Linguistics and the Meaning Game: A Treatise for Writing Teachers

 

    Descartes, eager to define humans as entities distinct from the natural world, contended that language does not result from “natural movements which betray passions and may be imitated by machines as well as manifested by animals” (Chomsky).  Crying, while a communicative act, does not constitute language; it merely denotes a response to stimuli.  The phrase “I am sad,” by contrast, rises to the language level because it represents abstract self-awareness on a creative plane unaffected by stimuli.  Much of Descartes’ comments, which tie inevitably to his philosophical writings, stem from the assumption that human thought—and by extension, human status—deserves commendation as something uniquely praiseworthy: “I think therefore I am!”  Concerned with proving that animals and machines can’t be people, he left unexamined the complex relationship between language and ideology.     The legacy of 20^th Century linguistics encourages a view of language as a fascinating field in its own right and not merely a symptom of intelligence.  (Moreover, insofar as scientists now apply the “language”  label to behaviors across the animal kingdom, we might wonder if Descartes’ views amount to a form of species-ism.)  I offer here an overview of three philosophies of grammar that derive from this legacy and comment briefly on their relevance to writing instruction.

     At the beginning of the 20^th Century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure promoted a view of language which had significant consequences, by the 1960s and 1970s, to philosophy and creative arts.  In brief, Saussure’s view held that language, and in turn thought, stemmed from a type of disruption, or as later philosophers termed it, “difference.”  Saussure’s view emerged in contrast to the traditional quest through the 19^th Century, by which scholars, seeking universal vocal sounds related to the real world, hoped to arrive at a fundamental description of language.  Saussure argued that scholars pursued the quest in vain, for human language offers only one constant:  the interplay of consonants and vowels.  Extrapolating further, Saussure argued that without such interplay—and not just between vowels and consonants, but between all sounds recognized by the mind as phonemes (in their simplest form, the letters of the alphabet)—language would cease to function.  We recognize the sound denoted by “R,” for example, not by R’s innate qualities, but by its contrast to “S” and “Q” and other basic sounds.  This description represents an auditory parallel to the way we think about the world on an ideological level.  We know “sky” not because of its singular presence, but because of its boundary with earth and sea.  According to Saussure, our language structure, as well as our conceptual view of the world, thus depends fundamentally on the difference between entities.

     People who remember grade school English class as a series of grammar drills meant to identify parts of speech or diagram a sentence participated in a style of instruction influenced by Saussure.  The concept that we can break a sentence into articles, nouns, verbs, prepositions, and adjectives implies that we can recognize the difference between such units and also that we know the syntactic instances in which one unit (and not another) may occur.  No matter how complex the sentence, we can reduce it to fundamental units.  This premise, a structuralist notion, provides the origin for the grammar known as “case-slot.”  To adherents of this school, Thomas Paine’s famous sentence These are the times that try men’s souls breaks down into syntactic slots (subject, verb, object, dependent clause) and the cases to fill those slots.     

     Dedicated to the idea that the building blocks of language fit into certain structures but not others, case-slot grammar gives English teachers unafraid of appearing dour, prim, and snobbish a chance to enforce “The Queen’s English” via prescriptive rules.  Apostrophe ‘S, as a basic unit, cannot precede the noun for which it bestows the quality of possession. . .  the object of a preposition can’t be the subject of a sentence.  .  .etc. 

     The “whole language” fad which took hold in the 1990’s, along with Humanities professors’ unquestioned fascination for Derrida and Postmodernism, drove a wrecking-ball into structuralist notions like case-slot.  In his landmark essay Structure, Sign and Play . . ., Derrida argued that because we have no adequate definition or intrinsic awareness of difference—we can only define it by recourse to itself or perceive it in the presence of other things—a paradox arises.  Basing knowledge upon something intrinsically unknowable destabilizes both language and knowledge.  How can words have meaning—or at least an “official” structured meaning—when at the center of the meaning game lies an entity not clearly defined?  Humanities departments throughout academia still resonate with the implications of this “postmodern condition.”

