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A Coin for Wealth A series of interviews asking the question: What does wealth mean to you?

Adam Croft Teacher at a progressive school in Seattle,USA Karen Clarke-Whistler Environmental Director at a major North American bank David Kowitz Hedge Fund Company Director and art collector James Marriott Co-Director and Founder of PLATFORM – arts/activism/ research/education Bill Drummond Artist, Musician, Writer and Record Producer.

Laura Gwynne Dancer, gift economy practitioner Arthur Brown Musician, Traveller Christine Kettaneh Artist, former economist, lives in Lebanon Paradise Youth Worker and Lyricist

I would like to thank all these people for sharing their thoughts about wealth with me for The Gifts Project: A Coin for Wealth.

The conversations have happened intermittently since November 2012. They have taken place in Italy, Toronto, Fairlight, the Bank of England, Higham in Kent, a letter, driving to Wales, a yurt, the Barbican, and Stockwell, in South London.

The first is Adam Croft. I met him in Italy. His progressive view of education seemed an ideal way to create writing on living wealth. His piece is meant to be read online so he can continually update and keep it alive. Karen, my sister-in-law, is a person I completely respect for her environmental knowledge and her pragmatic way of working from the inside. Chris Drury and I were lucky to talk with David Kowitz as his time is so financially valuable. He gave insights into the business of money and collecting art. Charlie Bean kindly showed me around the Bank of England and shared his philosophy of economics and love of Wagner. James Marriott is one of the most thoughtful thinkers about the world we live in, seen through the arts and activism.

Bill Drummond, musician, performance artist, part of the K Foundation (who famously burnt a million pounds) allowed me to ask one of the last 50 questions he is ever going to answer.

Laura Gwynne, fellow dancer, explained the complexities of living simply. Arthur Brown, magnificent singer and rock idol who is truly in touch with his metaphysical side. Christine Kettaneh a lover of the logic of economics and exquisite artist. I finally met with Paradise a lyricist, singer and youth worker extraordinaire.

Clare Whistler, May 2014

Adam Croft Teacher at a progressive school in Seattle,USA

What does wealth mean to you?

There is a way in which we go about our days as separate people, bumping into one another in more or less harmony or discord. As separate beings, we can experience a sort of nobility in this individuality: it feels like a great achievement to navigate the world in this way, with all of the challenges and dangers to which our separations make us so vulnerable, death most consequentially.

To my separate self, death is annihilation, the loss of my individual self into nothingness. And to lose another, like my mother, is to lose connection with that self – she can no longer be visited in these days spent as persons in the world. I feel such great and inexpressible sadness for this loss of another, a loss hinted at when saying goodbye to soon-to-be faraway friends.

Will I bump into them again? Perhaps – perhaps not. And so, again, there is only this I, me, this person in a room, waiting for a taxi before flying home.

And someday, I, too, will die alone.

But can I understand myself in some other way? I only came into being because of another. Part mother, part father, I began before I was me. Have I ever really become me? Am I not the continuation of all my ancestors’ coming-into-being, including the plants, animals, bacteria, waters, minerals, and gases; the cosmos itself? Isn’t it more accurate to say that I am always becoming me, that ‘I’ am actually this always-coming-intobeing – me?

To separate my self from this wholeness of the living feels violently impoverishing. My ego may recall and learn from the experiences of decades of clock time, but my heart pumps ancient ocean’s blood while my language echoes bird song and leaf dance.

Such wisdom lives as I! Such wealth of being!

This must be true wealth, a living wealth, this humble explosion, this endlessly ephemeral play of coming-into-being together.

Wealth lives as this belonging together. A fortune may be mine or yours, and I may encounter and even benefit from your fortune, but living wealth is always shared. We, the human and the morethan-human together, live wealth into the world.

I don’t seek to quantify living wealth; how would I count cominginto-being together? Rather, I work to deepen the quality of my participation. I listen, watch, breathe, imagine, learn, love, teach, speak, walk, and write myself into participation in the play of living. Society may assign a value to my work, a teacher with quantifiable educational degrees and years of experience, but what joy I experience as a teacher springs forth from the quality of my participation in the living.

Living wealth invites us to give, not accumulate. I seek to understand how best to participate in the wealth of the living.

This inquiry spurs me to connect and to imagine, to learn and create in the play of the living. As a teacher, my students and I practice an acid inquiry that can free the static into play.

Learning, imagining, creating, we dissolve the sandy foundations of society’s deadly constructions and spin the world back into motion.

And so I understand myself as partner to the world’s wealth, my life its currency. And someday, when I die, I will give of this living wealth, my body burned into bacterial metabolism, my last breath a clover’s...

Karen Clarke-Whistler Environmental director at a major North American bank

What does wealth mean to you?

I consider myself a business environmentalist, moving the organisation in a direction that recognizes that environmental quality and profits go together. After five years – no one in the bank has yet to say ‘Stop’.

People divide us into environmentalists and economists; environment and jobs protection, or economy. I think the environment is a key component of economy.

We’ve all hear of ‘dirty oil’, but I’d like to figure out what ‘clean oil’ looks like, or green nuclear. Canada is rich in natural resources – and we need to figure out how to do this. There are only a few places in the ‘overdeveloped’ world – including Norway, Australia and Canada – that could change how it’s done. How to develop the earth’s resources to meet the needs of society while protecting or enhancing the environment.

Everything came out of the ground, not just oil. Everything.

That is our wealth. It’s not to do with the banks, it’s to do with society.

People say we need to turn back the clock, we need to do less, go back to the land. I think it’s against human nature to do this, it’s not human nature to want less. People want personal productivity and essentials. We need to do ‘mindful living’ but the average person will not manage or want to do this to save the world. I do think technology benefits. It is through technology that we will be able to solve the conundrum of how to have more people, and do more – but with less resources.

I hate saying ‘save the environment’. It’s us we need to save. I am with James Lovelock on his Gaia theory* – the earth will continue to exist but maybe not man. The environment does not have a consciousness – it is a dynamic thing, it will continue.

I don’t think society is failing – it’s evolving, but we tend not to see this as evolution happens at all times.

These days we are always trying to reduce risk, as if risk is bad.

I have spent a lot of my life doing risk assessment! There will always be unintended consequences. We breed crops to be disease resistant, we stop naturally occurring forest fires to reduce risk.

But in the end we also reduces biodiversity. Whoever thought the pine beetle would decimate forests?

As it is with all consumption or distribution, it’s consumer demand. People blame companies but it would not be there if consumers did not buy it. We all live with disconnects in our lives. To live in a more conscious way and understand the consequences of our lifestyles we have to make choices and defend them.

I believe we need structures and governments – to not vote is almost criminal.

To be carbon neutral – at the bank we track it all and by reducing it we save money. We travel less and finance carbon offsets; it does help and we do highly beneficial programs to offset.

For each job here there are 20 one-on-one interviews. When I came for the job I made sure that if they were going to have me I would be allowed to make a difference, not just be a green wash.

I have spent my whole life in the environment and have 30 years experience. I’m pragmatic, not academic, and decided that money talks and size matters. So I joined a bank. Working in a bank the

product is money – can we use that to societal benefit? We can make an environmental and economic difference and they listen to me; they will pay money for this. Is it green washing PR? The bank sees the value of understanding environmental risk and opportunity.

It’s my/our money you have!

I wanted a team, not a one man band or a figurehead; I want support, I am not a hemp wearing activist. Some environmentalists see me as a sell out, but I like activists that make change.

Evolution, not revolution.

The environment was not even written about until the 1960’s.

I did one of the first environmental science degrees in the 1970’s – it’s a young field.

Personal wealth means home, family, living in a way your basic and valued needs are met. I was the first in my family to go to university. My mother was adopted. My father came from peasant stock going back generations, but I have been given so many opportunities. I want to raise good kids.

A positive contribution would be my wealth.

I am extremely dedicated to making a difference in the environment – it’s my life’s work and I want to have made a difference. The rest of it is all very nice – I want enough money not to worry as I think it’s a distraction worrying and thinking about money. My purpose is to earn it and deal with pensions so I don’t have to think about it.

I chose this work because as a kid I was going on fishing trips with dad and granddad; they were always associated with the outdoors and camping. I loved the outdoors, nature and bird watching.

My mother got sick with cancer when I was 16 so I started

off working life with two years in pre med. Then I realised that I didn’t want to be around sick people, so chose to work in environment.

Why wouldn’t I do something I love? I consciously changed from saving people to saving the environment. Some say that’s selfish – I would say it’s vocational. * James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS, is an independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist who lives in Dorset, England. He came up with the hypothesis he calls Gaia, that views the earth as a living organism that functions as a unified whole. Author of the books: Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity, and The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: Enjoy It While You Can.

David Kowitz Hedge Fund Company Director and art collector

What does wealth mean to you?

I tend to see the word ‘wealth’ in a narrow, financial sense. There’s that famous line from ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ – Blanche Dubois says: “Strange, I should be called a poor woman, but I have all this wealth around.” But I don’t think of wealth that way.

I think of wealth as money and stuff, but also freedom, in a sense, and liberating. I mean, wealth means big houses around the world, big cars and things like that. But more importantly, it means that it can transcend the hassles and petty trivialities of life that I think tend to consume, sadly, most people in the world.

Because if you can’t pay your electric bill, or you’re stressed out about the school fees, then it’s hard to get past that and sit around and really enjoy learning about music or something, because you’re too focused on how to pay your bills. So I think it’s a sad aspect of human existence, really – society and existence – that you need to satisfy the basics first. Wealth has the sort of connotation that you can fly above that, so for me that’s the connotation of it, and that’s the value of it.

I’ve always been a generous person, even when I didn’t really have any money. Whatever I had, I kind of shared ... actually, I always had slightly more than those around me. When I was at high school – what do you call it here? Senior school – I used to work, had a little business, did odd jobs and things. I was saving money, and I was buying stocks even back then, because my grandfather got me into it. When I was fifteen, I already owned some stocks.

I had a lucky streak, so I always had a bit more money than my friends, and therefore I was also a bit more generous. So I started being generous quite early. You can do something to help someone

in great and various ways and still have it not affect you. That’s sort of like a measure. True generosity’s when you say, I’m going to part with something to help you, and it’s actually going to have an impact on me; I’m going to have to cut back something. That’s truly generous.

If I say I’m going to help you, but that actually it doesn’t really matter to me, that’s not really being generous. I’ll still do it, though, in terms of money. I think it’s still a nice thing to do, and it makes the person a nicer human being. Many years ago now, my sister was getting out of university and had a bunch of social justice kind of jobs, virtually earning nothing. So I gave her some money to buy a flat in New York – she bought a small flat. It was just a chunk of money – it didn’t really affect me. But it was certainly a big change for her. So I guess over time, you start realising the things you can do are larger and larger, and still not have much of an impact on you. So that’s sort of a measure.

We lived in a small town 60 miles from New York City. Not exactly rural, but a nice kind of place. Firstly, the kids I went to high school with still live in Middletown and work at the mall, or whatever. If you ever went to the Catskills, you would pass through Middletown. There’s a hospital there, and a mall. Those are the two main things there, so I worked at the hospital.

My dad was a doctor, so we were comfortable growing up, but there was no wealth, per se. Some doctors are quite clever, businesswise, but my dad wasn’t, so he had all these mishaps with how they managed their practice. Anyway, we were comfortable, but we didn’t have a lot of money. It never occurred to me, though, because we’d go on holiday to Cape Cod and drive out there in a car stuffed full of things, and rent a house for $700, and that was fine. It was nice. My parents grew up next door to each other in eastern Pennsylvania – they were childhood sweethearts. When I was a kid, my grandparents lived next door to each other. I thought everyone’s grandparents lived next door to each other! My mother’s parents were quite wealthy; I thought they were kind of wealthy because my grandfather had a factory that made ladies’ underwear.

He employed 500 women sewing this underwear; this was in the Fifties.

Over the years there must have been almost twenty people that came to me with stories, or I heard conversations over the years, along the lines of: “When I was in trouble…” or “When our family had difficulties, your grandfather came and helped us out, and they would send anything…” Those stories had an impact on me.

I thought, that’s a really nice thing. No-one ever spoke about it much, perhaps a little bit. It wasn’t like, out there. We just quietly helped a lot of people. So I kind of feel like that. My father, being a doctor in this small town, was like a hero. He was a very generous guy with his time, knowledge and compassion. So when I was a kid growing up in that town, many people came to me over the years and said: “Your father helped us.”

I really wanted to be like my dad or my grandfather, or some combination of them. They were the formative adults in my life.

But I never knew what wealth was. I had a girlfriend when I got out of college – I knew that she was kind of rich, she lived in Philadelphia, but I didn’t really know what that meant. One day we were at dinner, and I asked her, how rich are your parents? And she said: “Well, my dad sold his business, they sold up for $100 million.” $100 million? Shit! How is that possible? And that was the first time it occurred to me that real wealth wasn’t just the Getty’s and the Rothschild’s, but that there’s real wealth around you. In everyday people that you meet, or your girlfriend!

Particularly in America. I know from our business – there are innumerable families in that situation, that’s sold a business for $1,500 or $300 million, because they’ve invested into firms I guess.

Some of them being the Getty’s and Rothschild’s – most of our clients, actually – but some are just some guy in Cleveland that had a good business making whatever. That’s the other thing – everything is a business, everything. When you look around you, it’s a business.

My uncle’s best friend seemed prosperous, Marvin. He pulled

me aside once when I was a kid and told me that in the business world, you have to find your niche. His niche used to be in the shipbuilding industry. Of course, they don’t have it any more. He said ships use a lot of wire and cable, and the big companies only produce wire and cable in a fixed 50 foot spool or whatever. So he went to them and said: “I’ll bespoke it for you. I’ll cut you any lengths you want. I’ll supply you.” They said: “That sounds good, that’ll save us wastage.” That’s how he built his business. That was his little niche, simple. He was doing what no- one else was doing.

Actually, it’s sort of like the animal kingdom, whether it’s the Galapagos or Christmas. This animal feeds on the ticks off of that other animal, or the poop of that other animal ... each animal kind of finds its little spot. The business world’s a bit like that.

Actually, that girl who I went out with from Philadelphia, in the Sixties her father had the insight on the oil industry. All the oil refineries in the US are down by where the oil is, which is down in Texas and Louisiana. But a lot of the oil was being used up in the north, so you’ve got to get it from one to the other. They used to put it on little boats. Her father went to Japan and asked them to design him the biggest boat they can come up with, a big barge, to be pushed by a tug. He bought two of those apparently, and set up a business shipping oil before anyone else figured it out, shipping oil from Louisiana, refined products. These ideas were percolating in my head when I was a kid. I was thinking, you’re a young adult.

I’d like to have money, I’d like to be like my grandfather, and generous, and kind of fascinating, this niche thing. I wonder what I can figure out.

When I was twelve my father said: “You save $100, I’ll double it, and we’ll buy a stock together. I wonder if you can do that for me?” Of course, I said yes. We bought six shares of Eastern Gas and Fuel in the company, for $30 a share or something. Every day, I used to go to get the newspaper, open it up and check to see if I made a dollar, or I lost 40 cents.

At that point it was trying to understand the whole aspect of the business world. If you don’t know about how industries work and

how everything works, and who provides what to who, and who gets paid and how much and what the rules are, and all that stuff, that’s fine; but I think you go through life, in a sense, missing a whole lot.

So for me, because we bought six shares of Eastern Gas and Fuel, that was my first ‘wow’ moment, my first taste of business, money.

I thought, I see, utilities – they burn coal, then this company has its own coal, so I guess I just started to see how it worked.

Then I talked to my granddad, saying let’s buy another stock! We can make a little more money. He said, well, why don’t we buy those oil stocks? So I’ve learned about that, and suddenly you realise the whole world’s just full of thousands of stocks. I remember my father telling me that you had to be patient.

When the contraceptive pill first came out, which was I think in the Sixties, the company that first sold it first was called Syntex. I don’t know who developed it. I remember my father or my grandfather saying to me that they were speaking to this doctor who said: “This is big.” So we bought some Syntex. A doctor in our town saw it quite early and realised it was going to really change stuff. He put his life savings into it and made two million dollars in a day, and that was in Middletown! I started to get how you figure the stuff out. So I became fascinated by the idea that you can actually do some homework, or have some knowledge, and make real money out of the financial profits.

I worked for a number of very successful eminent financiers. One guy was called Mark King, then I worked for Soros. Soros’s main guy was called Stan Druckenmiller. I asked both Mark and Stan, on my first days, or maybe even my interviews: “You’re billionaires – why do you keep doing this?” And they both gave me a different answer, but basically the same answer. Mark said: “I like to play the game and win,” and Stan said: “I’ve an unhealthy need to be right.”

But it is the same thing. To me, it’s all of that, especially with the rules here in the UK. We all have, in theory, the same opportunity to figure it out and make the right bet. The financial markets are

motivated by a lot of really smart people who are very motivated to get it right.

It’s a duel of wits kind of thing. That’s what has always captivated me. I could spend all week in researching the flower industry, or whatever, and figure something out, whereas the next guy didn’t or wouldn’t. The second thing is George Soros’ book, ‘The Alchemy of Finance’. He had this idea which popped into his head, and he made a little book out of it. I love the title because that really is true ... even now I get a thrill out of it. It’s not always doing weeks of research in companies; sometimes, there’s decades of doing this.

It’s just intuition or whatever. I’ll take a flier on something and it’ll work on me, capture me. And I’ll say, wow, just like out of thin air. It really is alchemy. To me, that’s still a thrill, that kind of a miracle, just a fascinating phenomena. It’s interesting – I was talking to my brother-in-law about this. I said, the funny thing is, it’s not that hard. It’s actually quite easy. He said, well that’s why you do what you do. Because I started really young, or I just happen to have a knack, like some people are really good at tennis or something.

I always say, particularly when I’m talking to clients, that there’s a spectrum of investing – one end of the dial’s art, and the other end is science. There are people who are very scientific so, for example, the most scientific thing might be complex computer trading. This company has 90 Russian PhDs sitting in a Long Island warehouse, and they work out these algorithms, and they do this trading.

That’s not intuition. That’s pure maths, and that’s really science.

And they’ve made billions of dollars out of fashion markets.

I don’t know much on the art side so we do a lot more research, but then it’s still me saying: “This feels like it’s the right time to get involved, this one really seems …” I don’t know if it’s intuition or just experience. A lot of it, actually, believe it or not, is pattern recognition – where you just look at something and say, I’ve seen that before. It’s probably going to work out this way. There are patterns in the world, and you see them, and you recognise them, and it takes a certain amount of knowledge or experience at the time to see those patterns.

It’s funny, people have different skills. I have a friend who has an incredible visual memory.

She is walking down the street and there’s the most minor film star. She’ll say, oh, that’s so-and- so, and he was in such and such a movie. I can’t even recognise Brad Pitt. I feel like it’s a skill that should be utilised. I don’t have that, and other people have it musically or whatever. For me it’s patterns – I can see something, and if I see it the second time I just think, aha. I don’t even think it; I feel an emotion.

Another aspect of it (probably more of a different aspect), is that you can sit around and analyse what might happen in a given subject, whatever the subject is, over the next year or so. If you pick a subject like bank regulation, I bet you there’s going to be more rules on this, and I bet you this is going to happen. I bet you there’s a property boom, so maybe there’ll be some demand for mortgages – I don’t know, whatever. It’s not so hard to sit around if you know something about how this stuff works – that’s the easy part. The hard part is to say, well, fine. If all that happens, how are people going to feel about that in a year? Because that’s what’s going to determine a financial crisis. That’s the analysis part, and key to the prices of things in my world. I think I’m pretty good at looking at the situation and saying: “Aha! I bet you, in a year’s time, people are going to be looking at it this way, because of … the following things will happen … and therefore the price is going to be ten instead of six … because they’re going to be … That’s going to provoke in them a certain mood, or a new set of expectations, or a new perception of how the value of that business sits. That’s partly intuitive and partly experiential. It’s also the ability to project yourself into the future, because it’s kind of about the future.

There’s a third thing, of course. The next step, if you have the motivation (which not everyone does, and it doesn’t make you a bad person if you don’t), but if you have the motivation to take that knowledge and skill set and go, is to really maximise the value of it.

It’s not like everyone has to be single-minded, pursuing wealth. But if you want that then you need to translate the skills into enterprise.

If you’re going to be in the financial industry, if you’re going to do this job, you may as well go for it and be as successful as you can. I don’t see any point in being in banking, in this country, and being mediocre – what’s the point? Money isn’t everything, but where this is my business, that’s what it is ultimately. So therefore I was always set out to be the best. And by the way, I’m hardly the most successful guy in this business, but ... I always felt like, from my very first job, that I wanted to be the top guy. I’m better than that guy – I can do better than him. I should have his job. You can advance. And that’s the other thing – I always find it amazing how in many fields, and certainly in this field, just how quickly you can advance. I just turned 31 when George Soros put me in charge of his entire Asian investments. 31! So you can advance. These sort of steps function in incredible ways, in this business.

I had lived in Asia for five years, so I knew something about Asia. I was investing for this other fund, like him, but one-tenth of the stock list. I had lunch with him and, to be honest, it wasn’t completely different from this conversation in a way. He was talking about how I look at the world. Literally, within two minutes, I knew I had the job. I could just see we were engaging, and I knew that that was it.

