Money and Friends

A couple of news stories from the last week have stayed on my mind, so I might as well blog about them.

Re: Money

Warren Buffett has gotten a lot of press for his announcement that he is giving away most of his money, and why not? 85% of 44 billion dollars is a staggering amount of money, but it will still leave him and his heirs with enough cash to cover the drycleaning bills (bad Hathaway joke), not to mention buy nice homes and send grandchildren to good colleges.

My feelings about capitalism are well-known (let's just call me anti, and leave it at that), but, let's face it, capitalists made possible the social and cultural infrastructure of this country (hmm, I initially typed "company"--Freudian typo, anyone?). Libraries? Carnegie steel. Museums? Rockefeller oil. Research of all kinds, not to mention a whole lot of cool community organizing and anti-poverty work? Ford cars. The fact is, capitalism is what we've got, in which case I'm all in favor of capitalists giving it away, especially to support education, medical research, and reproductive rights.

Still, the, well, the I don't know what...the radical agitator? the Marxist? the subverter of the dominant paradigm? let's just the naysayer in me hates the idea of rich people determining the non-governmental agenda in this country, even if they are smart, well-intentioned rich people (which I do think Gates and Buffett are). On the other hand, the pragmatist in me is just as strong as the naysayer, so I think I'll be getting in touch with Gates and giving him a few ideas for how to spend some of his new billions.

Re: Friends

Everyone probably saw the stories about the new study that says Americans have fewer close relationships than they once did: an average of 2 confidants, whereas 20 years ago the average was 3, and 25% report that they have none. The other interesting result was that people are more connected to family than to friends. And what I found most interesting about the study was that it was conducted by people who set out to refute Robert Putnam's work in Bowling Alone which argues that Americans are increasingly isolated. If the putative debunkers end up validating, you've got something going on.

And yet. I just don't know anyone who has such a dearth of meaningful connections. I am totally willing to recognize myself as an extreme: I couldn't even count the number of people I confide in: we'll start with my mother, mother-in-law, and sister, to whom I certainly do not confide everything, but with whom I discuss many important things at great length and depth many times a week; then we can go on to...well, I don't even know where to begin, but I would say there are probably over a dozen people with whom I regularly have meaningful conversations, and if I needed help I could knock on six doors on my block alone, and another six or more in the immediate neighborhood, and so forth and so on.

Maybe I'm just a super-social kind of person. Ok, I am. But there are a lot of people like me, like most of my friends (come on, you know you are, especially if you count online friendships, which I think you have to count in this day and age, because we all know the difference between an online interaction and an online friendship). And I know you can't build an argument on anecdotal evidence. And I know the data says 25% have nobody, which balances out the freaks like me. And I know people in my neighborhood who don't know a single person in Town. And yet...

It just seems more complicated. (Does it help to know that I am almost as skeptical of social science research as I am of capitalism?)