     During the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of Cold War politics that brought tremendous funding to the sciences, another philosophy of grammar, transformational/generative linguistics, emerged as the darling theory among American linguists, largely through the work of Noam Chomsky.  Chomsky’s name echoes with guru status not only in linguistics but also political science and social commentary, and much as Chomsky branched into other fields, so did generative linguistics spread out of the academic community into applications such as artificial intelligence.  Perhaps the appeal of generative grammar lies in its somewhat “scientific” quality:  based on observations, it seeks to predict language phenomena.  Further, it offers a convenient explanation for the way children acquire language.  Noting that children move rapidly from speaking single words to speaking entire sentences, Chomsky and his adherents speculated that a pattern, a set of templates, resides within the human mind.    According to Chomsky, we learn language not by imitating, but by matching the patterns we hear to the master template in our minds.

     Language, to the generative linguist, refers to a pattern organized by a set of formulas.  The formulas derive from a master template, and the words we speak and the sentences we write comprise transformations of the template, a surface reflecting a “deep structure” underneath.  Thomas Paine’s famous sentence reflects a transformation of two deep structure statements:  Certain times try men’s souls + These are the times.  The surface sentence “These are the times that try men’s souls” adheres to a formula allowing the combination of two sentences into one through the generation of a relative clause.  Sentence-combining exercises, for years a regular activity in grade school English classes, trace their origin to transformational grammar.

     While Generative linguistics does much to explain the process of language acquisition, the concept of an internal template ignores the influential effect that culture, environment, and belief have upon actual language use.  Critics of the generative model often argue that language is only partly internal.  More accurately, such critics contend, language and culture describe a circle of influence upon each other:  born into culture, we depend upon cultural values for our perception of meaning.  The cultural influence upon language, known as ideology, serves as the launching point for the third major approach to language:  functional grammar.

     Largely developed through the work of linguist Michael Halliday, functional grammar proceeds from the premise that any description of language must include a description of context, the surroundings in which language has meaning. Further, functional grammar assumes that at all times users of language have choice, in the words they use, in the sentence structures they select, etc.  As such, language amounts to a form of behavior.  Intriguingly, functional grammar asserts that meaning (thought) fundamentally links to language.  We do not wrap thoughts in language—rather, what we think IS our language.  Medium and message comprise flipsides of the same communicative act.

     In this view, Thomas Paine’s famous sentence “These are the times that try men’s souls” operates on three levels of meaning: ideation (i.e. what the speaker depicts as action), theme (i.e. what the speaker makes the sentence about), and interpersonal (i.e. how the speaker links the sentence to an ongoing conversation with a larger community).  The main verb, “are,” suggests a state of identification equating one concept with another.  Conceivably, Thomas Paine could have said “These times agitate us,” choosing a verb of process rather than static existence.  A similar choice underlies what the sentence asserts thematically.  The pronoun “these,” referring to “times,” emphasizes circumstances rather than humans.  Further, the circumstances do the action—stylistically, Thomas Paine communicates that humans are the victims of an environment outside their control.

     Functional grammar offers a rich resource for writing instructors.  For one, it suggests that all aspects of communication, from the sciences to the humanities, derive from ideology.  Further, leading students to question ideology encourages critical thinking.  Asking students to compare phrases like “Fire fighter” and “freedom fighter”—structurally similar expressions with divergent interpretations—helps show that we do, in fact, speak ideologically.  How do we know that one “fighter” fights against fire while the other fights for freedom?  Culture tells us, imbuing “freedom” with such a positive connotation that we automatically assume the “freedom fighter” must strive to promote it.  Similarly, if we can say “it’s raining” to indicate a sky filled with water drops, can we say “it’s winging” to indicate a sky filled with birds?  The fact that English speakers recognize the sense of the former but not the latter reflects cultural biases that refuse to accept birds as a weather phenomenon.

