Money Smart Week: Money, careers, and literature

This semester, I’m teaching a class at UIC on business, finance, and American culture. It’s a lot of fun to teach, and (I think) the students get a lot out of it. The class has started making their final presentations, and the first batch was really good.

Three of the books assigned are The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair; ‘Tis: A Memoir, by Frank McCourt; and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson. All three stories are about people struggling to get to the good life, but they are very different. Jurgis Rudkus comes to Chicago from Lithuania and sees his dreams crushed. Frank McCourt is born in New York, raised in Ireland, and returns to a land that he only vaguely remembers (but where he knows he won’t be hungry). Tom Rath, from an old East Coast family, serves his country in World War II and sees horrible violence, then wonders if financial and career success is worth the cost to his family.

They are different people, with different stories, at different times in American history. They are all trying to figure out the good life. The solution for Rudkus is socialism. For McCourt, it’s a college education through the G.I. Bill. For Rath, it’s scaling back his work.

And, of course, we’re all trying to figure it out for ourselves (although, fortunately, no one in the U.S. now experiences the working conditions of the Chicago packinghouses at the turn of the last century.) That often includes investments in education and finding ways to spend less. There’s a rich history to what we’re all trying to do here.

(This is cross-posted on Chicago on the Cheap.)