The Millionaire Next Door:
The Surprising Secrets of America's WealthyThe Millionaire Next Door:
The Surprising Secrets of America's WealthyBy Thomas J. Stanley, Ph.D. & William D. Danko, Ph.D.
Published 1996; 258 pages
Reviewed by Wes Wynne
The rich: they inherit a lot of money, or make a lot of money in glamorous jobs. Then they go spend it, living it up with a high-status lifestyle - big houses, fancy cars, expensive restaurants, luxurious vacations, exclusive private schools, nannies, jewelry, et cetera.
What's so secret about that? That's what it's like to be rich, isn't it? Well, actually no. As the authors of The Millionaire Next Door point out, most wealthy people in America don't live that way at all. High social status and conspicuous consumption are NOT, generally speaking, habits of the rich in this country. Instead, those tend to be the habits of people in high income occupations who never manage to acquire much wealth - in other words, people who make a lot of money but never have any left in the bank. Why not? Because they're paying off jumbo mortgages, consumer loans, and credit card bills. Most rich people, if they lived that way, wouldn't remain rich for very long, and probably would never have gotten rich to begin with.
The Millionaire Next Door is not a shoot-from-the-hip book about how to get rich, or a glamorizing expose on the lifestyles of the wealthy. The authors, two marketing professors, came to their conclusions after twenty years of studying the habits, attitudes, and spending patterns of high-income Americans. Their book, which has remained near the top of best seller lists for over a year now, is a distillation of that research, laid out in an interesting and readable non-academic language.
Who is the millionaire next door? The authors didn't expect what they found. Their first reaction upon interviewing rich people (whom they paid for the privilege, incidentally) was, "These people cannot be millionaires. They don't look like millionaires, they don't dress like millionaires, they don't eat like millionaires - they don't even have millionaire names. Where are the millionaires who look like millionaires?"
What they discovered was that the average millionaire in America is a self-employed man in his late fifties who typically considers himself to be an entrepreneur. He didn't inherit a dime from anyone and did not come from an affluent family. He lives in a modest or middle class neighborhood and tends to be in a rather boring line of business - rice farming, ranching, welding contracting, or carpet cleaning would be typical of him. His median household income is about $131,000 per year. He wears cheap suits and drives American-made cars. He is a college graduate. He is also a tight wad. He has probably never spent more than $500 on a suit, or $150 on a pair of shoes, or $250 on a wristwatch.
The Millionaire Next Door contains a great deal of information on high income people (both wealthy and those who are just big spenders) - their family relationships, attitudes about money and retirement, spending patterns, ethnic backgrounds, and so forth. For instance, there's an old stereotype that the Scottish are thrifty. Seems like that's more than a myth, according to one tidbit from the authors' research. In studying the ancestry groups of millionaires, they discovered that 20% of them were Scottish. That's two and a half times the percentage whose ancestry is English (7.71%) and over four times the percentage whose ancestry is Irish, Italian, or German. Forget the status aspect of having ancestors who came over on the Mayflower. You're probably better off having ancestors who caught a much later boat from Edinburgh.
To simplify their presentation, the authors divide consumers into two groups, Prodigious Accumulators of Wealth (PAWs) and Under-Accumulators of Wealth (UAWs). The former are people who save more money than expected, based on their income, and the later are folks who spend more money than expected, based on their income. Of course, you are a lot more likely to get rich if you are a PAW instead of a UAW. But keep in mind that wealth is a relative term, and a middle manager can become financially independent as easily as a physician can, provided each is willing to be satisfied with spending less than what he theoretically could. So it doesn't really matter in one respect whether you end up earning a huge income or an average one for a college-educated person: you can achieve independence if you follow the appropriate path.
But if becoming a millionaire is your goal, listen up. The authors found that truly wealthy people have certain traits that distinguish them from many other successful people who never accumulate much wealth. The list is worthy of being cut out and taped to the door by anyone set on achieving financial independence. In short, millionaires . . .
1. live well below their means.
2. allocate their time, energy, and money efficiently, in ways conducive to building wealth.
3. believe that financial independence is more important than displaying high social status.
4. have parents who did not provide economic outpatient care.
5. have adult children who become economically self-sufficient.
6. are proficient in targeting market opportunities.
7. choose the right occupation.
A friend of mine I discussed the book with was disappointed upon hearing the advice it contains, which is basically an appeal to save a lot, be prudent, and live beneath your means. "What's so good about having a lot of money if you can't spend it?" she asked. Well, there is a trade off. If you get a lucrative job and live it up, sure, you can have fun, but you probably won't become rich. You'll probably never be able to stop working on a whim and take five years off to do what you want. On the other hand, if you can control your spending and be satisfied with less than what you can afford, in the long run you can become financially independent. You will worry less about losing your job, going bankrupt, or not having enough money for retirement. You might even be able to retire by the time you are your parents' age.