     Much to the detriment of creative writing majors, very few creative writing courses at the undergraduate level incorporate a formal study of linguistics into their curriculum.  Consequently, colleges across the nation each year graduate thousands of aspiring writers who possess only a rudimentary awareness of the meaning game.  Some of them may boast portfolios of entertaining short stories polished through the classic workshop approach long regarded as a staple of the writing classroom, but very few have sufficient fluency in discourse theory to understand how a text makes meaning.  To raise a point that some may regard as trivial but I consider highly pertinent, how many creative writing students understand speech act theory?  Writing teachers obsess over authentic dialogue, and assign texts that model characters speaking authentically, yet very few of these teachers (and even fewer students) know about Grice’s Maxims, a famous tool for the linguistic study of conversation (and the perception of text as a conversational act).

     An ideologically informed approach to writing instruction would emphasize the HOW of a text as much as the what. . .in other words, it looks at the medium as much as the message.  Linguistics offers a valuable toolkit for developing a more robust awareness of text.  In my view, the “functional grammar” of Halliday holds the most potential, but any formal linguistic represents an improvement over current practice.  Unless undergraduate creative writing programs place a greater emphasis on linguistics in their curriculum, they will continue to graduate writers who fixate on message without a full grasp of the medium.           

A Lesson Non-Plan for English Teachers

(This piece first appeared in the online edition of the ECCTYC journal, Inside English)

The Art of the Tangent

 

    Recently, due to a scheduling glitch, I exchanged my daytime teaching load for night classes.  Adjusting to my new routine, I developed an appreciation for caffeine and sugar.  These traditional mainstays of the educator’s diet succored my stamina, but also primed me with palaver.  I confess, from my lesson plans I did digress, on occasion reprising the off-topic tendencies of my 8^th grade shop teacher, whose drill press demonstrations included colorful stories of drill press accidents and other unpleasantries meant to raise the eyebrows of his adolescent audience.  The result was an intriguing foray into the art of the tangent.

     Now, before any curriculum curmudgeons put my pedagogy on parole, let me posit that tangents, like red wine, offer benefits when used in moderation.  When students see a teacher toying with a tangent—in a sense, taking creative license with the organizing principle of the lesson plan—they in turn feel more willing to take creative license with their writing, making connections they might not otherwise.  Moreover, tangents possess an entertaining quality which can evoke curiosity.  Like pushing the pedal to the metal on a 1964 Pontiac GTO, and boosting the acceleration with nitrous oxide, you’re just not sure where things might lead—a fiery end, perhaps, but that blinding flash might just signal an epiphany.

     Aspiring tangentialists will find that stories from their pre-teaching employment can offer a rich trove of source material.  Students who believe that we entered the classroom like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus, fully armed with rhetorics and dry erase markers, express surprise upon discovering that we once worked in food service and retail.  For my students, surprise mixes with astonishment when I tell them my 1984 food service wages:  $3.15 an hour.  Students gasp when they do the math.

     “You mean you only made 25 dollars after an 8 hour day?”

     “That’s right,” I say.  “Before taxes.”

     These numbers give me some street cred, which I milk for dramatic effect, adding in details with which I hope my audience might sympathize.  I tell them of my struggle with the soft serve machine and how my boss yelled when I made the portions too large.  Then, the groundwork thusly in place, I deliver the key point:  my life, just like my students’, involved suffering.  The humanizing power of this revelation renders me more approachable.  Like a platoon who knows the scars on their sergeant’s cheek come from dangers faced and mastered, the class gains a sense of camaraderie.  Plus, students experience a feel-good optimism, which arises when they learn my fast food career was only temporary, and my subsequent job, at a supermarket, paid better.

     “How much did you make then?” they ask.

     “$4.25 an hour,” I beam.