George is all about intuition. Well, he’s about two things: he’s about intuition and he’s about guts. I have a lot of the first, and not that much of the second. That’s why he’s worth 20 billion, and I’m not.

And maybe you could psychoanalyse him, because he fled the Holocaust and never got any of his wealth. If he sees something he likes, he bets the ranch, and then he borrows some money and bets a second ranch. If I see something I like, I sort of take 3%.

I think it’s frightening. I much prefer to focus on the downside, you might say, and he’s probably more focused on the upside. I’ll just sit around, saying: “That sounds good,” or “This could go wrong.”

I guess I worry about what might happen, whereas he’s just focused.

He’s like: “No, no – the upside is this. This downside, forget that – the upside is this.”

The beauty of it makes sense to bet big, because we’re not flipping a coin, and hopefully we’ve an advantage. In theory, it’s like I’m going

to the casino, but I know the cards. It doesn’t matter, I always get it right, but I should get it right two-thirds of the time, which means I should be betting big. So if you were playing blackjack and develop like a 1% advantage, and that’s enough to become the world’s most famous blackjack player … Well, in theory, I don’t know what my advantage is supposed to be. But a guy like me should have a much bigger advantage because over time, that’s what George Soros’ kind of insight and personality allowed him to do.

George made a ton of money from the Crash. He didn’t figure it out, but he spoke to a couple who had figured it out, and he bet big. I had spent years thinking something’s not right – it’s going to crash; something’s not right, it’s going to crash. And it crashes, like – shit! – I knew this was going to happen.

I studied English at College. Actually, with a drama focus, so I studied Shakespeare and Restoration Drama. I just wanted to read stuff, and write whatever the minimum amount of essays I could get away with, and otherwise hang out with my family.

Yeah, I would hang out with my friends, listen to the Grateful Dead. And I got good grades... But I found it easy, whereas my freshman year roommate was a Bio Chem major, and he’d come back with so much work. For me, I just read. You needed to read three Shakespeare plays and write a paper on Henry IVth Part One, or Falstaff, or whatever. Basically, I think I squandered the opportunity to get a real education because I was too busy doing other things.

Well, career-wise it wasn’t squandering, because as it turns out this is something I advise young people today when they ask me. I say, the best major for what I do is humanities.

Whichever ever one you want to do, do – whether it’s history or English or philosophy, because you’re called on to analyse texts and to draw, to come up with a thesis, and then defend it with a text. So you say, Harold Pinter’s play, The Homecoming – there’s such-and-such a character who always behaves in a certain way, and

then you go through it. I went through the text, every single line and all my ideas. I was just looking for textual evidence. So here’s my four examples there. And then I’d say, the next logical thing in the essay is this, and then I follow on from that. So you had your point, and then you had to put that, and then the hard part was coming up with the point. The easy part was getting all the textual stuff, organising it and then writing in some kind of compelling way. If you can do that, then you could be an analyst. As an analyst, I was called upon to write about companies – I found it really easy because for me it’s much harder to write about James Joyce than it is to write about electric utilities, or something else like that.

When I got out of college I got mostly As. I’d been investing in some stocks. Now I’m 21, investing in stocks since I was twelve, I actually know something. But all these big banks were saying we want humanities graduates – I should have had the pick of the jobs, but I didn’t get any job offers. I really tried. I was kind of shocked that I didn’t. Well, the real reason is, I had long hair down to here, and I probably went to the interview stoned!

But all the guys that got the jobs, and women, despite what the banks say, were the econ grads, economics and all that stuff; computer science and maths and everything. It really pissed me off.

These guys all had their fabulously lucrative jobs and cache. It was very humiliating, actually. So I moved to Boston unemployed. I had squandered, and I’d got through college with having saved $15 or $18,000 from my little shares, and I just spent it all on whatever.

I got to Boston with $1,000 in my pocket, and no job, and the humiliation ...

And I worked in a wine shop for $6 an hour. I had a series of other jobs. It was humiliating, actually. I was singularly the least successful graduate. And my parents were obviously very disappointed. They felt, we spent all this money and he has had this education. So when I finally got a job with this very small fund manager in Boston, it was very old-fashioned. They put me in the corner and had me doing these basic things, and I was really motivated to get past those bastards. I was actually determined to leave the desk. It’s not

something I think about a lot, but certainly you learn on the job.

You may as well study car mechanics or something. So at a certain point, the one who’s got the imagination or wit, eventually they stick to it.

Another thing it teaches you is the value of the dollar. I wouldn’t say I’m too old-fashioned, but in my first job I was paid $14,000 – even in those days, that wasn’t a lot. In Boston, in the subway, they have those trams that were 60 cents, but if you took it outbound once it went above ground, it was free. I used to walk from my office to that point, which was about a mile-and-a-half, to save 60 cents. So 60 cents times five days a week is $3 times 50 weeks, it’s $150. You had to earn $250 to get the $150 tax rate, and I’m only earning $14,000, so I’ve just increased my salary by 2%. But I made it work.

I travelled around. I didn’t feel like I was living in squalor, but I was really careful with every cent.

That’s something I regret with my kids – they have no idea.

Even now that I try to explain it, I can’t; I don’t mind spending a lot of money on a picture, but to waste two pounds, even now it annoys me; it sticks in my craw. The other day, I have a Railcard, you get a 30% discount off peak and I was rushing to see my son in Winchester. I got to the station and I hit the return – it was definitely off peak, and they said, pay, put the credit card in. I just wasted £7 because I had a Railcard, and this really bugs me. My kids say well, how can it bug you? And I’m like, because that’s a waste. £7! You may as well take £7 out of your wallet and tear it into shreds, and throw it in the garbage bin.

I didn’t cut my hair for the interviews. The funny thing was, all these universities have career planning departments. They’re motivated to get you jobs, because obviously that helps the university. Vicky Ball was her name, and she was also my freshman year advisor. Making friends with her in the senior year meant I was quite friendly with the career advisor.

Yeah. I interviewed for the whole Who’s Who of all the American banks and consulting companies. I didn’t get any jobs. She called

me into her office and explained that when you have an interview with Goldman Sachs, they would write some comments down and send them back. She said: “I have in front of me all the comments.

I’ve been head of career planning for nearly 15 years, and I have never seen a worst set of comments than yours.”

She said that you came across as subversive and irreverent, a bit hippyish. She said, one of the commentators even thought you were on drugs during the interview. And I can see she was very disappointed. Anyway, I’m actually very glad all of that happened, because it kind of set the stage for later. I think if I had just gotten that job at Goldman Sachs, I would be much less further along, I’m sure, because I would have just said, ‘Oh, well here’s the way it is’, and you sort of coast. It was that burning frustration, humiliation and disappointment that made me go for it, probably as proof to myself, and probably to get back at the whole damn system.

I was interviewing, I remember, for anything. I was looking at the papers and I was interviewing not just for finance but for anything I thought I could do, so I remember interviewing to be a copywriter for a software company. I remember writing this letter, saying, if you’re looking for a copywriter, I can write you, I have pizzazz.

I wrote this really witty letter, and they were very excited. Of all the letters we got, this one really stood out. But by the end of the interview I’d managed to offend them, too. So I kind of lucked into that first job, which was a little company, whatever, and I asked them about stocks. It was a job to respond to written enquiries from their lowest-level customers. I read that the price of oil’s going to go up, what do you think? And they’d hand it to me to answer.

That was actually a good job, because I learned a lot, every day.

They’d just hand me the stack of letters, a dozen random things I had to research or something. Then I was determined to get that job at Goldman Sachs. I set a rule for myself. The fund managers provided these lunches – usually they were little inconsequential companies, but the company would be presenting lunch at the whatever hotel, so I’d say okay, I’ll go to that. There’d be six people, and the manager, CEO or something, of some company,

saying, we do this, and you’d get a very nice lunch out of it.

I said, okay, I’m going to collect one business card from everyone at these lunches, and when I’m ready, I’m going to write to the person I sat next to: Remember, I sat next to you; do you have a job? Eventually, I sat next to some guy from Goldman Sachs and I said I’d love to work at Goldman Sachs.

I got a call, and he said there’s a guy that handles this very junior program, so he got me an interview with this guy. I remember that day very well. That was my big test. I eventually sat in front of them. Different people were looking for junior assistants, so I got in front of this half dozen and my last one was with this Israeli woman who was the food analyst for Heinz and Campbell’s Soup. We hit it off. She said: “You know, I’m not so sure about you. I want to hire you, but I’m not so sure.

I should tell you, if I hire you and I’m disappointed, I won’t hesitate to fire you.” I said, “That’s fine.” Now she says I was the best analyst she ever had, and she’s our client, and every time I see her, she’s like, Davy! How are you?!

So I got in and then I worked. She was a very hard-driving person. She was a food analyst, so she would produce a quarterly, and the quarterly would be about that thick, and there’d be a discussion on prices, commodities and what’s happening in the food industry. Then there would be a discussion of each company. There’s fifteen companies. It was full of numbers, full of tables of numbers, and she was very innumerate, so I had to do all the numbers. There were 60 tables of numbers. There might be just corn prices, and it might be fashioning her expectations for the Campbell’s Soup company into an earnings table, or something like that. It was also the old days – there was Lotus 123, so I had to learn how to do spreadsheets as well. But the rest of it, they do a chart, corn prices, which now I can do in about ten seconds on my iPhone.

I had to go on a mainframe computer, log on, suck down this data, put on a disc, go to the IT department and book an appointment with the guy who ran the graph machine, put the thing in. Then this thing would go duh duh duh duh, for like

an hour-and-a-half or something. She couldn’t tolerate any errors, and then she’d go through it. Of course, you knew there was going to be some mistake in 60 pages of this stuff. I remember one time I had this whole thing called the Focus. I presented the whole thing.

She’s going through it and found some mistake, so she picked the whole stack of papers and said, “This makes me sick,” and just threw it at me.

She was good at spotting typos or an actual error. So I was determined to please her. I was probably the best junior analyst, but then I was determined. I wanted to go to Hong Kong – I don’t know why. At that point I met Sarah, and she was moving out there. I thought, it sounds like an incredible adventure. I was being offered a promotion, to be promoted at Goldman Sachs, like the next ladder up. I said, do I really want to do that? Versus the adventures of Hong Kong? I thought, I’m really screwing my career up.

Partly it was Sarah, and partly because I was fascinated by travel, so I thought, I’m going to do it. That turned out to be a great career move, because that was just really the very beginning of the world waking up and saying, wow! Asia’s growing really fast, and the future’s in Asia. So I inadvertently became a specialist in something that went on to become very important, and also where there really weren’t that many credible people, even now! But back then there was nobody. So suddenly I was like, wow, here’s a guy who’s obviously fired up, who worked at Goldman Sachs, got a good education, went to Browns University, lived in Hong Kong a while – that’s a guy that we want.

So I had something that was different. And then, eventually I moved back to New York.

