So I have been called by several over the years. This note explains why.

My father was most unusual in that was he both comfortable and very facile in both the Latin and Anglo cultures and worlds. After an Ivy league education, he worked his way up in Latin America after WWI to become the senior vice president of sales for Standard Oil for all of Latin America south of the US border. (Yes, they use gasoline down there too.) After that, he became a senior US diplomat in charge of US AID programs in a series of Latin countries while at the same time working, beginning earlier, as an FBI field agent and later a CIA agent. Rarely are active agents such high ranking diplomats (ranked immediately below the Ambassador in the American colony).

Thereafter, he became the senior vice president of finance for one of Mexico’s Fortune top 20 companies, the only American among the senior officers of all of Mexico’s Fortune 500 companies at the time. Both he and my mother, who was a Professor of Literature at a Mexican university, had highly developed sensibilities regarding Mexico Antiguo and its history and traditions, much preferring the friendships, graciousness and humor of high born Latin culture.

They enjoyed money, but their hearts were not in it and they preferred good company, gracious living, travel and other things more. To them, money was a lubricant in life; not an engine. I came along at the end of my father’s work for Standard Oil and spent several years growing up and traveling in Latin America while he was a diplomat working for US AID. I saw firsthand and understood the poverty in this world and what he was trying to do about it.

After putting the three boys from his fist marriage through Williams College, which he thought was a colossal waste of money, my father tossed my brother and I to the wind, telling my mother, we were healthy, smart and ambitious and we would get out of life exactly what we wanted. But we had to decide. He was correct, as she later conceded. We both quickly pursued good educations. My brother studied international business, languages and finance and followed in our father’s footsteps. I studied mathematics and economics, then law and finally developed a general love of ideas. A law practice was slipped in there and it proved quite remunerative. But money, nor much about its trappings per se, never captured my fancy. Ideas intrigued me more.

So why a traitor, I’ve been asked. Much has to do with my innate sense of fairness, which was furthered by both my parents in a very understated but powerful way, down to my father’s very work. I was also subconsciously very affected by the poverty I saw around me in Latin America. Finally, much has also had to do with my training in economics. And much of that, in turn, has to do with where I got most of that education and training – at The University of Chicago​, the intellectual munitions plant which develops, uses and rationalizes economics to protect the interests of the wealthy. I learned first-hand and up close how it was done and why. Given my background and world sense, it was a major eye-opener that impacted me profoundly, both academically and intellectually, but it also repulsed me in a way at the same time.

Then there are my impressions of those with money, including those in the great law and other firms of America. Those born to and comfortable with wealth and its trappings, casually and without apology, are often genuinely pleasant and somewhat gracious and generous, but too many others are painfully nouveau riche or love money for its own sake or seek money as a holy grail, end-all-be-all. I have found these types simply insufferable.

So too are displays of money and wealth as indicia of success, a specialty of some major law firms, accounting firms, investment banks and other larger companies. After the large law firm I was with grew and prospered, we remodeled in dazzling fashion. The design was in light oak (or “early orange crate” as one partner put it) and done by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation with impressive appointments, views and unusual space utilizations. It won a national Architectural Digest award, but like the other trappings of wealth I had experienced, including indeed my own three-storied home of four years in Ecuador, which is now an international bank (my bedroom is the secretarial pool), it made me a bit uneasy, if not at times actually uncomfortable. It was a sign that we had so much just for display or show while others less fortunate struggled to eat and it bothered me implicitly at a subconscious level. It still does, as do too many with money I have described.

Finally, in my mind, sheer disgust attends the fawning solicitation of subordinates seeking prospering favors as they interact at the edge of business, with the very rich and powerful. Phony and solicitous are not the words for it. The knowing smirks, the light elbow nudges or nods, and the punctuation of speech by nervous, forced laughter are universal, from the hallways of great law firms, to those of investment banks, the great cabols of Korea, the major keiretsus in Japan and to the corridors adjacent to the board rooms of major US corporations. The phrase “squirmin’ vermin” comes to mind. Patronizing in the extreme. A gross distortion of humanity for the sake of money. It is pathetic.

I have been around the wealthy of all types. I have heard and sifted through all the arguments raised by all in defense of money and wealth. I find none very persuasive, with only unquenchable insecurity coming in most understandably. But all this recalls the observation that money is not the engine; only a lubricant. Money for whom and what is always the question? In pursuit of what? You cannot take it with you. As Harry Johnson, an economist of renown and one of my teachers, taught me, “The rational man who cares for no one but himself dies clutching the last penny of the last payment on his funeral service.”

So you can’t take it with you. The factor then liberalizing me with age is the further notion that life is too short. Much too brief to make a fuss about having money. Much we think that is important isn’t. Keeping people from hurting now is the only matter of real importance. Further, as we come to understand the earth is figuratively shrinking and that we are so much more alike than our varied appearances would imply, the realization dawns that, “We are all in this same small boat together.” And only for a brief time. So what then can fairly justify too much different treatment among us? Intelligence? But doesn’t good intelligence properly applied eventually reach these same conclusions? What can justify outcomes that are too disparate? Welfare economics does not. It reaches these same conclusions, once shorn of its carefully narrowed applications. Moral philosophy likewise affords no leg up for great disparate wealth. Other rational thought generally is not much help either. So what is? Only two discernible elements occur to me: uncontrollable insecurity and other irrational pathologies.

These are the reasons I retired early, turned traitor to my class, and took off to the sail around the world. While I have not in fact done much about my developed sentiments, my excuse is it has taken me considerable time to sort them out, given the countervailing pressures that have been on me. But I have worked my way there eventually and in what I think to be a rather considered way. I simply need another life time to do better.