     In addition to work experience, aspiring tangentialists can mine their scholastic history for source material.  Here, let me offer a word of caution:  if you wax rhapsodic about how you wowed the MLA with your post-modern, post-structural, and post-relevant approach to discourse theory, you will inspire only glazed eyes and drooping jaws.  Such tales might regale the regents at Yale or Harvard, but won’t gain much traction among students who enrolled in your class to meet a GE pattern requirement.  Rather, an academic-sourced tangent should, in the parlance of our students’ subculture, “get real.”  Often this means divulging our academic failures as much as our success.  In my own case, students learn that my scholastic closet contains a few skeletons—such as the one bearing the scarlet letter “E” (for “expulsion”) dating back to the time I got kicked out of high school.  At first, eyebrows raise and foreheads crinkle as students engage in the mental machination of picturing their respectable professor as a miscreant youth.  Then students grasp the relevance of the story.  I tell them how I refused to let failure define me, but, like them, attended community college, which laid the path toward my future profession.  This tale of transformation resonates especially with students who feel marginalized because they don't fit traditional profiles.  Polly, a 40 year old recovering alcoholic, confided to me that she felt ashamed of her life, because she faced not only the embarrassment of living with her parents for economic reasons, but also the discomfort of sitting in class surrounded by students young enough to call her “mom.”  “Your story made me feel more comfortable about my own mess-ups,” she told me after class.  “Maybe I shouldn’t worry so much how others judge me.”  Polly went on to use anecdotes from her alcoholic years as powerful supporting details in her essays.

     Truth be told, not every tangent to which I subjected my night classes achieved success.  Some, like a nitrous-injected Pontiac GTO, crashed and burned.  But—isn’t that like writing itself?  Not all our ideas lead to epiphanies, nor do all our sentences merit a place among T.S. Eliot’s touchstones of the Western Tradition.  Nevertheless, we pursue our work as if they might, because at its essence writing is an art, and art requires play and a willingness to explore odd connections.  So too the Art of the Tangent.  If you worry how its pursuit might affect your reputation, fear not!  According to Rate My Professor, my reputation remains intact—not bad a guy who got kicked out of high school and made $3.15 an hour flipping burgers. . .but I digress.

Imagism and Ambiguity: Exploring Form in American Haiku

Note:  The following paper, written for a course in Rhetorical Theory, first appeared as a presentation in the Graduate Seminar of the Southern California Writing Program Administrators' Conference.  Copyright 1996, 2005 by S. Jacques Stratton.

     Poetry, as written communication, offers potentially either the most rigid or loose of forms for conveying a message to an audience.  Rigid poetic forms, such as sonnets, limericks, and epics, impose on the reader an expectation of convention.  Alternatively, poetry known as "free verse" shows little concern for formal matters.  It may lack a rhyme scheme, dance to a haphazard rhythm, and, visually, demonstrate an ignorance of margins or consistently delineated white space.  The poetry known as "Western" or "American" haiku straddles the border between forms.  Though writers of Western haiku need not adhere to conventions of meter and rhyme, the philosophy of the form severely constrains the expression of thought.  In general, haiku conforms to an ideological premise:  simple, precise imagery provides a communion between man and nature.  This premise, which provides haiku a focus, also creates ambiguity.  We do not know the intent of the poet, but only the suggestions of meaning that the poet's imagery brings to our minds.  Because of its ambiguity and concise nature, haiku presents an interesting situation to the critic. Kenneth Burke's assertion, that "form in literature is an arousing and fulfillment of desires," offers little guidance for exploring haiku.  In the space of a few short lines, a haiku arouses much but seemingly fulfills little.  Since Burke also asserts in "The Nature of Form" that correct form provides fulfillment, the question arises about the "correctness" of haiku form, at least as it pertains to a Western audience generally unfamiliar with haiku philosophy.

     One of the most widely anthologized haiku-type poems in American literature is Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro."  Although some claim that the imagist poets, a group which included Pound, did not fully understand the haiku, the poem deserves consideration as such because, like haiku, its central concern involves the presentation of an image which ambiguates rather than clarifies meaning.  The immediacy of the image confronts the reader no matter how we categorize the poem:

The Apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough

The image, like the poem itself,  exemplifies simplicity, at least upon cursory examination.  On a surface level, then, Pound achieve successful form, both as an imagist interested in presenting an abstract idea as a simple object and as a writer of haiku who seeks to relate man to the natural world through simple imagery.  Yet questions arise, as the poem encourages further thought.  What significance do we grant to the word "apparition?"  Does Pound mean how the faces appeared, or that they projected a ghostlike quality?  Do we attribute the wetness of the bough to a gentle summer rain or a sudden winter storm?  The poem provides no clarification, resulting in divergent possible meanings.  The poem provides no "summary statement," and the Western mind, used to a heritage of prose and poetry whose forms require the implied or explicit inclusion of such statements, remains unfulfilled.

     

     Literature courses, particularly those which examine the modernist aesthetic, laud the poem as an example of effective imagery, not only for the wording itself but because the image asserts a powerful, negative symbol about the results of industrialism.  The word "apparition" suggests the ghostlike, transitory nature of modern life, for which the metro station provides a representative setting.  The petals, to which the faces in the first line relate, symbolize humanity, cast away from its moorings by the storm of industrial technology.  Arranged against this view rise critics who, bolstered by a published interview of Pound, argue that the poem actually conveys a positive sentiment, despite the negative Modernist themes underlying much of Pound's work.  These critics argue that the word "apparition" simply denotes an appearance, suddenly and unexpectedly, of beauty, indicated by the image of petals in an otherwise tempestuous, frantic crowd.  The idea:  beauty still exists in spite of the forces that might suppress it.  These views and their variations represent a sizeable portion of  criticism on the subject.  The reader need not choose between them, but rather consider how the poem leads to ambiguity and divergent interpretations.  Haiku provides a form that allows us to experience the image, but not to confidently assess its implications.  In a sense, the form of the haiku teases us, arousing our curiosity, but leaving it without a definitive answer.

     The idea that a poem could tease in such a manner offers an interesting path for exploration.  Encountering a sonnet, we expect and find gratification in completing fourteen lines of iambic pentameter.  Encountering an epic, we expect and find gratification in the listing and description of forces, as in "Paradise Lost," and the narration of saga, as in the "Iliad."  But the form of an American haiku seems strange by comparison.  No meter or rhyme scheme drives the diction, no listing or narration sets the scene; we find only the need to relate man and nature through a simple image.  Specifically, Pound teases us by meeting this need while simultaneously implying something more.  He creates a rhyme scheme by ending each line of the poem with the same dipthong, and incorporates into the poem's underlying structure an element of prose.  These features imply a type of form that Kenneth Burke calls "progressive," yet Pound uses them in a way that breaks the progressive form.  The rhyming establishes progressive form by making the reader expect an alteration later on.  The underlying structure of the poem follows that of a prose sentence, with main and subordinate clauses ("in a station of the Metro, there was an apparition of faces in the crowd, which seemed like petals on a wet, black bough"), and yet Pound, through the omission of verbs (none exist in the entire poem) offers the entire piece as a noun phrase, leaving us without the progression that a corresponding verb phrase would provide.  Finally, the lack of summary statement proves defamiliarizing to our expectations of prose, which we expect to assert a topic and then substantiate it.    While the defamiliarization provided by these features allows the poems image to have greater impact, it leaves us ungratified.  The poem thwarts the very form it seeks to project.  

     The assertion that Pound establishes a progressive form while simultaneously breaking it has implications for our understanding of the poem's rhetorical quality.  If the poem simply provides a sentence reduced to a noun phrase, then we must conclude that no doing takes place.  As Burke says, "if one, for instance, enters a room and says simply, 'The man. . .' unless the auditor knows enough about the man to finish the sentence in his own thoughts, his spontaneous rejoinder will be, 'The man what?'  A naming must be completed by a doing, either explicit or implicit."  Through "In a Station of the Metro," Pound the poet acts like the man in Burke's statement, naming without completing.  We naturally respond by asking "what about the apparition of those faces?  Why are they like petals on a wet, black bough?"  The more such questions reverberate, the more we wonder if the poem's form serves its intent.

     And yet the success of the poem as an imagistic expression, the power of its defamiliarizing technique, and the aura that surrounds it as a widely anthologized piece of literature, combine to shield "In a Station of the Metro" from serious questions about the correctness of form.  After all, we must concede the possibility that Pound intended ambiguity.  If so, the form succeeds admirably.  The debate then shifts to questions about the ability of the Western mind to process rhetorical acts that limit themselves to naming but not completing.       