To the graduating seniors this month, good look on becoming the millionaire next door.
Wes Wynne is a Ph.D. candidate in psychology and is co-founder of Contumacy.
Blessed are the Barren: The Social Policy of Planned ParenthoodBy Robert Marshall and Charles Donovan
Published in 1991; 371 pages
Reviewed by Peter Russo
Most Americans believe that since the 1960's, America has been experiencing a moral crisis. Traditional Judeo-Christian ethics and morals have been pitted against a rising of tide of secular humanism, especially in matters of human sexuality. If you took the average American from the 1960's and told them that in thirty years there would be the public acceptance of homosexual behavior, abortion, sex education in the schools, and even euthanasia, they would have rightfully laughed in your face. The idea was absurd.
And yet, it has happened. The moral state of America is, by all standards, pathetic. One out of every three children is aborted in America. Divorce is becoming more frequent than marriage. Marriage is becoming merely legal fiction. Homosexuality is not only tolerated but also even encouraged on national television.
A whole generation of children has grown up with a warped concept of sexual relations which their parents did not even think was possible. If we look for the mechanism of this change, we find that public education was the instrument. To any objective observer, all of these happening at once would sound like a plot rather than a coincidence. This observer would wonder if there was not some organized force behind this moral degradation, some institution carefully indoctrinating the American public years before the 1960's, only vaulting its true purposes into American society when the spirit of revolt was in the air. Finally, this observer would have his theory confirmed when he saw that, indeed, there was such organization simply known as Planned Parenthood.
In Blessed are the Barren: The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood , Robert Marshall and Charles Donovan trace the history of Planned Parenthood from its founding days with Margaret Sanger to the present multibillion-dollar organization so powerful, that as Dr. Nathanson says in the forward it is like "government within a government."
Any study of Planned Parenthood must start with Margaret Sanger, and this book shows, that despite her canonization by the national press, she was a determined socialist ( not too offensive to many today ) with a total dedication to eugenics without any qualms about declaring whole nations and races unfit for existence. However, here is a sample of the love and compassion that St. Sanger had for all human life:
"Birth control is thus the entering wedge for the Eugenic educator the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit' admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization. The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective."
Of course, it seems only Sanger had the foresight to determine who was "fit" and who was "unfit". Nonetheless, the books shows the reader the side of Sanger that has been buried by the historians of Planned Parenthood because while abortion is now accepted, eugenic genocide is one idea of Sanger's that has yet to catch on.
After a detailed account of the influence Margaret Sanger had on Planned Parenthood, the rest of the book details Planned Parenthood's rise to social and political influence and power. Unfortunately, the reader will be only treated on how Planned Parenthood's wily and subversive techniques were all too successful. In one of the most disturbing chapters, the book details how Planned Parenthood basically infected mainstream Protestantism in only a span of about ten years. The horrifying influence can be seen today in which several Protestant denominations have totally accepted abortion as a moral act. This book gives the names, dates, and events that helped shaped this terrible transformation.
With relative ease, Planned Parenthood petitioned the federal government, in the 1960's, to allow them to introduce their agenda into the public schools under the veil of sex education. With deceptive statistics and outright lies, a common tool of this institution, sex education became a vehicle for them to indoctrinate children in school without the explicit knowledge of the parents. The explicit agenda of these programs has one repeated message. Sexual intercourse before marriage is allowed as long as you use some form of birth control, so that pregnancy is avoided.
Of course, since abortion has been legalized, birth control and abortion have almost become synonymous in the eyes of the sexual educators. The result of this emphasis is the great hypocrisy regarding the phenomena of underage abortion. Girls under eighteen cannot have medical procedures performed on themselves, including ear piercing, without explicit consent from their parents except for an abortion.
Finally, Planned Parenthood has been one of the most vocal supporters of abortion. From merely political and financial support for places that actually perform abortions to performing them in their clinics, Planned Parenthood remains in the foreground of the pro-abortion forces in America. To that extent, they are literally killing America's children by the millions. To anyone who has any respect for human life, this is a moral outrage.
In conclusion, more than any other institution, Planned Parenthood is responsible for the moral confusion facing America today. When sex education is criticized, they are there. When laws outlawing partial-birth abortion are brought before the American people, they are first to protest them. They have no moral qualms about lying or evading the law for their own purposes. They really have no morality in the sense that certain actions are good and certain actions are evil. They only care about building a "better" race with explicit rights to determine what "better" means. This book is the first attempt to outline this corrupt society.
The first rule in defeating an enemy is to know the enemy. Well, Planned Parenthood is the enemy of at is decent and good, and all who are decent and good can know what Planned Parenthood really is by reading this book.
Peter Russo is a physics major.