggest they reconstruct a Fortune-500 listing for the Ottoman holdings of Suleyman the Magnificent; or a representative Mughal, such as Akhbar, or Shah Jahan. The great landholders of history, East and West, had, and maintained, fortunes beyond comparison with, say, the playboy CEO of the Oracle corporation, who finishes all-time sixth on AskMen. Did no Hapsburgs have holdings larger than his? Was there no Yellow Emperor to knock Lawrence Ellison into his dragon top-hat? (The anti-Sinitic tendencies of this website need investigating: I noticed that their “ten sexiest women” list casually overlooked both Mei Fei and Yang Kuei-fei -- the excruciatingly beautiful and passionate mistresses of the T’ang-dynasty emperor, Hsüan Tsung. To say nothing of Zhang Ziyi.) We live in an unusual age, when great fortunes are made by direct investments, such as those of Warren Buffet (all-time eighth, says AskMen), or at least by clever manipulation of markets in the manner of George Soros. Thus, compilers of top-ten lists may unwittingly expose their partiality to mere entrepreneurs, and their prejudice against the more time-honoured methods of accumulating wealth: inheritance, appropriation, and plunder. Fabulous as the wealth of a Microsoft Corporation may be, in the hands of a few individuals, the money was merely earned, and shrinks to a teardrop in the ocean of a government’s phenomenal tax-collecting powers. And while an Andrew Carnegie can leave the mark of his name, for perhaps a century, through the incomparable philanthropy with which he endowed public libraries and other institutions of learning, his efforts are dwarfed by the most casual government expenditure to create vast, soul-destroying, regulatory bureaucracies; or promote feckless human behaviour through welfare entitlement programmes. I have no prejudice myself against wealth, however obtained -- money is so fungible -- and seldom object unless to the way it is displayed. To the wealthy themselves, one may be indifferent, for they will soon lose what they have. The best we can do for them is create the expectation they will find elegant and charitable uses for their excess. Happiness we cannot give them, for that belongs only to the poor in spirit. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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