Greedy like me.

GREEDY LIKE ME

I HAVEN'T DECIDED if I want to go out and be good before it becomes trendy or hand back and enjoy being greedy until the last moment. Arthur Schlesigner is the one who tipped me off to the coming change of fashion. Mr. Schlesinger has divided historical eras into two categories: the virtuous ones, when his friends are allowed to run the country, and the selfish ones, when they're left to hang around PBS television studios feeling grumpy.

Mr. Schlesinger told the New York Times recently that we are ending a selfish era and we're all going to start being good again. Newsweek let the bad news drop in one of its aggressively uneducated trend stories, "The '80s Are Over: Greed Goes Out of Style." Since Newsweek's and Mr. Schlesinger's virtous eras usually involve a lot of people giving up house and career and going off to 12-hour concerts of Bergman movies adapted for banjo and harmonica, I don't know if I want to be on the cutting edge of this next social transformation.

I'm the one, after all, who was three months late in joining thed malaise bandwagon in 1979. While everybody else was moping around gas lines, I was still wearing qiana shirts and searching for the perfect conch shell. On the other hand, I caught the greed wave long before it became fashionable. I'd been greedy a good six months before presidential hopeful Richard Gephardt declared, "The values of this country are selfishness and greed." And when the Washington Post's Meg Greenfield made it official by writing that the eighties have been an era of "officially sanctioned sleaziness and greed," I nudged ny wife and reminded her that it is not for nothing that I am well known in parts of Manhattan as "The Human Zeigeist."

It does bother me a bit that, though I have been the greed trendsetter, Ronald Reagan has been getting all the credit. Lance Morrow writes in Time, "Reagan and his Administration have established a national attitude of 'Get what you can get for yourself while you can.' A sense of values does not permeate this Administration." And Harper's editor Lewis Lapham says that "Reagan's triumphant plutocracy" has used Adam Smith "as an almost Biblical spokesman for unlicensed greed."

WHAT MR. GEPHARDT et al. don't appreciate is just how tough it is to be greedy these days. In the first place, you've got to figure out what the word "greedy" means.

For example, those of us who are slaves to sociological fashion are naturally tempted to become greedy Marxists, thereby making ourselves eligible for both money and tenure. But just try to get called greedy as a left-winger. I once let it be known that I was hoarding back issues of the Journal of Didactic Lesbians, but I couldn't get even Ralph Nader to call me greedy.

Once, I considered entering the mugging trade, which seemed like a pretty good way to be greedy without the heavy front-end capitalization that it takes t be, says, an insider trader. But nobody says that Amercia is growing greedy when street crime is up, and you get called a racist if you so much as mention the existence of the greedy needy.

No, to be an acknowledged greedhead in America today, you have to be a capitalist, which means getting up early, finding shirts that have no buttons missing, and then spending the bulk of your time trying to find somebody to write your autobiography.

Back in the Sixties and Seventies, greed was associated with excessive consumption, dwith a culture (in Daniel Bell's words) "no longer concerned with how to work and achieve, but how to spend and enjoy." In the supply-side Eighties, businessmen tend to work harder and consume less lavishly. Today, according to a Korn/Ferry International study, the typical corporate executive works three hours longer each week than in 1979, and he takes almost 20 per cent fewer vacation days. Greed is now associated with excessive work, archetypally with international bankers who rise at 4:00 A.M. and have shipped billions of dollars off to Brazil by the time the rest of us start mangling the morning grapefruit.

In the Fifties, greed was associated with William Whyte's Organization Man, who repressed his own individuality in order to climb the corporate ladder. Now, greed is associated dwith free agents, like takeover artists, or with young executives who feel little loyalty to their firms.

Also in the Fifties, greed was associated with staid, boring people who were unwilling to take risks, people so uncharismatic they couldn't get supermarket doors to open when they stepped on the mat. Now the people we call greedy are the ones we (and when I say we, I mean Meg Greenfield) feel take too many risks--speculators and arbitrageurs.

One of the sources of greed confusion in America is that the people who use the word--that is to say, lefties--are vehement, but not very articulate. Robert Lekachman titled his 1982 book Greed Is Not Enough: Reaganomics, but the word "greed" does not appear in the text. In Radical Citizenship: The New American Activism, by David Bouchier, there is a chapter titled "The Greedy State," but the word "greed" does not appear there either. It is never defined--just wielded like a club.

Now that Newsweek has declared greed unfashionable, there is of course renewed interest among sound-minded people in appearing greedy. If you have attended one of my "Aid the Greediest" seminars, which end with the audience hogging the doughnuts and pocketing the coffee spoons, you know that I am the right person to clear away the miasma and explain some of the principles that will help you become greedy too.

