Very strong post, Myopic! Clearly written and fun to read. I have The Protestant Ethic on my bookshelf to read, but it seems like you summed it up nicely here...
Excellent piece which somehow popped up in my feed this afternoon. Thoroughly enjoyed your short synopsis of Weber‘s primary work. I had to think of the Swabian (German) billionaire and businessman Adolf Merkle who lived a meticulously Calvinistic life and whose fundamentalist Protestant views informed both his life and death. He committed suicide in Jan 2009 after a financial speculation against VW stock using short positions and options went spectacularly pear-shaped when VW shares were subject to a bear squeeze. The subsequent losses forced him to liquidate the businesses he had spent his entire life building up and, taking this failure as the inverse of God‘s favour and suspecting that at his age he would never be able to regain God‘s favour (ie his previous level of wealth) he took his own life by stepping in front of a train close to his home. He was 74.
I have long suspected that the real driver of the Protestant economic miracle is to be found in the embrace of financial engineering and sophisticated accounting techniques rather than anything else. Jakob Fugger („Der Reiche“) made his fortune applying banking, accounting and trade financing innovations back to Germany and engaging in „money business“ at a time when good Christians (Catholics) regarded any business that was not directly related to real things (trade, handwork, building, agriculture) as Jewish and hateful. The new breed of Protestants freed from these constraints and allowed to work in areas and own property prohibited to Jews, found their wealth creation opportunities legion.
Very strong post, Myopic! Clearly written and fun to read. I have The Protestant Ethic on my bookshelf to read, but it seems like you summed it up nicely here...
Thank you! It's still v much worth reading -- not that long and Weber is a great writer
Excellent piece which somehow popped up in my feed this afternoon. Thoroughly enjoyed your short synopsis of Weber‘s primary work. I had to think of the Swabian (German) billionaire and businessman Adolf Merkle who lived a meticulously Calvinistic life and whose fundamentalist Protestant views informed both his life and death. He committed suicide in Jan 2009 after a financial speculation against VW stock using short positions and options went spectacularly pear-shaped when VW shares were subject to a bear squeeze. The subsequent losses forced him to liquidate the businesses he had spent his entire life building up and, taking this failure as the inverse of God‘s favour and suspecting that at his age he would never be able to regain God‘s favour (ie his previous level of wealth) he took his own life by stepping in front of a train close to his home. He was 74.
I have long suspected that the real driver of the Protestant economic miracle is to be found in the embrace of financial engineering and sophisticated accounting techniques rather than anything else. Jakob Fugger („Der Reiche“) made his fortune applying banking, accounting and trade financing innovations back to Germany and engaging in „money business“ at a time when good Christians (Catholics) regarded any business that was not directly related to real things (trade, handwork, building, agriculture) as Jewish and hateful. The new breed of Protestants freed from these constraints and allowed to work in areas and own property prohibited to Jews, found their wealth creation opportunities legion.