Freedom from Work

Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina

Daniel Fridman

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781503600263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziale Klassen & wirtschaftliche Ungleichheit

In this era where dollar value signals moral worth, Daniel Fridman paints a vivid portrait of Americans and Argentinians seeking to transform themselves into people worthy of millions. Following groups who practice the advice from financial success bestsellers, Fridman illustrates how the neoliberal emphasis on responsibility, individualism, and entrepreneurship binds people together with the ropes of aspiration.

Freedom from Work delves into a world of financial self-help in which books, seminars, and board games reject "get rich quick" formulas and instead suggest to participants that there is something fundamentally wrong with who they are, and that they must struggle to correct it. Fridman analyzes three groups who exercise principles from Rich Dad, Poor Dad by playing the board game Cashflow and investing in cash-generating assets with the goal of leaving the rat race of employment. Fridman shows that the global economic transformations of the last few decades have been accompanied by popular resources that transform the people trying to survive—and even thrive.

1

Contemporary Financial Self-Help and the Rise of Neoliberalism

LIKE ANY BROAD CONCEPT that attempts to include a number of heterogeneous components, the term financial self-help is not perfect. Simply put, while it references what is traditionally considered the self-help genre (resources, including books videos, group meetings, audio recordings, and so on aimed at improving some area of one’s life), it encompasses only those that apply mainly to the financial realm. Some types of self-help obviously are excluded from this definition. A book about improving one’s love life or working on one’s body image is self-help, but is certainly not financial self-help. A textbook about micro-economics belongs to the universe of financial expertise, but no one would call it self-help. But other cases are harder to classify. There are some self-help resources that touch upon prosperity and economic advancement, but do not make economic issues the main focus. There are also training workshops and websites about stock market trading which might not be self-help per se, but are important resources that are very popular among users of financial self-help.

Defining too strict a set of boundaries would not be productive. I use financial self-help to identify a very fluid set of cultural resources, practices, techniques, and expertise that is more a hybrid of related knowledge, practices, and techniques than a clearly bounded world.¹ I prefer to define the field of financial self-help not by its boundaries but rather by the presence, with various degrees of salience, of three features:

1. A technical economic component: technical expertise loosely related to professional investment and accounting

2. An emotional or motivational component: techniques of the self used to produce changes in dispositions, attitudes, and behavior, aimed at dealing with fears and emotions in economic behavior and planning, particularly in terms of risk-taking, managing, and thinking about money

3. A sociological component: social theories about how the world works (the economy, the social class structure, and so on), and what people’s goals should be under those circumstances.

Using this definition, financial self-help resources can be classified not by being inside or outside a delimited universe but rather by being closer or farther to or from a center. In that epicenter is the work of Robert Kiyosaki and the groups inspired by it. Kiyosaki’s products most clearly combine these three dimensions. He provides resources to increase users’ “financial intelligence,” such as real estate training and accounting tools; he encourages readers to examine their upbringing and subjectivity and to identify those parts of the self that are impeding their financial improvement; and he offers an account of the shift of capitalist societies from the “industrial age” to the “information age.” Other gurus combine the three components in different forms and with different intensities. Author Suze Orman (1997, 2007a), for example, provides investment and personal finance advice coupled with motivational material and self-help, but she does not focus as much as Kiyosaki on offering an account of the structure of social classes in the current world.

Financial self-help borrows much of its discourse and knowledge from several forms of related expertise, some of which enjoy a more legitimate status than others, including economics and finance, coaching, corporate success literature, personal finance, professional investing, neurolinguistic programming, leadership, and psychology. All of these fields are largely autonomous, and financial self-help authors frequently legitimate claims on their basis. Although they are all related to financial self-help, they should be differentiated. Corporate success literature, for example, is closely tied to financial self-help in its advocacy of individual strategy and positive thinking. But although financial self-help takes that flavor from corporate success literature, it explicitly disregards the corporate world as an adequate setting for the pursuit of financial success.² In other words, financial self-help would not see much use for resources that help people succeed inside the firm. Financial freedom, the goal of financial self-help, is precisely the liberation from the constraints of that world, not the mastery of a corporate ladder.

The field of personal finance or household finance is very close to financial self-help. They both advocate a balanced family budget and careful expense recording practices. But financial self-help is not just personal finance. It promotes self-regulation of spending practices as only one part of a quest for wealth, success, and, ultimately, “financial freedom.” Achieving a balanced household budget and healthy personal finances is seen in financial self-help as a very limited goal, perhaps one step on the way to financial freedom and a sign of improved financial intelligence. But for authors like Kiyosaki, only “losers” would conform to that goal alone.

