18 ms·
Mark Twain’s Get-Rich-Quick Schemes
- billions 9y agoMark Twain's financial struggles and goals were never framed or discussed in my American school education. Wonder what the children of our poorest families would aspire to given the truth of business? God forbid they try to emulate Mark Twain's path.
- Rainymood 9y agoLovely article. Best piece imho: >And Twain wasn’t born “around the year 1835,” but during it—a strategic decision of the utmost significance, suggesting an alert and eager business mind operating even in utero.
- jeffwass 9y agoThe following line (in the next paragraph) is good too : "Unfortunately, Twain was not so astute in his choice of parents."
- james_woods 9y ago„and for settlers trying to persuade Indians to abandon tribal lands that these newcomers wished to inhabit.„ Ah - they persuaded them. What a lovely euphemism.
- blunte 9y agoNice introduction, but I admit I was a bit disappointed to not get even one "get-rich-quick scheme".
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Animats 9y agoRight. Clemens put large sums into a typesetting machine project, but it was a dud.[1] One of the prototype machines still exists. [1] http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi50.htm http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi50.htm
- blunte 9y agoLink doesn't seem correct, but I would guess that a typesetting machine project wouldn't be categorized as a get-rich-quick scheme. This sounds more like a (risky?) business venture.
- kbart 9y ago"to not get even one "get-rich-quick scheme"." It's stressed in the article that the most important thing to get rich is to be born around 1835, so you could start with this.
- blunte 9y agoNo for a couple of reasons. First, the connotation to "get-rich-quick" is that it's a foolish endeavor that usually results in loss. So I was expecting to see some amusing failures. Secondly, being born at the right time isn't "quick", unless you are perhaps speaking of the conception effort involved.
- pvg 9y agoIt's an excerpt from a book, as it says at the bottom and I imagine there's also some expectation the reader is generally aware Mark Twain was involved in many unsuccessful business ventures throughout his life. The excerpt provides a bit of context.
- waibelp 9y agoAm I the only one getting fake amazon popups on that page?
- hnarayanan 9y agoI don’t see any.
- Blazespinnaker 9y agoI get a fake iOS security warning. Quick rich scheme indeed.
- josephpmay 9y agoThere's an add-injection infection going around today. A lot of sites are getting this.
- RobertDeNiro 9y agoDefinitely got something, I thought I was on an adult website for a sec.
- beautifulfreak 9y agoThere seems to be an error: "The family’s annual food bill was $80 a month." For a person earning $1.50 per day, that would have been a whopping monthly food bill.
- spiderfarmer 9y agoHistorically, the price of food was much higher than it is now. Thank our farmers for operating more efficient year after year. https://mjperry.blogspot.nl/2010/07/as-share-of-income-americans-have.html https://mjperry.blogspot.nl/2010/07/as-share-of-income-ameri...
- rz2k 9y agoYou are right that modern technology has figured out how to turn energy into soil (way oversimplified!), and that probably 80% of the nitrogen in the bodies of any of us reading this came from the Haber process. However, it still sounds bizarre that about 90% of their expenses was food.
- Radim 9y ago"Annual" and "a month" are mutually exclusive, so (at least) one in that sentence must be in error.
- quickthrower2 9y agoMight be like the modern SaaS - advertised as a monthly price but you need to pay for the entire year to get that price.
- jdietrich 9y agoIt isn't totally off-base. Even today, the poorest consumers in middle-income countries spend 70-80% of their income on food. http://www.hindustantimes.com/interactives/how-do-people-in-developing-countries-spend-money/ http://www.hindustantimes.com/interactives/how-do-people-in-...
- keymone 9y agois it just me or is the font really hard to read?
- erikb 9y agoIt's on the harder side, I also have to say so.
- jaredklewis 9y agoRegarding the point about his good fortune of being born in 1835, I wonder what the date is for new tech billionaire CEOs. The article made me wonder if we are in our own little gilded age now. Mark Zuckerberg: 1984 Larry Page: 1973 Sergey Brin: 1973 Elon Musk: 1971 Michael Dell: 1965 Jeff Bezos: 1964 Jack Ma: 1964 Masayoshi Son: 1957 Steven Ballmer: 1956 Bill Gates: 1955 Steve Jobs: 1955 Paul Allen: 1953 Larry Ellison: 1944 The median of this list (which I compiled with no particular methodology or criteria) is 1964. The mean is 1962.
- champagnepapi 9y ago1993. I know because that's the year I was born in! Lol
- Radle 9y agoMost people take the better part of their lives to get rich. Thus if you only examine people who are alive you will naturally only find people who are quite old.
- tossaway1 9y agoMaybe you're already aware of this but being in a gilded age would not be a good thing. The gilded age described a society where serious problems were masked by a thin veneer of gold.
- gotrecruit 9y agomaybe OP meant the greek Golden Age, rather than Twain's Gilded Age.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jaredklewis 9y agoI've never read the book, but am aware it is a satire. Given your description, I think my word choice turned out to be apropos. Though perhaps "thin veneer of gold" should be modernized to "tacky stucco facade" or "parallax hero background."
- petercooper 9y agoSo it says $450k then is equivalent to about $11M now, a multiple of about 24. So scaling up.. the coal miner's daily pay was about $36 in today's money and monthly rent about $144. A 3 bed NYC apartment, on the other hand, was about $1920 in today's money. Seems the gap between poor and the 'typical' rich has come down a lot, even if it doesn't feel like it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fastball 9y agoSeems the gap between poor and 'typical' rich has come down a lot How do you figure? Back then you could rent a 3bed in NYC for $2000 (in todays dollars). That actual cost for a 3bed in NYC is probably closer to 4k or 5k, as I think a 2bed will usually run you about 3.5k p/m. So basically the only thing that can be gleaned is that property prices have gone up across the board, unlinked to inflation. EDIT: the actual cost for a 2 bed is apparently more like $4.1k in NYC. So a 3bed is probably around $5-6k [1]. [1] http://www.nyhabitat.com/new-york-price.html http://www.nyhabitat.com/new-york-price.html
- erikb 9y agoNice article, but what do the title and text have to do with each other? Spending ~30+ years learning to write and sell books doesn't look like a Get-Rich-Quick scheme to me. His father also bought land so that his future generations could become rich. That's not quick either.
- smudgymcscmudge 9y agoI had the same thought. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I didn’t expect it to turn into stories of crazy business ventures.
- dmix 9y agoIt seems even The Paris Review is not immune from clickbait headlines.
- dang 9y agoWe can change the title but someone needs to suggest a better one, as I can't think of one. A good title is accurate and neutral (which doesn't necessarily mean boring) and ideally uses representative language from the article.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- acomjean 9y agoI expected discussion of his investment in a typesetting machine. They have one in the Mark Twain museum in Hartford. Its a big machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paige_Compositor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paige_Compositor "The Paige Compositor typesetting machine that drove the family to the brink of bankruptcy, forcing them to leave their Hartford home." http://www.marktwainhouse.org/museum/our_collection.php http://www.marktwainhouse.org/museum/our_collection.php
- dmix 9y agoSeriously, how could they not mention this? The headline really has nothing to do with the article...
- mi100hael 9y agoFrom TFA: Excerpted from How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain by Alan Pell Crawford. Copyright © (2017) by Alan Pell Crawford. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
- known 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks