AVARICE It's been said that during the Industrial Revolution, most of the deadly sins were turned into virtues. Perhaps none so much as greed. But avaritia is more than just wanting stuff — it's wanting more than you need. (Dante called it "excessive love of money and power.") Hmmm... it looks like we may still be having trouble with this one.
Staggering Fortunes
Where is the line between corporate management's
fiduciary responsibility to generate profits and return on
investment, and avarice?
What is happening to the money?
What about greedy management?
Why are corporations willing to pay CEOs so
much?
Is there any justification for the credo, stated by
Wall Street's Gordon Gecko, that greed is
good?
"Salary is never, ever at the top" of the priority list for Hopkins student job hunters, Alberts says. "What we're hearing more from students is that quality of life is most important." Students want their weekends free to spend with friends and family, according to Alberts. They tend to look for "stable positions with the potential for long-term growth," and at organizations with "altruistic" philosophies. Times were decidedly different just a few years ago, during the high-tech boom, when Hopkins students could hope to land well-paying jobs in the technology or finance industries. "In 2000 and 2001 we were seeing exorbitant salaries, signing bonuses, and all kinds of perks," Alberts says. "One undergraduate left in 2001 to work for a technology company, starting at $73,000. That was the highest starting salary I'd ever seen. It made me lose my breath." But as the economy has cooled, so have the financial prospects for new college grads. "It's the employer's market now. They don't need to throw so many perks at students," says Alberts. "Today it's realistic for undergraduates leaving Hopkins to start out making somewhere between the high $20,000s and the mid $40,000s." —SD |
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Copy from original owned by the Maryland Historical Society. No reproduction without permission. |
Whether or not the young pair was "greedy" is hard to say,
according to Catherine Rogers Arthur, curator at the
Homewood House Museum, which houses some of Betsy's
things and where she is "a tantalizing aside whose story
never loses its allure." The couple would certainly draw paparazzi today with their extravagant tastes, however. In the end, it was greed that seems to have been their undoing. Jerome first admired Betsy's "fine profile and such harmonious proportions" on a horse ride, and, after a heated courtship, they married — causing a stir in each family and throughout a realigned world where post-revolution power structures were still shifting. Ignoring the stir, the two partied. Jerome spent money like water, according to the French consul forced to worry over meeting the young man's extravagant demands. The consul received notes such as this one, from one of Jerome's friends: "He has also asked me to tell you that he is impatiently awaiting the arrival of the $4,000 you are supposed to remit to him." "Too bad he leads such an idle life," the frustrated consul once muttered, according to a 1988 biography of Betsy, The Belle of Baltimore, by Claude Bourguignon-Frasseto. Among Bonaparte's presents to his young wife were fancy, sheer French dresses that, with nothing beneath them, revealed so much of Betsy that the pair often drew a crowd of male gawkers, which seemed to please them both. "Look here," Betsy told a critical aging aunt, according to her biographer, "that is what Jerome wants." The two got attention in the highest circles: "I am sure," said Vice President Aaron Burr, "that I could stuff all her dresses together into my pocket and mistake them for my handkerchiefs." Here on campus at the Homewood House are other reminders of that life — most notably Betsy's French-made traveling mahogany bidet, with its silver basin (signed by its designer) and its copper inlay and carved legs that fit neatly into the case. The glamorous life did not end happily. Napoleon threatened to disown Jerome and had the marriage annulled (though Betsy was pregnant). Three years after the two had reached the height of their celebrity, Betsy's powerful father brought her a letter describing Jerome's lavish wedding in 1807 to Princess Catherine of Wurttemberg, assuring his position of royalty. "A fine reward for a man who has abandoned his legitimate wife," the elder Patterson said. Betsy, who was left by her father to be consoled by a sister, cheered herself with the fact that torrential rains had canceled an elaborate fireworks and illumination display for the royal couple. —JP
"I'm not against debt relief in principle," he says. "I'm against relief where there is not a clear timetable for specific reforms on the part of both debtors and creditors. You have to have accountability and very tight controls. We've learned this over and over and over again." If the world's major lenders forgive so much accumulated debt in the absence of strict conditionality, Leeds says, that means there is insufficient accountability for corrupt or incompetent governments that have wrecked, and in some cases plundered, their nations' economies. "You're not setting very high standards for future leaders by turning your back on all that's happened previously," he argues. He adds that the recently announced debt relief also creates a "free rider" problem: "What you're doing here is rewarding the worst performers at the expense of those developing countries that have repaid their debts in full and on