In Hong Kong, my job was what they call ‘sell side analyst’. Sell side is like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, and they earn their money by facilitating transactions, by stock exchange.

They’ll analyse if there’s a merger and acquisition between two companies, and they’ll advise on that, every flavour transaction, and getting fees for transactions.

They charge you for effecting that, or for advising this. So they employ analysts, and the analysts write about companies and meet with clients, and say, I think you should buy. I was the utility analyst first. I was doing research on China Light & Power, and would say I think you should buy this. That’s what I did for five years out there, and then my father got cancer unfortunately, so I decided I would move back. Just at that point I was learning about these so-called hedge funds, and hedge funds advanced, and if you get it right in here, you earn a ton of money – that sounds good, especially as I’m moving back to New York. So I interviewed, again. It was a little bit like the experience in Boston. I have a very methodical side, so everyone who’s in this game I contacted one by one. Eventually I got a job with this guy, Mark Keenan, and he just said, okay, I’m going to hire you. Sit in the corner, I’m going to give you $100 million, two or three billion cap again, and you invest in Asia, and I’ll pay you a little percentage of what the profits we’re going to earn. I would never do that actually, with my company, but he hired somebody; no actual investing.

When I say investing experience for myself, I’ve got no proper institutional investing experience. He trusted me to go and invest or speculate, as everyone was saying, with a capital return, a small amount. That’s a small amount of capital really, and he was only paying me a tiny little percentage of the profits, but that was fine.

It was my foot in the door. I did that for a year-and-a-half. It was actually a tough time in the market, so again I had a kind of sunny upstream kind of experience. I made some profits in a very tough environment.

Then George Soros was looking for a guy for Asia – he didn’t like the one he had.

That’s kind of an amusing story as a sidetrack. As it turned out, that job working for Soros was the plumb job in the industry, probably the top job you could have, but I didn’t really appreciate that at the time. I didn’t know George Soros, and I just thought, oh, he’s the guy that broke the Bank of England. I was very loyal to Mark Keenan and gave him a shot, and I thought, I like my job. I

was contacted by the head-hunters. I actually said I’m not interested – call Sheldon Cassocks, who was a friend of mine living in Hong Kong and my business partner. They say that George wants to meet you too, but I’m not interested in meeting with George. Several months went by and, unbeknownst to me, George Soros was sitting there going, who is this guy not wanting to meet with me? I meet presidents and prime ministers. So eventually, I was persuaded to go.

By the time I walked in there, he was really curious to see who I was!

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned, I walked in there, and he sat down, and we just talked.

In fact, the five years that I was there was almost like a father/son thing. It was a very warm relationship. He’s a generous, and at some level a humble guy, at some levels not so humble. But really, what he wants to be remembered as is as a thinker and a philosopher, not like some guy who got really rich. He’s written some books, and one was particularly well-reviewed; he loves to stand up and say, at a press conference, I knew that Europe was going to do this. He wants to be thought of as someone who is, has, something of value to add to the discourse of humanity, and not just someone who has really settled for a trade. When I left, I still had no wealth really, to speak of.

Ultimately in this business, you probably want to have your own things. The ultimate sort of thing. If you get me running George’s $20 billion, he just has to pay you half-a-billion dollars in a year. I just think that the odds that are probably low. I knew that George was in a state of flux. I kind of thought, what the hell, let’s do our own things. So me and Sheldon (bear in mind Sheldon was best man at my wedding), then when I joined Soros I said to George: “You need a team, you’re trying to do it with one guy, and I can get you the best team.” So he said: “Go ahead and hire them.” So I hired a bunch of people, including this guy who is my friend, and then Soros blew up. He set this thing, the two of us, and we hired; we brought with us the whole team, and we set about doing something that you never do, which is to build a real company. If you’re a Swiss billionaire or something, you can just say, oh, that George Soros, he’s brilliant and I’ve decided to give him $300 million of money to match. For us, to get pension funds money, Cambridge

University’s money, it’s a whole process. You can’t just be, oh, he’s had to support a dinner or something – you had to fill the whole infrastructure, which we did, but George never did.

My company has about 90 people. It’s mostly in the States and in Hong Kong. This is just because Sarah’s English, and decided she wanted to move here, so our office here is tiny. To me, home is back in New York.

I go to New York regularly. I was there last week. We spent the month of August there, and I’d probably go three or four times for business, for a week or three days; Hong Kong, two weeks; and Korea, I go out there three times a year for ten days, say. I stay in London too. The industry – the financial industry – is a fascinating animal. There are a lot of people, different actors in this giant play, that are prepared to or want to come to see me all the time.

I could spend 24/7, the entire day, meeting with people. Every flavour, companies that want to get along with investors because they need capital, or will need in the future. Hedge funds are very vague. It’s almost like saying, artist.

It really means nothing. Actually, I hate when I see that word in the press, because it’s just such a meaningless term, and it has this weird connotation of secret dark forces for extracting wealth, women and children or something. All it really is that someone gives you money, rich people or institutions, banks – somebody – and says, invest it, and if you succeed, we’ll pay you a percentage of the profits. So maybe this one guy is a Russian scientist sitting on Long Island, one guy who builds the companies like I do; he says, I’m going to look at real estate, and buy loans from banks – whatever, it could be a zillion flavours. Yeah, there’s a thousand different flavours.

The title of the equity was equity loan shop, which just means we analyse companies and we bet on the good ones and bet against the bad ones.

Well, it’s funny. The rules of the financial industry are under such

scrutiny now, by people who either don’t understand how it works or choose not to understand how it works, that I can’t even take a client to lunch. But they can’t even have a sandwich for lunch, because it’s been deemed as me trying to bribe them – if you have a nice egg sandwich, you might give me some of the assets of your fund.

So you don’t take clients to lunch, because it’s too much of a problem with the regulatory procedures. Mostly, if I take people to lunch, it’s personal stuff. I get taken to lunch by investment bankers and brokers.

Or you might have someone come in and say hi, or the Goldman Sachs’ auto history expert’s coming in at ten o’clock. He comes in and says: “Ah, I want to talk about what I see is happening in the auto industry. My recommendation is that you do this and that.”

I will say OK, of course it’s a discourse, to be inspired directly by what he’s saying, and send off investors to him.

Then, hey, I’ve met this guy. He says that the Japanese oil commission have a real advantage, because the yen is weak.

We’ve thought about that – how is it going to affect this other thing? Or often times I get ideas – they want to talk about apples and I just think, oranges, or something completely off … lateral thinking of all kinds.

Then a company will come in and say: “Hi, we’re in the carpet business.” Really, how’s that working? Who’s your competition?

Where do you sell, and where do you source materials, and what are the costs? What are the regulations around that? What are your financial statements?

Also, I focus very much on the motivation of people. If you think about it, everyone has something that makes them tick. Everyone has different things.

What I want to hear is someone say, I’ve started this company, or I’ve been with it a long time. Or I’ve got a put a bit of stock and I

want to get rich. Or I want to build this company, I want to sell it for twenty times the current price. That sounds good to me, because I’m piggy-backing alongside him. I spend quite a bit of time, partly to get a sense of who you are and partly to put you at ease, I usually talk about you. And it’s amazing how small the world is. I mean very often, you’ll say something like: “I was working at such-and-such a company…” “Oh, really? Do you know this guy? Oh, you do, wow, yeah – how is he doing?” And before you know it, the guy’s relaxed. It’s kind of a human touch.

So I try to do a company a day. Basically I do two or three, and then I realise ... the amazing thing is, it actually takes a lot out of you. It sounds weird, and I was saying this to some of my colleagues – I don’t know if it’s a matter of getting older, but I find that those company meetings take a lot out of you. They’re exhausting, because you have an hour usually of someone’s time.

You really want to get as much out of that as you can, and you have to be exceptionally prepared, because if you ask dumb questions, or whatever, the meeting starts to deteriorate. You need to do some homework before it. You come in, and are informed, and then you’ve got to really use your wits, because people give little clues about things and you’ve got to recognise them and jump. Typically, people come in and they have their patter. They always come out with presentation books. What they really want to do is come and say, OK, turn to page two. Here you can see a chart of our ‘whatever’ and they just go through the motions. I don’t want that. So I get them off piste, and I get them relaxed, and just figure that one of you needs to betray something that might be interesting, and get down that path. That’s tough. After those meetings, I walk out and I’m exhausted. Also, to be likeable.

You want them to be laughing when they walk out of the meeting – ah, that was a great meeting, here’s my card. Look me up when you’re in Singapore, or whatever. So it’s hard. If you do it three times in a day, it’s like ... so I can only do it once. There are conferences that you go to where you do all the companies together – they come to a hotel in Knightsbridge or something, and then you sign up, and you interview one after the other, and that’s exhausting. I do that a lot. When I wake up in the morning

and know it’s the oil industry conference at Knightsbridge, I say: Oh my God, it’s going to be tough today.

Collecting art Well, there’s collecting and there’s collecting. When I was in Asia, I’d go to India and I’d buy. I don’t know what possessed me, it’s just that interest. I’d go to a gallery and I’d buy a picture for $300 or something. I wish I had a little more of some of that Indian stuff, that you could buy for $300 then – it’s worth $50,000 now. But I’d buy this, and it didn’t occur to me to spend a lot of money. I used to collect stamps when I was a kid, and I became fascinated by old things. I used to particularly like old covers, stamps on the envelope, and often times the envelope had a letter in it. I remember when I was in high school, I did a project, when I was about thirteen, on the American Civil War. I had all these covers, and in the covers were letters, so whereas everyone else just kind of read the book everyone gave them about the nineties, I had stuff like this letter written by a woman who was sewing flags, talking about how her husband was going to war. Wow, where did that come from? So I stumbled one day into this nice gallery in London on a business trip, and there’s a room for Tudor and Stuart portraits – he was a Tudor and Stuart portrait dealer. I was like, wow! It just rekindled my love of all things really old, cool things, all with stories, all with history, and I bought a picture for £8,000, which we still have somewhere.

It’s actually upstairs. He didn’t even know what it was. He probably paid £200 or something. It turned out to be a Swiss portrait. It’s a crude portrait of a guy standing there, holding a lily of the valley, and there were some books and things, and he’s obviously meant to be a scientists, or posing as a scientists, or something like that. It’s 300 years old, and I’m like, wow, you can buy a 300-year-old picture for £8,000 – amazing, really cool.

I just hung it on the wall, as decoration, as a talking piece. And then I ran into him again in New York. I had a conversation and

then we went to the Christie’s Old Master auction thing, and I suddenly realised, wow, there’s like all kinds of pictures out there.

I then realised, hey, you’re a specialist in this narrow area. I could tell he had an eye. He seemed to have a lot of knowledge about a lot of stuff. So I said, well, how does that work, if you have all this knowledge back here? Your dealership is just this very narrow thing.

