I had a dream the other night.
I was with a travel group from Washington and Lee University, though I wasn't part of the group. Rather, I was photographing the tour, and we we were in a large church. The Pope came to meet the group, and as I made pictures we began to chat.
He was taken with me and asked me to come with him as he left, which I did. (The group continued on in the church, though I had some anxiety about rejoining them before they left later.) We talked, and he asked about my cameras. I handed him one -- a Canon DSLR with a small zoom lens -- and he looked through it gently, handling it uncertainly before passing it back. He noted that it must be expensive, and I said that it was actually fairly cheap compared to some, such as the Leica I was using at that moment.
My pal Pope Francis
He then sat down to lunch with a number of others from different countries and ethnicities -- African, Indian, etc. I was not asked to sit at the table (all the seats were taken) but welcomed into the discussion. He noted the cost of the cameras and wondered about whether that money might be better used. I answered that at least the cameras would bring the stories of need to others, but I asked the group what they thought about the proper use of money. Specifically, I saw this as a chance to ask people who might actually have some useful answers about something that had been bothering me of late.
The world's most expensive painting
Would you spend something like the budget of a small city for this?
Would you spend something like the budget of a small city for this?
Christie's recently sold the world's most expensive painting, a triptych by Francis Bacon that went for over $142 million. Yep, basically the budget of a decently sized corporation. One commentary I heard on the radio speculated that it was bought by a "trophy hunter:" someone recently made fabulously rich who wants to prove his wealth and good taste with the purchase of things like this, whether he himself values them or not.
Now this sort of thing has given me pause from time to time. Often, it's when some sports star receives a massive salary (mainly because the star in question usually plays in a sport in which I have little or no interest). I think it's a useful example; the sports industry globally is worth something in the area of $600 billion (with a B, billion) dollars. That's a little less than $100 per person, man woman and child, on the entire surface of the earth. What do we get for it?
Sports doesn't build roads or run food programs. It doesn't clothe people or end disease. It just entertains.
Now, one can make the same argument about sports as one can about paintings: The human mind cannot live on work alone. We need to unwind and enjoy things, elevate the spirit and so on. And whenever there's a way to make money off of something, humans will do so. (I have a similar rule that any time a human discovers something with forward motion, he will find a way to race it competitively, but that's neither here nor there right now.) $600 billion for a few quiet afternoons ... for those who can afford it?
Perhaps a better argument could be made to say that the $600 billion doesn't simply evaporate, or go directly into the team owners' and players' massive bank accounts. That includes the cost for construction workers to build stadiums and hot dog vendors and janitors to clean up afterwards, not to mention all the secondary markets in bars where people watch the games and companies that make jerseys and stuff for fans. It's a considerable little economy there, but it's still an economy built on basically nothing. (As opposed to the economy around, say, a car factory, which actually produces something.)
Let's go somewhere else, like popular entertainment. Or how about the whole secondary industry around popular entertainment? A nice play, some music -- again, you can make the human spirit argument. But what about something like the Michael Jackson trial in 2005. Global coverage. Satellite trucks and thousands of reporters gathered, waiting, day after day. What did that cost? Not the trial, just all the people hanging around to cover it, and the satellite time, the equipment rental, the food and hotel expenses.
Outside the courthouse in 2005
What more productive thing could all this money be applied to? What if we could all agree to take one day, or one event, and just apply all that money to something like development in a poor country? (Of course, I'm sure everyone would instantly agree with this, except for the sport or team or game that they follow. Just take someone else's.)
So I cited the painting example (a particularly galling one to me) to the lunch crowd, who seemed to receive it with interest. A discussion was beginning when my group started to leave, and -- as dreams will -- the scene suddenly shifted elsewhere. China, to be specific. But perhaps that's another posting ...
What shall it profit, my brethren, if a man say he hath faith, but hath not works? Shall faith be able to save him?
And if a brother or sister be naked and want daily food:
And one of you say to them: Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled;
yet give them not those things that are necessary for the body, what
shall it profit? So faith also, if it have not works, is dead in itself.
- James 2:14-17
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