time." Leeds believes that it's not just the debtors who have been wayward. "All attention focuses on the debtors, very little on the behavior of the creditors, most of whom were the multilateral development institutions," he says. "If there are lessons to be learned from this whole experience, you have to have much more rigorous accountability of the creditors extending these loans. In my view, they have gotten off easy." Why have institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund continued for decades to make loans to nations with such terrible records — even those exhibiting corruption of the upper reaches of government? Says Leeds, "The lenders lend money because they're interested in reducing poverty and the people stealing the money are not the poor. You don't want to turn your back on the people who need it the most. Some donors are trying to find ways to disperse funds at the grassroots level, to circumvent problems [with corrupt governments]. But you cannot disperse hundreds of millions of dollars that way. We need to work on intermediaries that are not fully controlled by the government, NGOs that have the capacity to intermediate some of these funds. That's one solution. I think the other solution is to have much more strict monitoring of central governments that are the recipients of these funds. So much of this funding is unaccounted for. I mean literally unaccounted for." —DK
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Illustration by Gilbert Ford |
Is greed truly encroaching on the third sector? Lester
Salamon, director of the Johns Hopkins
Center for Civil Society Studies and a nationally
recognized expert on the nonprofit world, says "not
really," but the perception certainly is there. Fueling this perception, Salamon says, are media folk and lawmakers who have grabbed hold of the dubious actions of a handful of nonprofit executives and recent national scandals, such as the tale of Bill Aramony, the United Way head who was convicted of stealing from the organization. Pointing to stories of executives who may have misused their position and used organizational funds for personal purposes, Salamon says, "All of that stimulates a lot of scrutiny, but I would say that the practices are not rampant." The press, Salamon says, has also taken advantage of publicly available access to a nonprofit's annual financial reports. Heads often turn, Salamon says, when people see someone at a nonprofit, no matter how large, offered a high six-figure salary. "I think it's a bit of cheap shot, especially when you compare it to what the head of a large company such as a Black & Decker earns, which may be five times what the head of a university is paid," he says. "It's all a matter of expectations, what people feel someone at a nonprofit should make." While it's true that some nonprofit executives are earning larger salaries than in the past, it's often a natural product of the organization's growth, Salamon notes. Compared to a Ma and Pa soup kitchen of yesteryear, nonprofit organizations today can be complex businesses with thousands of employees and multiple funding streams. Consider the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, whose total revenues in 2004 were nearly $319 million. "Heading these organizations can be brutal jobs. The nonprofit world often can be much harder than working in the for-profit field, in fact, where there's a clear bottom line and only one or two sources of income," he says. The Center for Civil Society Studies engages in a wide variety of research activities designed to shed light on the role that nonprofit organizations play in modern society. A core venture of the center is the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, the largest inquiry ever undertaken into the scope, structure, financing, and impact of nonprofit activity throughout the world. Salamon says the center in 2002 amassed data on nonprofit wage levels and, as expected, found them in general to be significantly below the average wage in the for-profit arena: The average weekly wage of someone at a nonprofit was $603, compared to $670 at for-profit firms. However, when nonprofits in the education, day-care, and social services sectors were compared to their for-profit counterparts, average nonprofit wages typically exceeded average for-profit wages, by 30 percent (daycare) and 18 percent (residential care). Still, are those who work at nonprofits in it for the money? Not likely, Salamon says. —GR |
Photo courtesy kingworld.com |
Well, yes and no. Rutter used his original Jeopardy
winnings to buy a silver Porsche Boxter S, which he now
plans to trade in for a Porsche 911 after his most recent
win. However, he lacks the lavish lifestyle one might
expect a game show millionaire would have. He lives in a
three-bedroom apartment and frequents the sandwich stand at
the local farmer's market. On the other hand, the money enabled him to do what he's always wanted: create and host InQuizitive, his own It's Academic-style trivia game show. "I didn't want to get a day job. Now I'm working for myself, and I love working with the kids," says Rutter. He also plans to endow a college scholarship at Manheim Township High School, named for his former Quiz Bowl adviser, Anne Clouser, who died in 2000. While Rutter enjoyed facing off against the affable Jennings, pronouncing him "even nicer in person than he is on TV," he doesn't envy Jennings' star status. Says Rutter, "I'd just as soon have the money as the fame." —MB
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