He says, well, it’s frustrating. Sometimes I see stuff that looks good, but doesn’t really fit with what I do. And also, he said, I don’t have the capital to go and buy a Flemish landscape, or something. So I said, all right, here’s the deal – I want to learn about art and I’m fascinated by it, and you need a bit of the money. So I’ll put up some money, we’ll buy some pictures together, that aren’t Tudor and Stuart portraits. But I want to know, I want you to keep me in that loop, everything we do, I want you to tell me why we do it, what’s the story, and all that. Teach me. So that’s how we started.

To be honest with you, I think he thought Christmas came early.

Here’s like this dumb American who’s going to give me money. I’m sure his intention was to rip me off.

He’s actually a friend of mine, a good friend of mine now. I’m sure he thought, I’m going to make a bunch of money out of this, and I’ll teach the kid something too. When I started getting into it I bought a couple that are hanging in the dining room – the first proper picture is a Dutch portrait, which is 1540’s.

I saw right away how that one was a very different quality to this other thing I’d bought. I thought, you know what? I don’t want to sell that picture. Can I just keep it, and I’ll pay you a little commission or something? And so he kept it, and then suddenly I had a proper picture. And then in Bedford, New York, where we were living, I went to a dinner party and sat next to the curator of Dutch pictures of the Met, who was also a friend now – I just saw him last week. I said: “What do you do for a living?” “I’m the curator of Dutch pictures.” I said, “I have a Dutch picture.” He said, “What do you have?” “I have a portrait.” He thought it was quite an obscure thing for some guy to have, sitting in Bedford. I mean, to get a collection is one thing, but to have one picture? He said, “Well that’s an unusual thing to have. Do you have a private collection, or

something?” I said, “Do you want to come and look at this?” So, a couple of days later, he came up to the house and, as we walked in, I had the picture sitting there on the wall. He had this big file of the Met’s; we had an Ottoman. He just started putting these pictures, one by one, of all these other early Dutch portraits on the Ottoman, and eventually he put a photograph of my picture, which the Met had in the archive. I remember thinking, wow, that’s so cool. That is my picture in the photograph in the archive, and there it is, it’s hanging on the wall. This is really cool. So it started to dawn on me how fascinating this whole world is. We started talking about that, with the Dutch portraits. There are just endless layers of fascination with this stuff – it captivated me really quickly.

I’ve always been more interested in portraits than, let’s say, a landscape, because landscapes are like, OK it’s a landscape. The Dutch countryside probably still looks kind of like that. Portraits, a real live human being who walked the earth in 1550 or whatever – incredible. First of all, it’s incredible how much they looked like us, and it’s incredible how different they look as well. Obviously their dress and their expressions, but some of them look like they could have been painted ... sometimes you see someone walking down the street, like oh my God, it looks exactly like that.

It’s kind of like my thing. I love to look at, I love to learn about things. I know so little. I feel like pathetically, really pathetically human. So you’re hanging out with the curators and the dealers and all, and then once I’ve learned something, I’m like, how could I not know that?

Charlie Bean Deputy Governor, Monetary Policy Deputy Governor, Monetary Policy at the Bank Of England.

He is also President-Elect of the Royal Economic Society.

On arrival at Charlie’s office for our interview appointment, I was immediately sent into the waiting room. There are bank tellers opposite the reception and Bank of England cash machines nearby. Old portraits hang majestically around the domed ceilinged room, with cherubs and muses holding up the ceiling.

There is one other person waiting, wearing a red visitor necklace like me. He looks nervous.

A young man in a pink/orange jacket, possibly from South America, appears. I had wanted to be early to just sit and survey but I am being hustled in. He leads me speedily down the mosaicked corridors of the grand ground floor, telling me that it all becomes very dull and office like two floors up and that this is the stately area. I am led through a door to a carpeted corridor where my coat is taken. I’m accompanied along a thin corridor, like an inner tunnel, to the rooms around the garden courtyard and left to wait in an ante chamber. I immediately look at the paintings – one by Rowlandson of the domed hall with bankers, another being the famous cartoon of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street being attacked, from Napoleonic times.

I don’t have time to do much before I am called in by Charlie Bean. I manage to drop everything, scoop it all up again, put my glasses on my head, shuffle into his room and take the sofa. I have planned what I would like to get through within the allotted 30 minute time slot. I pull out my books and stuff and start.

It is a jumble of a conversation – Charlie is a very precise and controlled speaker, but I am all over the place, so we talk about everything; the City of London Festival (Charlie is on the Board), and about what it is I would like to do in the bank. I explain

about my Gifts project. He gets the idea and understands that we’re a small group, but reiterates that this is not something that is done there and I say of course, but that even my visiting him will become a part of the piece.

I give Charlie a coin, one I chose for him today. It’s a Belgium coin from 1929 so I deliberately don’t mention the date as that was the year of the stock market crash! It has a hole in the centre and a lovely flower. He immediately counters that as I am giving him a gift of a coin he will give me a gift, too. On his windowsill are a collection of commemorative coins in boxes, ones I imagine he is given on his travels around the world. In fact the first one he offers me is from Korea. But I liked the Adam Smith one, and one of dancers, but he decided I should have the Adam Smith coin. Nestled in its blue case, I have no idea where it’s from but it has the saying: ‘The effort of every man to better his condition’, a profile and the dates 1723-1790 on the other side. I am overwhelmed and hastily hide the Starbucks chocolate coin I have just bought as a joke before getting here. I’m not sure it would be appreciated as a joke and, anyway, Starbucks may give the wrong idea all round!

Then I asked the question “What does wealth mean to you?”, and we began the interview.

Charlie looked up a book on his computer – Art and Accounting, by a fellow colleague Basil Yamey – and told me to get it from the Yale University Press. Charlie started out doing mathematics at university but he admitted that quantum mechanics was too much for him. So on his second year he changed to Economics, an easier discipline of logical reasoning applied to understanding economic choices and applying techniques.

He continues: “How do people choose between competing things when resources are constrained? How do you decide to split your money? It is Bread and Butter writ large. My interest is in public policy, wanting to get better outcomes. It’s the human being part of it, how people interconnect.

“As an example, one person has meat and another fruit. They can make an exchange. But if you want fish, one has to come to a price. What money enables is to have a token which is widely exchangeable for a range of products. Bartering can be hard, but economics shows us how to have things function efficiently.

Actually, it’s more the question of ‘why do they not function?’ when something goes badly wrong, when there is a dangerous condition. Understanding how economics can fail is a most needed knowledge.

“I started at HM Treasury as an economic forecaster in 1975.

Economists are hopeless at predicting the future, but it is even harder to understand the past.”

In 1979-80 Charlie studied for his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then returned to the Treasury on policy aspects before joining the London School of Economics (LSE) as an Academic in 1982. But he always kept in touch with his consulting and is widely published. In 2008 he joined the Bank of England, taking over from Rachel Lomax, and is now Deputy Governor, Monetary Policy. Since his time at the LSE, it is no surprise to see his natural progression from academia to the Bank.

I asked if the weight of the responsibility of being Deputy Governor, Monetary Policy at the Bank of England must be intense, especially on Budget Day. Charlie explained that Budget Day is not in his hands – all that has been dealt with long before.

He says it’s the Cyprus shock that is today’s worry. I asked if he counteracts his work days’ stresses with music, which he does – he likes opera, Wagner. He then told me a little story: As economists they have Regional Agencies where they talk to businesses about their data collecting, helping provide a more qualitative feel, discussing budgetary puzzles and such like. On one occasion Charlie travelled to North Wales, to the Chamber of Commerce in Wrexham I think. One of the ladies there was getting ready to visit London to see Wagner’s Ring Cycle and knew Bryn Terfel. She gave Charlie a programme signed by Bryn,

saying: ‘To Charlie Bean, take care of the gold!’ – referring, of course, to the Wagner opera Das Rheingold and the gold in the vaults.

And the gold is in the vaults, but not much British gold, apparently. It seems that Gordon Brown sold that off. The gold now mostly belongs to banks and individuals from around the world.

The Bank has its own artesian well, so has its own water supply as well as its own power station. In fact, they are capable of being self sufficient for one month if needed. I had been told about the Central Line cutting through one corner of the Bank – on mentioning this to Charlie, he then told me a story not completely verified. It seems that in the 19th Century the Bank received an anonymous letter saying that someone knew how to get into the vaults. The Bank ignored it, but more letters were received. Then one day the anonymous writer wrote to say they would be in the vaults at midnight on such a such a date, so Bank staff waited and watched to see if this was true. And lo, someone opened up a trapdoor from underneath! Where they had come from – possibly an underground stream – is now lost in time, but the Bank did reward him financially for his honesty, and fixed the lapsed security. It is very secure now.

The Bank of England was built in 1734. In 1788 the bricks and mortar of the Bank became Sir John Soane’s responsibility during his 45 years as ‘Architect and Surveyor’. It is an architectural masterpiece, going further down underground than it rises above.

I asked Charlie for his thoughts about the gold, and these are some of his nuggets (excuse the pun): • Gold is not wealth; wealth is what you can buy with it – shelter and food.

• Money is the token, gold is a coin of value.

• Coins are disappearing and money is now in trust.

• Without trusting people, nothing works.

• Trust in the payment is crucial to the economy functioning correctly.

• Paper currency can always be inflated and lose value, whereas gold is a material that retains value.

• Every system can be abused, like credit cards.

I showed him my picture of the money tree, and asked him if there was a wishing well at the Bank. That’s when he told me about the artesian well. He wanted to know about my event so I told him that it would be a Sunday afternoon in the Museum, and that we’re hoping to make/film something in the garden.

I even suggested melting coins, old coins to make a bell – we could use Canadian cents as they are just going out of circulation.

I wondered if we could greet the new Canadian Head of the bank. He said: “Leave it to me.”

I don’t see why I couldn’t do my ‘Gifts’ project, but I will wait and see. Whatever the outcome of my request, I have been in there, asked, met the Deputy Governor, Monetary Policy and have his opinions for my humble project entitled: ‘A Coin for Wealth’.

James Marriott Co-Director and Founder of PLATFORM – arts/activism/research/education Lives in Higham, Kent

What does wealth mean to you?

What a fascinating question. I have been ruminating on the way home on the train. There is a line by Ruskin that seems apt: ‘There is no wealth but life’. And another by William Morris that is part of a longer quote: ‘Fellowship is life, lack of fellowship is death’.

‘Wealth’ can also be understood in relation to common wealth, or ‘commonwealth’ – public welfare, the general or common good of the people, a community of people.

I come from a class culture which has emphasised individual or family wealth; the social unit from our bloodlines and genetics, forbears and primogenitors. Because of my family history, parts of our lineage has been clearly recorded for thirteen generations, since the 16th Century. We have always had material wealth. Whereas parts of my partner Jane’s family is less recorded as she is not from a family of power or material wealth.

