The Long Arithmetic: Issue 15

My Thanksgiving table always has a turkey on it. It always has the pickled herring too.

We make pickled herring the way it has always been made, and it turns up whatever is the occasion. New Year, a birthday, random day of the week when someone comes over. It does not know it is Thanksgiving. It shows up because it shows up.

Nothing was replaced to make room for the turkey. The turkey was added. Decades in this country and that table is still serving both things at once, without anybody having decided it should.

We did not keep it on purpose, and that is the part worth sitting with. There was no evening where somebody argued for the herring and won. It came along the way the language came along, and by the time anyone might have voted on it, the vote was long over.

Most of what crosses over with you works like that. It arrives without a decision, and then it stays without one as well.

In 2007, Dennis Jaffe and James Grubman published a paper about families and money, and they used a frame I have not been able to put down since. “Acquirers of wealth are, in a sense, like immigrants,” they wrote. “They undergo the life-changing experience of traveling to a more affluent country from their homeland.” These immigrants, they go on, “bring with them the culture, values, history, language, and beliefs of the socioeconomic lands of their birth as they journey to the Land of Wealth.”

I read that and recognized my own kitchen from the old country. In my case it was Ukraine, which was part of Soviet Union at the time.

If you built your money rather than received it, you moved. You may not have crossed a border to do it. You changed countries anyway.

This holds even if you were born here, because the old country does not have to be a place. It can be a decade. If you spent your twenties genuinely short of money, you emigrated from somewhere too, and the rules came with you the same way. The border was an income bracket instead of a river, and the crossing still counted. Thrift would be the easy answer for what came along.

Thrift I could name, and anything I can name I can argue with. What I actually carried over is an absence, and an absence is harder to catch, because it never shows up as behavior. It shows up as a gap where a behavior would be.

In the Soviet Union you ate what was on the table. There was no menu. Scarcity usually gets described as not having enough, and that is the smaller half of it. The larger half is that scarcity removes the act of choosing. Nothing to choose between means no practice at choosing, and practice is the part that does not come back on its own.

I am still not fully comfortable having a choice. With food. With shopping.

And money arrives offering nothing else. Choice is the native language of the country you moved to, and nearly everything wealth does for you has to run through it.

My mother has a rule about being sick. When you have a cold you cannot drink cold water and you cannot have ice cream, or it will get worse. Hot water only. She does not offer this as her opinion. She offers it the way you would state the weather.

I have asked how that works. The asking has never once moved the rule.

That is the thing about the old country. It sends recipes. It also sends legislation, and the legislation never arrives with a citation attached.

Here is a piece of mine.

For more than 3 years I kept a meaningful amount of capital in cash.

You could be generous and call that a position. It was not one.

A position has a trigger, and I had nothing I was waiting for that I could have named, no condition that would have made me deploy. It stayed because staying was the only option that asked nothing of me.

A decision would have cost me a few evenings. Not deciding cost me nothing I could feel.

A non-decision never announces itself. There is no day to point to, nobody sends a confirmation, and it leaves neither a paper trail nor a date. Which is exactly how it ran for 3 years without ever once coming up for review.

I have never made myself add up what those years cost. I could. I have not. I am not telling you this on the way to announcing that I fixed it, because the not-counting is the same reflex as the sitting, and I would rather show you the whole animal than the tidy half of it.

Here is the part that makes this harder than it sounds. The reflex is not wrong. The caution that kept that money still is probably the same caution that made there be money at all. You do not get to keep the half that built it and delete the half that freezes it. It is one instrument, and it does both jobs with the same hands.

I should say plainly that I do not live in scarcity now, and have not for a long time. I expect money to come. That expectation is real, and it shapes most of what I do.

The old rules stayed anyway. They sit closer to a reflex the body kept after the danger passed than to anything I believe about the world, and a reflex does not check the news. Which is why noticing is most of the job. Arguing with it does not work, because it was never an argument in the first place. It is a hand that moves before you do.

Key points:

Jaffe and Grubman have a second half, and it is the one that matters if you have children. If you are the immigrant, they are the natives. The inheritor, in their words, is “the native-born citizen of the land of comfort and exemption from financial worry.”

Natives do not have the absence. They have been choosing since they could talk. From where you are standing that can look like carelessness. Mostly it is fluency. They are fluent in the thing you are illiterate in, and illiterate in the scarcity that built it.

The available mistake is teaching them the old country's rules as though the rules were about money. Mostly the rules are about fear. Fear does not transfer. It gets re-learned or it does not, and either way it is not a thing you can hand across a table.

There is a version of this where the household keeps running on old-country rules long after the country changed, and the children learn them as manners. They can recite them perfectly. They have no idea what they are for. That is how you get an adult who saves diligently and cannot say why, or one who spends freely and cannot say why either. Same missing sentence, opposite symptom.

So what is worth handing over is probably the reason the rule existed, rather than the rule itself. That is a harder conversation to start, and usually a shorter one than parents expect.

I question my mother's ice cream rule. Every time. It has never moved, and I ask anyway.

The money rules that came out of the same house, in the same language, out of the same scarcity, I mostly do not question at all. They do not announce themselves as rules. They arrive as reasonable. As prudent. As “I just don't see the need.”

And they charge more than a scoop of ice cream.

So here is what I am sitting with this week, and I would offer it to you as well. Which of your money rules does not know what country it is in?

The ones worth finding are the ones you have never had to defend, because nobody has ever asked. Write back and tell me one. The specific rule, and roughly what you think it has cost you, or that you have never counted, which is its own kind of answer. I read every reply myself.

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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. This material is for educational purposes only and not financial, legal, or investment advice. Private investments may be risky. Do your own research and consult licensed professionals before acting on anything specific to your situation.

Until Monday.

Alina