Those unfamiliar with the genre often think that financial self-help books are nothing but glorified “get rich quick” schemes. But authors, group leaders, and practitioners in general emphasize how financial self-help is not such a scheme. There is a paradox here. Get-rich-quick schemes are a presence in the world of users and fans of financial self-help. Late-night infomercials abound, promising that without any financial expertise, and by just clicking a few buttons, one may become wealthy in a short time, as do pyramid network schemes that promise to multiply one’s income almost overnight. While those schemes often use similar discourses, they have little to do with the core discourse of financial self-help that I examine in this book. Both approaches argue that anyone can be rich if they really want to be, but the paths to riches each of them promotes are quite different. Most financial self-help resources stress that becoming rich is difficult and make quite clear that get-rich-quick schemes are illusory. Financial self-help users are told that they need to understand financial goals correctly, acquire technical tools, and work on the self. Devotees of this discourse are taught to forget much or all of what they have learned thus far, and to combat all the dispositions that prevent them from achieving financial freedom. For example, in Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Kiyosaki writes,

I wish I could say acquiring wealth was easy for me, but it wasn’t. . . . I believe that each of us has a financial genius within us. The problem is, our financial genius lies asleep, waiting to be called upon. It lies asleep because our culture has educated us into believing that the love of money is the root of all evil. It has encouraged us to learn a profession so we can work for money, but failed to teach us how to have money work for us. It taught us not to worry about our financial future, our company or the government would take care of us when our working days are over. . . .

Unfortunately, 90 percent of the Western world subscribes to the above dogma, simply because it’s easier to find a job and work for money. If you are not one of the masses, I offer you the following ten steps to awaken your financial genius. . . .

If you ask most people if they would like to be rich or financially free, they would say “yes.” But then reality sets in. The road seems too long with too many hills to climb. It’s easier to just work for money and hand the excess over to your broker. (Kiyosaki and Lechter 1998:213–14)

Financial self-help tells readers that becoming rich is not as impossible as their family upbringing suggested, but it’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be quick. Those attracted to get-rich-quick schemes, in contrast, attempt to circumvent the crucial work of acquiring financial education and working on the self. Get-rich-quick schemes and financial self-help look alike not because they are alike, but because they compete to attract the same clientele.

The more general self-help genre, like get-rich-quick schemes, is related to but also distinct from financial self-help. Most people I interviewed had read a self-help book at some point before reading Robert Kiyosaki. But there were significant variations in how much contact they have had with nonfinancial self-help, and in how they saw the financial integrated into other spheres of life improvement. Nicolás, whom I met early in my fieldwork in Argentina, offers perhaps the clearest example of a complete integration of financial self-help into a whole program of self-improvement. Nicolás was introduced to financial self-help books by a friend from his church in Buenos Aires. An extremely eager nineteen-year-old and a committed fan of Kiyosaki (whom he referred to as “Robert” when I interviewed him), he saw financial self-help as one component of his overall project of self-improvement and success. His church, where he started going after his mother passed away, was led by a local pastor who authored several spiritual self-help books and often appeared on radio and television. He narrated the details of purchasing and reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad for the first time as a moment of epiphany:

My friend from church—we were going to take the bus and we saw a bookstore, and we went in, and went to the business books and leadership section, which is perhaps my favorite now. And he said, “Look at this book, I recommend it. It’s spectacular, it would be great if you could buy it.” And I had the money in my pocket, picked up the book, took it to the cashier, paid, went home and started reading it, and loved it. That night I read it for about three hours, and I was halfway into it and realized it was like 2:00 a.m. So I went to bed but with an amazing desire to continue reading it the next morning. So, from then on, I started devouring Kiyosaki’s books.

Nicolás then proceeded to name the titles of each of the eight books by Kiyosaki he had read. He said that he also bought the Cashflow game and played with friends, to whom he would offer Rich Dad, Poor Dad as a gift “so that they could read Kiyosaki and share my experience on this new path.” For Nicolás, being introduced to Kiyosaki was the consequence of his participation in this particular church. He sees religion, health, spirituality, and finance as one unified project:

I believed I could [make it] because of the church, because of all the growth in that explosive moment I had in the spiritual realm . . . mostly. I felt connected because it was all new to me. So I was thrilled, enthusiastic . . . so it was easy for me to read Kiyosaki, to soak in his books. And I love going to the church. I go every week, I love it. I love it . . . persisting in this path, even if the initial motivation wanes a bit. And, well, all this [influence] became visible in my personality, in how I move, how I communicate with others, in the words I started using, because with our words and thoughts one creates one’s world and creates the world. A world that when Kiyosaki appeared [in my life], it expanded from the spiritual sphere to a lot more areas, and that was the idea: to cover many areas—really important areas that we all need—basic ones, and try to grow in each one of them evenly.

Nicolás was an avid reader of self-help, and even his words echoed the linguistic style of self-help manuals. He told me his readings covered “the physical, the spiritual, the mental, and the emotional” and finances were part of the mental sphere, “the most rational part, the cold part that links more to strategy.” I asked Nicolás how important finances were in his activities with the church, and he told me,

Yes, we take into account freedom in all senses: physical, emotional, spiritual, financial. Yes, we talk a lot about that. That’s why they recommend Rich Dad, Poor Dad. We constantly talk about assets, business, being a leader for others. Lots of freedom, a field of the human being free of conditionings we inherit, perhaps from taboos, money, sex, a lot of things, and try to break with it so that the human being can be free and unfold its potential.