There tends to be a strong passage of wealth through the male line.

Women have only been able to own their own property for four generations.

Historically, wealth defined people from the wider society. It was a way of isolating power to a small group of people via land, architecture, buildings, objects, paintings, books, and stocks and shares. Accumulating a certain type of wealth expresses power and exercises a certain power.

My parents live in East Yorkshire in what is largely a 1600 Jacobean Manor house with 18th century additions. It’s a substantial creation, three floors high, and was built of brick rather than wood, mud or chalk. An imposing building, it was also built at the time to assert power in the landscape. It stayed in the family until 1950, when it was owned by my uncle. My father was 20 when it was sold. Being a symbol of my father’s family he was exhilarated when the chance came to buy it back, which he did in 1980. My father’s aim was to own our ‘history’. He never had much interest in international urban wealth, like a yacht in the Mediterranean, a flat in New York, or any other kind of Modernist wealth. Except an enthusiasm for sleek German cars.

Another frame of wealth is that one holds in common with others. The wealth of the individual grows the more it is held in common – it cannot stand outside of the common wealth. This thought process has not been explored in the culture I come from.

My father’s family were involved in the Commonwealth after the Civil War, so there is that period of crossover. But then the idea of wealth being held in common means that the wealth of the individual cannot be separated from the community. In other words, if the ‘common’ is poor then the individual is poor; but if the common is rich, then the individual has wealth.

Wealth should be something that is communal, that you can’t separate. When you’re interested in ecology you come to that realisation, that the individual exists only within an ecosystem where the wealth of the ecosystem is the wealth of all – whether a Skylark or a human being. But it’s the humans that destroy the fields, the wealth of the system.

As a child I learnt about ecosystems, about that very simple pyramid of beetles, mice and kestrels. They are all interdependent, yet the wealth of the ecosystem is writ large in terms of climate change – can one be wealthy as the climate and planet are destroyed? In other cultures the indigenous peoples, or First Nations, learned to live in harmony with the ecosystem. But the ecological wealth of the planet is now in question.

In England, wealth lurches between two ‘ideals’ – individual and common. Back in 1948 there was a radical social shift of money.

Suddenly the National Health System, comprehensive schools, mines, iron and steel, water, electricity, railways and grids, all came under the state, a common ownership. It was an impulse celebrated in the Festival of Britain – it was decided to have a different notion of wealth after the 20s and 30s when poverty was so extreme, followed by the acceleration of war and so came this defining moment of British Socialism.

Poverty, what is poverty? We are fairly well equipped with what poverty looked like in the 1930s through books like The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell*. Maybe we should think of poverty in relation to the impoverishment of the ecosystem?. Just look at North West Scotland. Here in North Kent I can see 20-30 different bird species in an hour’s walk, but on the mountains of Dundonell in Wester Ross you might only see three in the same time. Is that part of what poverty looks like now? Lack of fellowship, lack of community and a general impoverishment because of the current belief that wealth is just to do with money and material things.

Wealth radically affected my upbringing. I was troubled by it between the ages of 10 to 15; when I was 18 I went to the Middle East, to Turkey. I was invited into a house that was, in its entirety, smaller than this room. It was home to a man, a woman and two children. To someone like me it was a shock. I then visited a very wealthy Turkish home; the contrast caused a catalytic moment.

It was a visceral experience of poverty. Now, 30 years later, it’s a daily experience to live this way, moving between relatively extensive material wealth and relatively moderate material wealth, experiencing the shift. Yes, to try and shuttle between the scale of my parents house and this terrace house where Jane and I live.

This is not, of course, like the extremity I just described, but sometimes it is difficult. On the other hand it keeps me alive.

I did consider cutting off and having no connection with my family. When I inherited money I gave lots away and have

been fairly conscious not to live off the income of an inherited portfolio of shares since. Why haven’t I given it all away? Fear, a security backstop. And perhaps, because I am, after all, interested in how money works.

Interpreting wealth is difficult but productive. In the 90s I decided I needed to think about family, class, wealth and deeply examine it – treat it as a project. I took a day a week to work on the project. Because of my inherited shares I sat down and taught myself how stocks and shares work, which in itself was a useful experience. I needed to face it, look it in the eye. I wrote to the man who was the asset manager and said I don’t want my money in these particular shares. He didn’t want to change them, so I had to tell him that I do know what I’m talking about and if you don’t listen to me I will move my account. It was useful, taking power and responsibility into my own hands and moving away from lazily depending on my father, because he did it all previously.

That experience has been very useful as now I spend much of my time talking to asset managers. During my work with PLATFORM**, I talk to asset managers about BP and Shell drilling holes in the Arctic as part of a campaign with Greenpeace and Share Action. We figured out that polar bears won’t get to the asset managers! I can help show them a way to reduce their risk of loosing money and at the same time put pressure on the oil companies to stop drilling in at Arctic Ocean that will endanger the ecosystems and communities there. It is in part a devil’s advocate way but I would not have been able to do that if I hadn’t faced my own wealth. I also work in the City now. In fact, my family has worked in the City since the 18th Century, just within a different frame! That teaches me about wealth, too.

When partially estranged from my family from my mid-teens to mid thirties (I get on very well with my parents now), I unconsciously chose surrogate parents, Suzi Gablik and Rodney Mace. I am grateful to him – he treated me straight and was immediately open and honest. A Marxist historian, Rodney

taught me a lot about wealth and economy. He said, brilliantly, that in order for capitalism to work capitalists have to acquire free capital at different stages and use power to appropriate wealth by a means where you don’t pay full value.

That takes us back to the subject of common land. Before the enclosures, smallholders would have cattle, geese and some kind of land usage rights on common lands. Then state power acquired large areas of land in waves throughout the 15th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Private wealth caused the theft of commonwealth – you can see that in the history of my own family.

My father’s wealth radically increased during the 1980s and 1990s. Merchant banks made money in the City, and again, things that were commonly owned, commonwealth, became absorbed into private wealth. The same can be seen in the oil companies – they get rich through the appropriation of undervalued oil. Why is it possible that Shell can continue to get Niger oil in a civil war? Even getting blown up and killed is worth it apparently; they still continue because the terms on which they are extracting the oil means it is very cheap. Sometimes I feel that oil, gas & coal companies own the air we breathe – for the are generating their wealth through a means which alters the climate, alters the common wealth of the atmosphere.

If one could not make a profit from the extraction of fossil fuels it would largely stop. Instability generates wealth for a small number of people. It’s not quite as simple as that, but looking at things clearly is the thing to do. The trouble is, we feel the fossil fuel industrial system is too big a problem so we can’t look at it, which is nonsense really. With the creation of oil and gas fields, huge world changing decisions are made by small groups of people – perhaps 30 people for a set of mammoth projects such as those in the Western Caspian and Caucasus. Those 30 people are all multi-millionaires. They are the 1% for whom instability has generated wealth.

Turning now to spiritual wealth. In the Byzantine era during the

9th through to the 12th centuries, people were hugely wealthy but in a theocratic state – they were interested in spiritual wealth.

It can also be seen in the up-welling of social and religious movements in England,Wyclifites***, Lollards,Puritans, Quakers, non-conformity. They were empathetic to spiritual, not material, wealth, many of them aspiring to live their lives outside the centrality of money. This was Britain’s tradition of spiritual wealth, inherent to here. So different from the Yogic, Hindu or Buddhist visions.

To be puritan is pejorative; to be abstemious is difficult to deal with. But both are perfectly fascinating to explore.

Is spiritual wealth a common wealth or social equity? From an ecological point of view it’s a good thing. Most of us consume too much and are absorbed in acquiring material matter; spiritualists might not.

I have been visiting a strict Benedictine monastery on the Holland/ Germany border since 1991. Having extreme discipline, the monks sing for many hours of the day. They don’t mind that I am not Christian. I am happy there and find it incredibly, intensely beautiful. Generally I stay for only four days at a time, otherwise it’s too overwhelming. I become intoxicated with the 3,000 year old Psalms that are sung. It’s a Modernist building but the monks have no personal wealth, no property. If they leave, they leave with nothing. This is an acute form of no private wealth. There is a form of common wealth within the institution and in serving the immediate population. A veritable factory of spiritual wealth.

And yet it’s the most ‘materialistic’ place I have ever been to, where you focus your attention on the material world. How does one describe how beautiful it is, when light becomes solid? As one watches the light move around the room all day, it becomes matter, catching the smoke from a candle once it is blown out. The light looks as solid as steel. One can truly think about the beauty of the material world, the materialist world.

Mostly I throw away matter. There is the interplay – individual

material poverty or individual spiritual wealth. Being able to understand the beauty of the material world that you don’t own (not owning a valuable painting), yet appreciating matter that you do own.

I have lived here for 20 years and am interested in the land here.

I don’t own any of it, except that I possess it and it possesses me.

For 20 years I have co-owned 50 acres in Leicestershire. I have found it very difficult to ‘possess’ because of a whole set of issues.

Unlike studying this land here which I don’t own. Reminds me of Norman McCaig’s poem:

Who owns this landscape?

The millionaire who bought it or the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning with a deer on his back?

Who possesses this landscape?

The man who bought it or I who am possessed by it?

When I was 29 my grandfather died. I was told: “Here, you can go and live in this large house in Leicestershire with land.”

But it was a wreck. I did not want to do that, so said no to my father and uncles. They said yes, you must. I wanted to put it into a family trust. The argument continued. In the end a deal was made – my brother and I nominally owned it but cousins live there and ran it. Eventually after 20 years we established the family trust and it took over ownership. I stopped owning it and feel immensely liberated.

It is now private wealth and common wealth, given and possessed by a trust for the wider family of many people. Largely through the work of my amazing cousin and friends in the village an educational trust has been established and built a resource centre with a historical archive. This might be called dealing with property wealth and it going into commonwealth, but whatever it is I am glad. At times it was a real challenge and people said ‘why don’t you sell it and get the money?’ But if it was sold it would

probably now be a luxury hotel with golf course and its mineral rights, the gravel under the fields would have been mined, and the vast hole that this process would have created would have been refilled with rubbish. I don’t want to be the cause of that.

By putting material things into commonwealth maybe one comes to possess it more spiritually. Now I am happier;something has been done that feels worthwhile.

Is wealth about possessing cultural continuity?

It was difficult at Eton. I didn’t really engage with it. Now part of me is becoming more interested in engaging in these structures and their parallel continuities, but with disdain of the high praise of material accumulation.

I needed courage and self-confidence to think about it, but for a long time I’ve wanted to look away. Now I realise I enjoy the process of looking at something very hard. As Joseph Beuys, the artist said; “The thing itself is the teacher”. In other words, if you look at the thing hard enough, the thing itself will tell you what to do.

A form of wealth comes from living with the dead, in amongst the dead and the unborn – it makes for a rich life. Living with other species makes for a wealthier life – knowing where the Robins are nesting, or the Yellowhammers; knowing they are around me makes me wealthier. I can neither own them nor cash them in – that’s wealth.

