Idiot Money
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  • #21: The merits of money are negative
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  • #24: My favourite way to think about investing, part 1
  • #25: The ABC of money, part 1: the three self-deceptive poisons
  • #26: Consider the pineapple: the perfect symbol of idiot money
  • #27: The ABC of money, part 2: financial nobility, an overview
  • #28: My favourite way to think about investing, part 2
  • #29: The ABC of money, part 3: financial nobility, step 1
  • #30: My favourite way to think about investing, part 3
  • #31: The ABC of money, part 4: financial nobility, step 2
  • #32: The idiocy of ignoring impermanence (the ABC of money, part 5)
  • #33: The six financial stress responses: what's yours?
  • #34: My favourite way to think about investing, part 4: betting beyond the basics
  • #35: The ABC of money, part 6: financial nobility, step 3
  • #36: My favourite way to think about investing, part 5: cost-benefit investing
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  • #38: The best diet advice and the best financial advice are the same
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  • #40: The dance of becoming wiser with money
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  • #45: The ABC of money, part 10: what meditation isn’t
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  • #54: The ABC of money, part 13: financial enlightenment
  • #55: Identifying your hidden money addictions
  • #56: Treating your hidden money addictions
  • #57: Idiot Money Maths #1: How much does it cost to keep you happy?
  • #58: The ABC of money, part 14: the secret shackles of financial freedom
  • #59: The ABC of money, part 15: freedom to, freedom from, freedom for
  • #60: If you go there blindfolded, you probably won’t like where you end up
  • #61: Idiot Money Maths #2: What is your default unit of spending?
  • #62: Balance isn’t stillness
  • #63: A problem shared
  • #64: How to live well, even in a palace (the ABC of money, part 16)
  • #65: Denunciation is still attachment (the ABC of money, part 17)
  • #66: “What do Blackheath people do?” (a story about how not to do financial planning)
  • #67: The ABC of money, part 18: Addicted to a dream
  • #68: What hot new financial knowledge are you likely to find in 2022?
  • #69: Red Pill Financial Planning: Escaping the Money Matrix
  • #70: The nasty narrowness of number-governed living
  • #71: Getting into Financial Flow
  • #72: The ABC of money, part 19: Denunciation bad, renunciation good
  • #73: I, Robot? Money and the misleading mechanisation of life choices
  • #74: Kondo your credit-card statements
  • #75: The rule of 72 (and its oft-overlooked implications)
  • #76: Forget about improving your decisions. Focus on improving your decision-making skills
  • #77: Seeing your financial world more clearly (the ABC of money, part 20)
  • #78: How to lose 2 1/2 stone in 6 months: an intro to the best non-fiction book I've ever read
  • #79: Your money worldview is (literally) half-brained
  • #80: Cost-consciousness beats cost-cutting
  • #81: Financial change that doesn’t start from your financial worldview is selling you short
  • #82: The overlooked truth of reality that is messing up how you live with money
  • #83: How money hijacks your hierarchy of attention
  • #84: The value of (almost) everything to you is nothing
  • #85: Financial philosophy > Financial psychology > Hot investment tips
  • #86: Five regrets of the rich
  • #87: Sum malfunction: a sure-fire way to spot if you’re being a financial idiot
  • #88: The Micawber Fallacy, or what your Dickensian maths misses about spending wisely
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  • #90: Wanting wisdom, craving financial fortune cookies
  • #91: You don’t need a scammer to be scammed: your desperation for an ‘answer’ will do almost as well
  • #92: Are you reading the wine list the wrong way around?
  • #93: Some personal finance puzzles and how not to solve them
  • #94: The main reason your relationship with money is so messed up
  • #95: The tyranny of the takeaway
  • #96: Deep wealth v shallow wealth
  • #97: What seeing your financial life more clearly looks like
  • #98: Making more of your money isn’t a maths problem
  • #99: Is what you’re doing for and with money working?
  • #100: Where to start, where to go, what to do about what’s stopping you
  • #101: The life cycle of a financial idiot
  • #102: I can read your financial mind
  • #103: Don’t worry about playing a game better when there’s a better game to play
  • #104: Reflections on two years of this newsletter, and why I’m taking a six-month break
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#26: Consider the pineapple: the perfect symbol of idiot money

15th March, 2021

Previous#25: The ABC of money, part 1: the three self-deceptive poisonsNext#27: The ABC of money, part 2: financial nobility, an overview

Last updated 4 years ago

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To celebrate this newsletter's six-month anniversary, the story of my favourite symbol of money idiocy, starring St Paul's Cathedral, prisoners rioting because of being made to eat lobster, and taking fruit for a walk.

Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter. The newsletter that would rather eat fruit than flaunt it.

This week: becoming wiser with money by understanding that price and value are completely different things... though we often need ridiculous reminders of this.

To take another example, consider cacti. I’ve a friend that works in a garden centre. They tell me that people regularly come in and ask – without any sense of embarrassment – what’s the most expensive indoor plant they’ve got. It’s usually a bloody big cactus. Cacti grow slowly. That’s why they cost a lot. Not because they’re ‘better’. Better in houseplant terms is a function of how well it fits with where you want it to go and how its care needs fit with your conscientiousness.

If you eat caviar, you're probably an idiot. If you want eggs, eat those of a hen. They are more nutritious and leave significantly more resources to buy other things with in addition.

Not all ways of wasting our lives in a desperate bid to look as though we aren’t are as silly as having people round to view rotting fruit. But subtlety is more dangerous than silliness; more modern manifestations of pineapple posturings are more pernicious for being less public.

My Pineapple of Value

Because everyone needs a kitsch reminder of what really matters... a glimpse inside my life. This ridiculous thing is stuffed with little notes about great things in my life, to be remembered and dwelled upon when not-so-great things are happening.

Train to hear these words and phrases as you do you own name across a crowded room, then stop and check that the belief underlying your automatic reaction is true.

What something costs is not what something is worth. Cost is calculated by the world’s supply and demand. Worth is determined by a context-dependent contribution to your life.

If you’ve ever been to St Paul’s Cathedral in London, you may have noticed the proud golden pineapples that sit sentry-like . Or perhaps you’ve noticed the ones that adorn the . Examples abound of pineapples popping up in contexts unrelated to their fundamental fruity purpose.

When St Paul’s was built the punk-haired pineapple was just about the rarest – and therefore priciest – item around, so its fruit-based function was forgotten in the name of price-based posturing. ‘A single fruit,’ the , could be ‘worth thousands of pounds,’ and ‘often the same pineapple would be paraded from event to event until it eventually went rotten.’

‘Less well-off folk,’ we’re told, could rent them for ‘a special event, dinner party or even just to jauntily tuck under an arm on a show-off stroll.’ Some came with their own security guards. In 1807, a Mr Godding was sentenced to seven years in Australia, one year per pineapple he pinched. ‘For a long time,’ the School of Life , ‘only royalty could actually afford to eat them.’ Poems were written, and temples built, in their honour.

Today, pineapples don’t cost £5,000. A fiver can get you three and still have enough change for a couple of bananas. Stripped of its ability to showcase a wasting of resources – to provide one of the best examples of James Carse’s assertion that – the pineapple hasn’t changed. It’s still just a fruit. People nowadays even eat them before they rot.

Put so starkly as this, it may sound stupid to just pick a plant on the pot’s price tag. But imagine you’ve been given a voucher for a free plant. You can spend it on anything. Without playing silly games involving a second-hand houseplant market, do you go for the £40 one that fits best with your circumstances, or the £400 cactus? You may of course mix in circles where people will somehow think better of you after they know what your cactus cost, however out of place it looks, but who wants to mix in such circles, as opposed to ones that know your place is an awfully silly place for a cactus, and you’d’ve been much better off with a fern, or a palm, or an

David Foster Wallace ‘Up until sometime in the 1800s, lobster was literally low-class food.’ ‘Even in the harsh penal environment of early America,’ he continues, ‘some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats.’ We eat lobster, but when we pay for it, we’re being sold a story. That stories can literally make food (and wine) taste nicer is no bad thing. But it’s only a positive when you use the story to save money, to make inexpensive things taste better (e.g. treating dinner-party guests to an extra special bottle by regaling them with tales from the vineyard), not when you do the opposite and shell out for the story, not the substance.

Money of the Week

This week:

atop the western towers
Wimbledon trophy
BBC reports
relates
wealth is not possessed, but performed
elaborate indoor shrubbery with two levels and a little path running down the middle…
tells of how
Maxim
Trigger #14: Worth