Financial self-help is for Nicolás one component of a regimented set of practices for self-improvement involving physical well-being and spiritual growth. He integrates what he learns in church with other popular self-help books:

I contemplate the results in all those areas, and I see progress and growth. For example, every morning I make the same breakfast: one liter of water in a bottle with two lemons and two oranges. I mix it with two spoons of aloe vera, with two spoons of all the minerals, and two spoons of fructose corn syrup. I mix everything and I drink 250 milliliters of that juice and then I do yoga. . . . I learned that in John Gray’s book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. I read that one, and one called The Mars and Venus Diet and Exercise Solution. And, well, it explains how the body is designed to heal itself, and to give the best, all the time, making your body a “supermachine.” So while you do the yoga exercise, the power of lemon, minerals, and aloe vera purifies everything inside you, it cleans everything. . . . After fifteen minutes of exercise, I drink another cup of that juice, and two garlic cloves, I put them in the food processor and mix them with water. It destroys all virus and bacteria, everything bad in your body. And after that, he [John Gray] says, you drink the morning smoothie.

Nicolás’s words show a serious commitment to everyday techniques for improving health and well-being, which for him are part of an overall program of self-improvement in which Kiyosaki also fits. Nicolás’s story is not the most typical in terms of the extent of his commitment. For example, his level of devotion to church participation as well as regimented physical and spiritual improvement was not remotely as strong in most other participants I met. Yet it illustrates not only the enthusiasm most fans develop after first reading Kiyosaki, but also the way financial self-help integrates into a larger project of self-help that is not centered solely on finances. However, other fans stumble upon financial self-help books without having read so many other self-help genres like Nicolás had, and even without a high regard for self-help in general.

Iván, for example, a professional economist who taught at a prestigious university in Buenos Aires, said that for a while he refused to read Kiyosaki, just because it was self-help, and he simply did not like self-help. When I met Iván, he had just published an article on Robert Kiyosaki for a local financial magazine, and he had started teaching courses on personal finance organized by the same magazine. I was surprised to see Kiyosaki’s ideas treated seriously by an academic expert and in a magazine targeted to more experienced investors. While his background was in corporate finance and capital markets, Iván told me that he grew attracted to personal finance and the latest developments in behavioral economics. Even with a strong academic background in economics and finance, and with suspicion of self-help, he soon became a fan of Robert Kiyosaki.

I don’t like self-help. . . . But, well, a friend started telling me some things about the books and I realized they were interesting. Perhaps I found resonance with things I had been thinking before. And that was the big break. Besides reading him, phrases by Kiyosaki have stuck in my head . . . like, for example, he talks a lot about emotions, which is very interesting—emotions in investment and decision making. And he says that when you look for a safe job, the emotion that drives you is fear.

I attended a few sessions of Iván’s courses for aspiring investors, and in his lectures he frequently used concepts from Kiyosaki’s books. Iván later published his own book on personal finance and became a columnist on personal finance for a major newspaper. Kiyosaki also had an impact on his personal life. Not long after he was introduced to Kiyosaki’s work, Iván quit his job at a major oil company—a dream career for an economist with his specialization—to become an entrepreneur, writer, and personal finance educator.

Although they are extremes—Nicolás is probably the most committed fan I met, while Iván is atypical in that he was an academic and a specialist in finance—Nicolás and Iván’s stories demonstrate how wide the variety of users of financial self-help can be, ranging from fans who are regular consumers of self-help in general to those for whom financial self-help is tied to business and money and don’t highly regard the self-help genre itself. This amplitude contributes to the success of financial self-help and the breadth of its audience, because people with different goals and different attitudes toward self-help can feel comfortable with it.

The distinctions and connections between financial self-help and general self-help may have little value for users themselves, given that they simply use resources as they run into them and find them appealing or useful. But it is important to clarify what, in my view, makes financial self-help unique: the fact that motivation, optimism, and positive thinking are only part of the components that define it. One recent successful (nonfinancial) self-help resource illustrates the singularity of financial self-help. In 2006, the book and DVD The Secret were published globally and became an immediate sensation, partly because of their exposure on American celebrity Oprah Winfrey’s television show. Echoing a long tradition of self-help focusing on “positive thinking,” the central tenet of The Secret is that people attract outcomes with the power of their minds. Whatever people want in life, they have to truly wish for. Positive thoughts attract positive outcomes. The visualization of wishes is what brings about their realization in the future (Byrne 2006; The Secret 2006). The Secret and resources like it do not have a specific domain of application. The “law of attraction” that it promotes can be equally applied to health issues, financial issues, or one’s love life. In essence, The Secret discards any external constraints and makes individuals the only party responsible for what they achieve, regardless of whether it is riches, happiness, or good health. Several authors have criticized self-help for being oppressive, and for blaming individuals for circumstances outside their control. Essayist Barbara Ehrenreich (2009:42), for example, states in her critique of positive thinking, “Without question there is a problem when positive thinking ‘fails’ and the cancer spreads or eludes treatment. Then the patient can only blame herself: she is not bein...