When asked why he took the case, Schlichtmann responded, “pride, greed, ambition. Getting rich by doing good (491).”Greed was his motivating factor but Schlichtmann quickly learned that being rich isn’t so difficult, being famous isn’t so difficult, being rich and famous together aren’t so difficult, but being rich, famous and doing good together was very difficult. 2.2 million dollars later and his residence as homeless, Schlichtmann surely let greed blind him. It is hard to say whether Schlichtmann persevered with the case because of a change of heart, or because the mere fact that he had invested almost a decade of his life to it. However I do feel competent in saying that after receiving the verdict against Beatrice and despite being broke, Schlichtmann persevered because he cared about this case.
The statement that outlines the course of the book is “sacrifice high consumption today for financial independence tomorrow.” Application: After reading this book, I now have a different outlook on how to be successful with my finances. Just because a person earns a high pay salary does not necessarily mean that they are wealthy. The amount of money a person stores and invests is what truly measures that person’s wealth. Millionaires are not the high-spending, self-consumed people that we tend to imagine. To become wealthy, one must become frugal.
Galbraith Chapters 1 &2 Argument Spans Chapter 1: “The Affluent society” The problem that Galbraith is trying to point out in the first chapter is that “wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding”(p.1). This wealth has brought change among the people but has kept the ideas of the world of poverty. In the past, almost everybody was poor, but today in the affluent world people are consumed with wealth to the extreme point that they begin to believe that they are poor or “ill” With poor understanding, people are not open to accepting new ideas that can aid this new and affluent society. The economic ideas that are used today, that were “once interpreted the world of mass poverty have made no adjustment to the world of affluence” (p.2).
The greed that people have is one of the themes in The Devil and Tom Walker. People are willing to wage just about anything to make quick, easy, money. Back then, not a lot of people had money so it was like a treasure everyone envied. Even though in today’s society we like to say, “Money isn’t everything” we all know it’s a great proportion of everything. If we start looking toward romantic and transcendentalist ideas maybe that will change though I highly doubt it.
On the other hand, there were many differences between Tom and Bernie. One important different is that Tom was a usurer; he gave people money for his own profit. He landed people money in a high interest, so high that they couldn’t pay back the money. But, Bernie did the opposite of Tom; he collected money from the people, and made them believe that they would be paid back in a high interest. He couldn’t pay back the money to the people because he spent the money for
Gatsby used to be very poor and always wanted to be rich. After losing Daisy once, Gatsby was dedicated himself to win Daisy back. But his approach toward getting rich was not so clean, which ultimately led him to his death at the
When people here the words American dream most would say it’s to be wealthy, to have everything money can buy, but for others it’s having the simple joys in life. After reading and analyzing the book, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the points have become very clear, that some individuals in this world are materialistic; well others are set on things money can’t buy. Everyone wants to be happy in some way, for some it comes in the form of another person for others it comes in the form of green rectangular pieces of paper. The American dream is simply love, not matter what kind of love it is, for a person, money, or even a friend. Characterized by or indicative of pleasure, contentment, or joy: the definition of being
While “Asia manages to balance their desire for wealth against other claims of human spirit…and the Soviets honor the holding of political power,” we Americans show no medium between wealth and other aspects affecting their lives. Lapham states that “a rich man is perceived as being…both good and wise.” He asserts that Americans judge what is good and wise by its monetary value. Americans validate his point because we only tend to trust people who fall under the same social class and believe that the poor “willed it so” by not working hard enough. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays how Americans show off their wealth and what kind of lifestyle a rich man lives. Money to the East and West residents was their American Dream that was earned or passed on, and they valued monetary value and the idea of it more than their relationships.
When I read the Great Gatsby it was about striving for equality, but more of a drive to become as rich as possible. Although not always by the best of means, the idea that Americans were portrayed to care about nothing more than to reach the top is what kept the economy and the nation for that matter going. Most of the characters in the novel are full of nothing more than hope. Hope for money, hope for love, hope for a life better than what they had in the past. As Linn wrote, life is more complex than we think.
The problem in today’s government is that they worked very well with the top class and not so much the lower and middle class. The government tends to favor the top class over all the others, and that isn’t right because they have everything all ready and don’t need to work to survive, unlike the people that need to sell their labor to survive in this nation. The top 400 richest people together on tax returns make average around 202 million. That is a crazy amount of money, think of all the better things it could go towards, homeless people, school system, Medicare/Medicade, and getting rid of the huge debt that America has sunken them selves into. Another huge issue is the whole unemployment rate.