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March 31, 2012 at 08:00 PM
In 2007, John C. Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, gave a commencement speech entitled “Enough” to the MBA Graduates of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. In it, he related an anecdote from Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut and Catch-22 author Joseph Heller were at a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Vonnegut asked Heller how he felt knowing that their host probably made more money in one day than Heller had made off of the entire history of Catch-22. Heller replied that he had something the billionaire would never have: enough.
This speech became the foundation of a book Bogle published a year later, on the eve of the global financial crisis. The message of the book, and of the commencement speech, is simple: we have gone from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing one to a service one to a financial one, and in so doing, we have pinned so much of our collective fortune on extracting value from trading paper that we are losing our grip on what it means to actually build anything of value, let alone how to serve others. Getting rich is fine. Getting crazy about it isn’t.
It took courage to write this at a time when most people on the planet didn’t want to hear that the global economy was on the verge of bursting its bubble. Bogle warned that when things turned south, the folks on Wall Street and everybody connected to them who would be hanging from the lamp posts. Given how little Occupy Wall Street has accomplished, I think it’s safe to say that there will be no revolution over this.