The first principle of being greedy is that one must demonstrate a preference for prosperity over poverty, which means that while it is fine to see a certain spiritual beauty in the phrase, "In poverty, dignity," it is nevertheless necessary to think that the Democrats went too far in making this the complete text of their economic platform. Those who write about cyclical periods of greed uniformly list the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1980s as this century's greediest eras. Now, all of these were periods of general prosperity, when the middle classes became so fantastically wealthy that they could afford to have their kids major in English at Ivy League colleges (progressives are pleased when the lower orders are accepted into elite schools, but it is considered a mite threatening when they can afford to pay their own way). The epitome of the virtuous decade, meanwhile, is the 1930s, which was a great time to be a HArvard professor, but not so hot for the rest of the country.

The second principle of being greedy is that one must be extremely generous. Since 1980, when the Greeding of America began, charitable giving has increased by over 10 per cent a year, a phenomenal rate by historical standards (the Seventies, by the way, were dismal for charities). Americans between the ages of 30 and 34 (yuppies) gave on the average $500 per person to charity, more than previous generations gave at that time of their lives.

One of the hallmarks of generosity in the Eighties is that it often benefits groups that despise the donors, and in this category it is corporations (and especially multinational corporations) that lead the way. Marvin Olasky's recent study of corporate giving found that about 70 per cent of corporate public-policy donations went to left-wing, anti-corporate organizations.

The reason corporate executives give millions of dollars to, say, a politically engaged arts organization is that they get sublime pleasure from hearing a person who enjoys two hundred sexual partners a year tell them how greedy they are.

The third principle of greed in the Eighties is that it is necessary to make money in a fashion that annoys America's financial virgins. This group is made up of comfortable elders who, having arrived at a settled station in life, suddenly notice that their own financial holdings become more and more wholesome as the years spent hustling for them fade into the past. Much as prepubescents tend to find the act of lovemaking distasteful and frightening, the financial virgin finds the act of moneymaking "yucky."

With the last payment on the mortgage comes the full flowering of the financial virgin and, with it, an epiphany. People should be more spiritual, the virgin declares: only greedy people worry about money, such as that acquisitive young couple with the noisy kids trying to build the house down the street.

Today's financial virgins have produced a plethora of books such as John Brooks's The Takeover Game, articles such as Myron Magnet's "The Decline & Fall of Business Ethics" (Fortune), and movies such as Oliver Stone's Wall Street, which mourn the passing of Wall Street's genteel Old Boy Network.

Absorbing these accounts, I found it fascinating to learn that while today's yuppies are brash, unprincipled, and greedy, the old-fashioned businessmen in days of yore made millions by walking grandmothers across the street and taking orphans out to ballgames on Sundays.

One way to get a financial virgin squealing about greed is to threaten that top management job he's settled into. There were nearly twice as many mergers and acquisitions in 1969 (6, 107) as there were in 1985, but nobody raised much of a fuss. That is because the M&A activity was mostly huge corporations swallowing smaller firms. As late as 1975, there was only one takeover transaction worth $500 million or more. Established corporate managers had little to worry about.

Over the last decade that has changed. By 1980, there had been 15 takeovers worth over $500 million, and many were hostile. In the first half of this decade, 62 Fortune 500 firms were taken over. In 1984, there were the Chevron-Gulf merger and the Mobil and Superior Oil deal. In 1985, Philip Morris acquired General Foods, and GE took over RCA. Mustering the moral indignation that is most perfectly voiced by the commercially incompetent, many entrenched managers declared that they were disgusted, simply disgusted, to observe certain businessmen--T. Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Sir James Goldsmith--actually trying to make money.

The first and most important principle for the would-be greedy is, Don't be greedy. Which is the same as saying, Be self-interested.

American progressives, a group made up mainly of people who nominated themselves "most likely to be beatified" in their high-school yearbooks, have launched a campaign to eradicate self-interest from the globe, claiming modestly to lead by example. Walter mondale declared, "I would rather lose an election about decency than win one about self-interest," the evening before America granted his wish. Ever since, to get the progressives agitated about your greed it has become necessary to be self-interested, and sometimes this involves the drastic step of not going broke. The mythic yuppie again serves as our model.

Progressives greeted the crash of 1987 with the gleeful laugh of the hyena, certain that there would soon be plenty of good yuppie-meat to feed on. "In many cases," psychologist Gerald Davison told Newsweek just after Black Monday, "we're talking about people whose entire lives are organized around having lots of money. . . . For [them], such chaos will have tremendous psychological dislocations."

Well, the yuppies were too self-interested for the greed-busters: young brokers had diversified their holdings and their reasons for living, and the crash (alas) did not create a heap of broken lives. Even the massive layoffs by brokerage houses did not wreak mental havoc. "It's been remarkable," the Harvard-affiliated psychiatrist Dr. Edward Hallowell acknowledged recently in Fortune. "I thought a lot of people would be freaking out." The most-often-heard remark of the post-crash era was, "It's only money." Hallowell found it "very heartening. People seem to have a more even hand on their feelings about money than I had thought."

In sum, if you engage in any commercial enterprise, and if you are relatively successful, or at any rate more successful than your average associate professor of sociology, it is likely that you may be called greedy by some of your anti-capitalist friends. As a member of the fashionably greedy myself, I can only tell you that it is a very rewarding feeling and well worth all the trouble it takes to achieve it.