Footnotes * The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell – An unflinching look at unemployment and life among the working classes in Britain during the Great Depression, The Road to Wigan Pier offers an in-depth examination of socioeconomic conditions in the coal-mining communities of England’s industrial areas, including detailed analysis of workers’ wages, living conditions, and working environments. ** PLATFORM combines art, activism, education and research in one organisation creating unique projects driven by the need for social and ecological justice. Platform’s current campaigns focus on the social, economic and environmental impacts of the global oil industry. Their pioneering education courses, exhibitions, art events and book projects promote radical new ideas that inspire change.

See more at: http://platformlondon.org *** John Wycliffe was an English Scholastic philosopher, theologian, lay preacher, translator, reformer and university teacher at Oxford in England, who was known as an early dissident in the Roman Catholic Church during the 14th century.

Bill Drummond From: Clare Whistler <clarew@dircon.co.uk> Date: Monday, 20 May 2013 07:36 To: <admin@penkilnburn.com> Subject: question I think most of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;lastâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; questions Bill Drummond will have answered must be nearly done. if not I have oneCan I ask it? yours Clare Whistler On 20 May 2013, at 09:18, Penkiln Burn <admin@penkiln-burn.com> wrote: You can ask.

From: Clare Whistler <clarew@dircon.co.uk> Date: Monday, 20 May 2013 09:58 To: teddy touchstone <admin@penkiln-burn.com> Subject: Re: question What does wealth mean to you?

Dear Clare, It changes from week to week, as my mood may swing, what the monthly bank statement looks like, what the weather outside my window is when I awake in the morning.

It depends on whether my children are squabbling or not and if what I am writing now makes sense to me the week after next.

I have never been proper hungry and I have never been truly cold, I am yet to have that life threatening disease, I live in a country with a National Health Service, so far be it for me to feel qualified to give a true answer to your question.

Yours, Bill Drummond

Laura Gywnne Traveller, dancer, film maker, healer, gift economy practitioner

What does wealth mean to you?

It means a wealth of time, free to do as I please. I can be quite abstract in my thinking, day dreaming, thinking things through, ideas, having space to see and to listen. This is what wealth means to me. It’s what I have got – not possessions, money, things, but health, abundance, time with dear people and a wider family, a closer family. Having a wealth of space and time to listen.

I survive on the wealth of others! It’s not always balanced – I can feel abundant, at ease with what I need, in giving and receiving, but it has got a bit tighter. My lifestyle has shifted as I am not earning much, I am putting myself in a give and take situation. I am giving time, space, skills, in return for food and apartments.

I’m using other people’s appliances, like fridges, beds, and I avoid having ‘things’. That is one side of wealth. I think of wealth as a regal house, decadent, with oil paintings and opulence. Waitrose, not Asda!

I have chosen to have my own free time. I am realising that I don’t want all this time anymore, and with my wealth of experience I can change. Giving out is needed – a shift. Maybe a community, open grounds, garden, land, availability of nature, intimacy of people. Yes, to have a sense of creativity, having a freedom of the land, and a form of transport. Not having transport is hard.

I have lived for the past two or three years literally hand to mouth. If I do life modelling I can earn £30 pounds, then maybe spend £20 on food.

When I was working in film I was earning about £200-300 a

day. I have less now. I am painting walls for friends, or doing care work. Right now I am cleaning from 6-9 am for £6 an hour. I put a message out on 5RhythmsDance Facebook and hope for a job or a lift. With so little money recently I was walking from Portslade to Brighton everyday – couldn’t afford the bus. I do babysitting, cleaning, listening, reiki, admin, care, live in care, drive. Recently a friend needed a carer for her special needs child when the official carer was ill.

I always know the people or know of them and always feel it is more than ‘work’. When you do it for friends it’s more tricky, more flexible and the money is unclear. Working as a cleaner is clear – we are all on shifts. But it is interesting to weave and ride in and out where I am needed; it is more of an exchange. I am helpful, I give more than a job description, I am working in a holistic way in holistic environments. Actually, I am even caring about the cleaning!

Living like this has served me. In some ways I could be seen as a traveling healer, being given things and healing as I go. I have a radar for finding where it resonates. Sixty people have shared their homes or were there for support of some sort; you knit a community together. Weaving the threads together has been my mission. It has worked. Although I still may not know where I am going to stay overnight, I have to stay fluid at all times.

Something has happened recently, people have closed up and I don’t like it anymore; I am not enjoying it as much. I would like my own cutlery, my own space. This way it is always changing, always leaving environments. It’s frenetical. I am always trying to work out the frictions and what is needed to help. If I am given a bed I have to ‘be’ there. I want to stop exchanging and use money.

I often live in places where I don’t need money; retreats work well. I have done that in New Zealand as well, and worked in the laundry at Gaia House, a retreat near Lewes. Working in hostels, often by word of mouth, I end up helping to run the place.

I don’t have money. I don’t know if I am interested in making money. This has been wealth for me, so full of experiences, and every day completely different. Living with subtlety. But I am just ready for a change.

I got into this situation after working in film because I wanted to dance. I wanted the freedom to develop my dance practice. I made a choice to follow dance, thought it would unfold, but I used all my money on courses. I was brought up to save. I am still shocked that I don’t earn money. Dance always takes money.

It is frightening because we live in a ‘money’ world. If I didn’t I would be fine – my body, health, friends, dance and air is enough.

Trying to live ‘my’ way in the wrong environment is hard. In Lewes I have friends who are millionaires and others who survive on car boot sales. At the moment everyone seems to be ‘saving’ but often that is pretend. I just bob along with everyone.

Who else lives like me, very few, I can only think of three.

I can feel resentment. How can I afford to go to Iceland when I have to sleep on your floor, but those are the choices I have made.

I do value the things people with money have, but I don’t value money.

I can’t do money, the thought of paying monthly rent freaks me out. If it’s ‘temporary’ I’m ok.

Arthur Brown Musician, traveller

What does wealth mean to you?

There are many different connotations to this. Such as, a ‘wealth’ of ideas, a commonwealth which to some extent was common.

Societal wealth, position, power, money, and all its outward shows, trappings and traps; borders and barriers.

We speak of an inner wealth, of the spirit so they say. A wealth of happiness with oneself and with life. But that’s all kind of dualistic.

To me it’s more about what happens in the moment when you’re open, because then there are infinite potential possibilities. Your wealth is indescribable; you don’t have to own bits of nature to be full of all the possibilities of nature that is beyond even happiness.

With wealth there is no question of happiness.

This world is unreal and we have to search for the world of the spiritual – the heart, love, compassion and being in the moment. I think that’s the true wealth. Or equally we could say it’s all there, that the world is an illusion and a world of reality is somewhere else. One can equally say that everything is real. We mostly live without descriptions of things constantly playing back in our consciousness; the mind is making a copy of everything before we see it, then we see it.

Wealth is being able to live without the constant dialogue we have with ourselves about the world, but I suppose at a certain point it does include that dialogue. Some people say their life is like a movie: “I’m watching it, it’s a consciousness, I created it.” The world has created a massive consciousness and it now stars my

ego – some look at it like that. But that still presumes someone it seeing it all.

If you hit a tennis ball when does it leave you? Are your hands guiding you, or your feet? That moment of actually playing is when responses are instinctive; they include all that you have learnt. You are not the one watching yourself, the one thinking around it – the game is just being played. There is no kind of location, you are living form. Life is like that as well. When it plays itself like that, including your own consciousness, then that’s wealth.

It’s paradoxical – wealth denotes possession of valuable things.

The ‘usual’ way is with the latest car, swanky house in Miami with a pool. The idea is that actually, when there is no one there to own anything, wealth is the very things you can’t own or possess.

The not being able to hold them is the wealth. If you have a small bit of wood chipping or a great angel they have different functions and are attached to different worlds – whichever one comes to the open consciousness, they are both wealth and neither is worth more.

Christine Kettaneh Artist, former economist. Lives between London and Lebanon

What does wealth mean to you?

I can’t define wealth; I can’t really measure it. But economics can.

It is your net worth. How much are you worth? It is everything that you own, both physical and financial, minus all your liabilities. For example, add the worth of your house, car, books, stocks and bonds; then deduct your loans.

Wealth is related to income but is not income. Your accumulated past income is part of your wealth. But your wealth can also provide you with income; like the income that you would earn from the rent of a flat that you own, the sale of the produce of a land that you own, or simply the interest on a bond that you own.

Income is a flow variable, a measurement per unit of time whereas wealth is a stock variable, a measurement at a point in time.

Definition of wealth is not static, but is context-­dependent. Is it the wealth of an individual, of a country, of a region? Measures of the wealth of a country can be found in the national accounts.

GDP is the monetary value all final goods and services produced in a country in one given year.

However, GDP has many limitations. Productive non-­market activities are excluded in the measure, because GDP cannot account for unpaid work. So it would exclude the value of a mother raising a child or the services of a volunteer. It would also exclude the value of your homemade meal but would include it if you had eaten it at a restaurant. GDP also cannot account for the unrecorded barter and money exchanges for services happening in the underground economy. It also cannot take into account the

importance of leisure time, the human cost of work like stress, or the harmful effects of production on the environment.

GDP is also not a good indicator of how compatible the combination of goods produced is to the needs of the economy.

The increase in GDP is typically associated with growth, however that is not necessarily a positive thing if the increase in GDP is a result of an increase in production of undesirable or harmful goods. Economists are well aware of the shortcomings of GDP as a measure of well-­being and have put significant efforts in improving it and finding alternatives.

Why did I go into Economics?

I didn’t understand the economic system, and that was an enough reason for me to want to learn it. Once I got into the system, I got stuck wanting to learn more and more, and ever more rigorously – all in an attempt to reach understanding! In 2005, I obtained my masters degree in Finance and Economics from the London School of Economics. It was a prestigious, very technical program; it opened for me a door into a financially rewarding future.

But I never crossed the threshold. For years, I stood at the door flirting with the idea of crossing. Many appealing opportunities called to me on the other side. Sometimes I ignored them; at other times I would take a few steps inside but to turn away just before I shook hands with the opportunity. Meanwhile at the door, I was finding refuge teaching economics at university. I loved teaching; I loved explaining; I loved delivering the lesson, the theory, the logic. To explain the rationality of people through their maximizing behaviours… To explain how the consumer makes decisions in a way to maximize his utility, how the supplier makes decisions in a way to maximize his profit, and assuming that everyone is behaving –rationally – in his own self-­interest, how the market reaches equilibrium.

Yes, the theory was beautiful… it made ‘sense.’ Through

education, I had been finely cut to fit in the puzzle past that door.

But in that puzzle, I felt I was a piece that kept fidgeting as if constantly trying to fit – but not really wanting to. I felt an urge to find another door.

