The View from the Office.

I met up with historian and author Joseph Moore for lunch at The Porch in Bryant Park. I had the sliders. He had the chicken wrap.  

Joseph has a new book out called: How to Get Rich in American History in which he mines 300 years of data and anecdotes for lessons about how wealth is built.

Joseph draws a distinction between saving for retirement and getting rich. He says the two have been conflated by the outsized returns clocked by Baby Boomers.

Most personal finance advice says work 40 years, save 10% a year and hold index funds. But using that strategy fails 40% of the time since the American Revolution, in part because there have been four periods in which financial markets collapsed.

Joesph argues that saving is how you can tread water; Getting rich requires concentration and risk.

Joseph grew up in rural South Carolina. His father made $14,000 a year climbing under mobile homes inspecting electrical boxes. His parents’ definition of success was that their kids didn’t go to jail. 

I asked him what the answer is to how to get rich. He said it boils  down to five things.

–Solve someone’s problems. 

–Take bigger, outsized risks.

–Be mobile for opportunities.

–Marry well (someone supportive) 

–Be optimistic.

The most enjoyable part of our conversation was all the minutia of historical details he’s picked up reading letters and documents.

We talked about how George Washington made his fortune by a) marrying a wealthy widow and then b) speculating in western land.

Joseph said Washington died the  wealthiest president in American history relative to the population at the time until Trump.

I loved the irony that Benjamin Franklin, in his twenties, was printing pamphlets warning against debt while behind on the payments for his own press.

Joseph says we’ve never lived in a wealthier era or one in which the cost of taking outsized risks is relatively small. (There are – he notes – no longer the kind of debtor prisons in which entire families were incarcerated.) 

You can connect with Joseph via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.