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Quote by Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“A major part of wealth is liquidity. Yes, It’s important to have valuable assets with big price tags. But it’s also important that your assets are doing more than inflating your net worth. Those assets should be providing continuous, substantial and endless streams of money for you. You should always be able to access the money you need to do the things you need to do and like to do. There is power in liquidity.”

Quote by Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

Work

The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic

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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

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“When our money is pooled together, we can do more good in the world. As spiritual people and conscious people, we can leverage our combined monetary power to have a greater influence on the economy and make it better reflect our values. At the same time, it can be profitable for each of us independently. There’s power in pooling capital. And that’s part of what we do at Mayflower-Plymouth.”

“Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so. If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call Philistines. Culture says: 'Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”

“Hunter-gatherers are generally spared opportunistic leadership because the gap between rich and poor is so narrow—not surprising in economies that don't use currency or stockpile food. As soon as food can be monopolized, though, hunter-gatherers become just as unfair and stratified as everyone else. Archaeological evidence from across the Pacific Northwest indicates that some Native communities figured out how to restrict access to riverine salmon fisheries and quickly institute a powerful elite that built large houses, kept slaves, and passed wealth from generation to generation. But most Native peoples lived off the land in a way that could not be monopolized. A survey of several hundred tribes native to North America found that nearly 90 percent of the ones with no large food surpluses also had no political inequality. Conversely, social stratification was found in almost 90 percent of tribes that did stockpile food or monopolize its production.”

“The distribution of income in a society is called the 'Gini coefficient,' named after an Italian sociologist named Corrado Gini, who published a paper on the topic in 1912. A society where one person earns all the money and everyone else earns none, effectively has a Gini coefficient of 1.0; and a society where everyone earns the same amount has a coefficient of zero. Neither is desirable. Moderate differences in income motivate people because they have a reasonable chance of bettering their circumstances, and extreme differences discourage people because their efforts look futile. A study of 21 small-scale societies around the world found that hunter-gatherers like the Hadza—who presumably represent the most efficient possible system for survival in a hostile environment—have Gini coefficients as low as .25. In other words, they are far closer to absolute income equality than to absolute monopoly. Because oppression from one's own leaders is as common a threat as oppression from one's enemies, Gini coefficients are one reliable measure of freedom. Hunter-gatherer societies are not democracies—and many hold women in subordinate family roles—but the relationship between those families and their leaders is almost impervious to exploitation. In that sense, they are freer than virtually all modern societies. According to multiple sources, including the Congressional Budget Office, the United States has one of the highest Gini coefficients of the developed world, .42, which puts it at roughly the level of Ancient Rome. (Before taxes, the American Gini coefficient is even higher—almost .6—which is on par with deeply corrupt countries like Haiti, Namibia, and Botswana.) Moreover, the wealth gap between America's richest and poorest families has doubled since 1989. Globally, the situation is even more extreme: several dozen extremely rich people control as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity—3.8 billion people.”