As soon as I had set foot in the realm of art, I knew I had finally found the right door. It was not the right puzzle that I found behind the door though, but a collage – ‘pieces of other things.

Their edges don’t meet.’ It is through my art practice that I now attempt to understand. But now I enjoy the pursuit of understanding without expecting a solution. I can appreciate the beauty of a language like economics, but more importantly the beauty of its holes, from which I can hope to catch a glimpse of what is beyond the logic – a glimpse of chaos.

Speaking of ownership, holes or wholes…

I was preoccupied last year with retelling the myth of Echo and Narcissus. There had been many versions of the Narcissus story but the character of Echo first appeared in Ovid’s (AD 8) version in the third book of his Metamorphoses. Echo was a beautiful nymph who – because of a curse- could only repeat the last words people said. She fell in love with Narcissus; he rejected her; and she wasted away. The Gods then punished Narcissus; they made him fall in love with his own reflection. When he realized that that was an impossible love, he too wasted away. In his place, narcissus flowers have grown. All that has remained of Echo however is her haunting voice.

I tried to rescue echo. I used a photo transfer technique to transfer Ovid’s version of the story onto different surfaces. The process necessitated mirroring, transferring and then excavating the text.

I tried to excavate Echo from the wall, from the floor, and finally from the bath. And that’s where I eventually left Echo, submerged in water in a body of text that will forever lock her to her self-­‐ defeating passion. I had realized then that rescuing Echo was not necessary. Maybe there was an underlying complementarity between Narcissus and Echo that should not be dismissed.

Patricia Berry (2008) emphasized the beauty of the hollowness of echo; she suggested that narcissism was only part of an archetype; the rest had to do with echo and her longing.

Our discussion on wealth reminds me of my latest key project.

We always obsess about losing or misplacing the key because the key embodies power; with it we control our ownership, our wealth, our security. The key fosters the separation between “yours” and “mine.” It represents our fears from one another and our desire for independence from each other. It stands for our desire for possession, power and hence hierarchy. But this system of keys has trapped us, constantly growing us apart and blinding us from our very nature, the predisposition for a life of relationships and community.

I am not interested in the key as much as in the bits that get lost when the key is cut. I am interested in the space that defines the key but that remains hollow. The lacking of the key. That absence that gets reactivated every time a key and the right lock do their affair. An active absence that resembles Echo, an aesthetic that can prevail only in the empty spaces. And then there is an opening, a closing, a sharing, a stealing and an on and off.

And I wonder what would result if I asked key cutters to save all the metal filings – that metallic dust that gets lost to activate keys. What if I collected them? Can the wholeness of the keys be restored?

Paradise Youth Worker and Lyricist

What does wealth mean to you?

Ok, it probably has two meanings. The first is the financial maybe, even security maybe, even above the financial, wealthy is not the same as being financial secure. Wealthy is an abundance, is an over-abundance, of those money and material objects. But then you can be wealthy in your spirit, in your attitude, you can have an abundance of a certain goodness that can spill over.

I think of someone like Gandhi, he might be wealthy in that spiritual essence that spills over onto other people, in that sense that he is able to touch and influence in ways that coin just can’t !

So wealth, going back to finance, it can create maybe a situation where one should be happy because you could think that all the material things I want I got due to money. But that does not mean it won’t translate to you being happy cause you can have all those things and still be empty inside, or spiritually empty. You can see the gulf, it’s because we are caught up in this rat race of trying to attain, trying to attain these things that you probably hurry past the things that you really wanted just because that’s what you really need. I need that 40 inch screen television, I need that car that everyone says I need, need that and that, and those are the things we aspire to, those are the things we think of as wealthy. But you know the basics are food, clothing and shelter- a roof over your head, food to eat, the clothes on the back, then you might want to get more than the basics for your family and friends, you want to get them better than that, mm thats that financial wealth.

Yes, I think when your young when you are growing up, I don’t think you are able to see what that balance should be. When

you are young you just see all this imagery around you, just hear what should be, what people say you need to be successful . Then when they say: ‘What’s a good job?’ The answer is: ‘Earning a lot of money.’ When anyone talks about your job they talk about what you’re paid, you don’t talk about the gratitude you might get back. Or what you get back what you give to others. Its about the pay, because that will determine certain things about your lifestyle, and lifestyle determines well, no it doesn’t, its the two sides of the same coin.

I like this now, there are two sides to this coin, to this question, that side of what money can do and what that means and the other the essence of who you are and what happiness is. He’s rich in ideas, he is rich in spirit, he is wealthy in attitude. You can be poor, you can be rich and poor on both sides. So me personally I think we tell our children to aspire to more in life, have more than us, attain more in life, don’t you want this in life when you grow up, and if we are part of that rat race we want them to get out of the rat race. That they attain those things as early as possible, they get into that hamster wheel and they start running from early. I need to get this and by attaining these things I have got that, I have got this I got that got…. I should be happy, but we don’t put, or not in my life, we don’t put the same emphasis on the spiritual side.

Until I had a certain level of wealth and then I said oh I have raced and raced. I attained and attained. I was banking. I had a couple of properties and I had money. £100,000 saved. I can retire young but how come I don’t feel, I don’t feel that sense of achievement that I should. That’s because that was all about financial and monetary rewards. There are only so many pairs of shoes you can buy, there are only so many leather coaches, sofas, that can fit in your living room, there are only so many properties you can own, you can only live in one property or only in one place at a time. There is only so much you can do with all that before you can say, what does it all mean?

Sometimes I go shopping and I ask myself, I don’t need that

jacket. You think you are given a quick fix, an emotional fix, but it doesn’t fix emotions .People have linked retail therapy, that getting material things, gives you a short term sense of achievement. I’ve got this, I’ve got that, but really it doesn’t. You can’t fill it with receipts. Its a void you are trying to fill. Then you realise or you don’t realise, either you are able to change or maybe you can’t. Then you suffer once you see the light, then you cant walk towards it going, I know I am empty, I know I am empty but I can’t do anything. You need psychologists and such to help manage you step out of it. Or you come out of that race and you devote yourself to things that really matter. Like myself, that’s why I am here, I changed jobs. Lots less money involved but the reward from helping others... priceless. priceless.

Well, I’ve made money by any means and I always thought that’s what you have to do from a very young age. There was times I knew I needed to take care, if not for my family, at least for myself. My mother is struggling enough for herself, I can’t consider myself to be a man and be a burden. At least I need to be able to take care of myself, to relieve her of that burden. As I got older I wanted to take care of her and my grandmother and everyone, to this day it’s on my shoulders. I take care of mine.

I started aged 12/13. You need the basics, food, clothing, shelter.

Rent needs to be paid. To have even one pair of trousers, two pairs of shoes. If you are on a poor salary or are poor anyway its hard to maintain just the basic level of those things. Me coming up. I know I need to contribute and when the scales tip and one of things goes out of balance, like you have a jacket in the winter but when you get home you have no food, then something needs to be done.

No, it was never an idea to make money from rapping that was Charlie’s idea. Actually I came to this country, I grew up in New York, people just assumed ‘Oh you’re American. You must rap’, and I don’t rap, actually I don’t but I went to the path of lesser evil, that means that your a drug dealer, your a gang banger. The other people said ‘come to a studio’ so I thought why don’t I, just go to a studio and see what its about. So I went to the studio

and heard some people rapping, I don’t rap but I think I could do better than that- and that’s how I started. I have always had an ability, I am a charismatic person anyway, I was the class clown, a big character. Everyone knew me in every school I was at, I have a big personality. I had an ability to freestyle and make something rhyme with this or comment in some sort of way, but not rapping.

I didn’t respect rappers, its just putting words together, same as children, abcd, same as we were taught. Some have the ability to say something quite potent and you can respect that, but its nursery rhyme stuff. My kindergarten teacher can do that, I don’t respect rappers for that, I respect those that take a podium and have something to say. So I was never thinking I wanted to be a rapper, actually when I was younger I wanted to rob rappers.

Well you got those big old chains, pre bling, so that’s the way I look at rappers, I don’t call myself that. Music was never a thing I thought I would make money at. Though I was quite good at it and so I went with it. Its a skill I had but I never thought, you know I could freestyle, but its not who I want to be, I’d rather make money in any other way then that. And that’s sod’s law, that’s the damn thing I ended up doing. ‘You’re a rapper’ I hate it yes, well I guess I am. It plays with all the negative stereotypes that go with it. Nowadays rappers have to perpetuate a certain lifestyle, a certain way that they are, and they not really that. I don’t want people looking me and saying he’s this, he’s that.

Well I thought these were things that people aspired to. When I reached £60,000, had no bills, a property portfolio, I paid £450 for a pair of trainers, three pairs in different colours, when I got home I thought what does it mean? And went shopping again, Gucci, I got labels, come home and what does it mean? I think about my children, I’ve got property, my children are able to go to Uni, if I die today my life insurance will pay for these things, but what about me, what about me? Yes I got a Boise stereo £ 3,300 good quality sound, but other than that, I could have bought one for £100 and it still works fine.

I was not really rich, I felt empty, I knew I could not continue on

that path, I knew these material things did no mean anything.

I did a reassessment, what do I want to do. I like helping people, I like being an advocate, I like helping the community and youth, why don’t I do that despite the money. You and I met in 2006 and I was still on the money path, what they call stacking money. I paid off my mum’s bills, but after a while I felt, I don’t know it was a dark point. What is life all about, I’m 30, what do I want to do till I’m 60, what do I want to do in the next part of my life, I am sure I don’t want to be buying expensive trainers. It was dark, not easy, no reason to continue.

My company Good Samaritan Music started the message. I wanted to give a positive ethos in music. It took me two years on the ground to take that leap, despite the money I make, even now I can’t tell if it was a sensible thing because now I am broke. I have to go work here and there and here just to maintain what I have. Now I am on the other side, I am broke, I am a Youth Worker, I get fulfilment in the community, I help youth. Now I am on another turn to say I need to be compensated, not just here, but in music. I wanted to walk away from the whole music thing, the whole rapper thing, but now I want to go back. I need to balance the art with the purpose. I have got nominations and awards for this youth work and that is a certain level of fulfilment, now I need to be able to go out there and be paid for both. I hope it all comes together, it has to be both.

I love the poetry to express myself, its a great medium to communicate without preaching. I use my own life as a template that people can relate and respond to, universally, universally.

I love being able to express myself, that that expression can help change someone.

Wealth means to me financial security and abundance of creativity and passion and a healthy spirit. In wealth all financial security is to be balanced with the outlet to be spiritual. My spirit needs to balance with the coin. Its good to know poverty. I would rather be poor in my youth and rich in my old age. When you are young and poor you are on a journey, when you are older it is about the seeds you’ve sown.

G IF TS SEV E N

Clare Whistler Š May 2014