The lovely and talented Nathan Rabin has started a new column on the Onion’s A.V. Club called Money Matters, in which he interviews different creative people about art and commerce, financial failure and professional failure. It’s really interesting. Bankrate.com has a similar feature, Celebrity Money, that looks at different ways that different stars make and spend their money.
I’ve long thought that we should talk more about money. It’s just a tool, but people use it as a way of keeping score or a measure of moral value, and it is not. If we talked about it, it might be less mysterious. We might spend less time trying to buy the same stuff as other people, and more time concentrating on important things that are not money. We might have a better understanding of other people. During this past election, I spent a lot of time explaining to wealthy friends that people were not rich were not necessarily lazy moochers, and to my non-wealthy friends that people who were rich were not necessarily greedy, heartless bastards.
And, of course, even though none of us wants to talk about our own money, it’s always fun to dish about other people’s!