Abundance: the Intersection of Philosophy and Finance

     Like many Americans whose teenage years coincided with the heyday of shopping malls, I gained access to the working world through the greasy portal of a fast food establishment.  I won't use the word "restaurant," as it would only misrepresent, in euphemistic terms, what amounted to a tawdry burger shack.  For the grand sum of $3.35 an hour, I helped maintain both the operation's culinary components and infrastructure, cleaning tables, sweeping floors, and traipsing trash.  In this capacity, mired in sweaty servitude, I experienced the nihilistic frustration that comes from trading hours for dollars.  The frustration turned bitter when Christine K., a high school classmate for whom I nurtured a well-advertised crush, feigned ignorance of our acquaintance, disdaining me and my greasy greeting as she arrived for a snack with her status-conscious friends.  My teenage spirit, ever hopeful amid hopelessness, found in these travails a silver lining.  If I could only save a sizeable chunk of my earnings, I might salvage a thread of dignity from the tattered fabric of my ego.  With enough savings--a teenage version of F-U money--I could quit the burger stand, hopefully in a moment of teen triumph that, I fantasized, might endear me to Christine K., if not her stuck-up friends.

     For all its unpleasantry, the burger stand did impart to my teenage brain an important life lesson.  The frustration of trading hours for dollars prompted me to think critically about spending habits and the chief liability that drained my funds:  my '68 T-bird.  A prime specimen of the heavy-metal mojo that once characterized American car culture, the beast had an unquenchable thirst for gas an an affinity for the repair shop, traits that an objective cost-benefit analysis identified as busters to a balance sheet.  Either I had to ditch the car or work longer hours, a devil's bargain that my teenage heart found most unpleasant.  In sum, the burger stand confronted me with one of money's fundamental truths: saving requires sacrifice.  Eventually, I quit the burger stand, but I never quit the savings mentality it helped instill.

     A long journey separates the development of a savings mentality from financial abundance, but as Rancroft Beachley reminds us in his new book, CA$H CRAFT:  The Musings and Meditations of an Income Investor, they represent mutually informing money milestones, or as Mr. Beachley might pen, "flipsides of the same investing coin."  (Full disclosure: deluded that my background as an English teacher qualifies me to opine on bookish matters, Rancroft solicited my services as manuscript editor. Plugging his book thus indirectly toots my own horn, and I excerpted the opening paragraphs of this post from the book's foreword.)  But just what does "financial abundance" mean?  This question and several others guide the curious, enigmatic, and ultimately fascinating meditations that comprise CA$H CRAFT, a book that merges finance and philosophy in an unconventional way.  Frankly, neither the investing nor the personal finance categories offer anything like it.  I know this not because of my experience with income investing--a topic which Rancroft's manuscript revealed as nuanced beyond my expectation--but because my editing effort required me, I felt, to gain familiarity with titles from the investing and personal finance genres.

     A refreshing quality of CA$H CRAFT is the irreverent critique that the author applies to the presumptions of personal finance.  He has little tolerance for blogosphere buzzwords, which he regards more as marketing gimmicks than useful ideas.  Case in point, the aforementioned financial abundance, an idea that inspires an almost mystical vocabulary in personal finance literature.  Beachley's effort to define "abundance" according to specific metrics gives a taste of the explorations that readers will encounter in CA$H CRAFT.  I excerpt the following passage (moderately abridged) with permission of the author.  

From Meditation 3, "On Financial Abundance," by Rancroft Beachley

A clever vocabulary, promoted by lifestyle coaches and finance gurus, now pervades the internet.  Where past generations offered the unpleasant yet effective admonition that riches require hard work and savings, today’s money muses invite their audience to “win the money game” by “shifting frequencies.”  If we accept the metaphor their vocabulary promotes, we can believe that wealth, like sunshine, radiates with widespread resplendence; we need only adopt an “abundance mindset” to enjoy it.

     If seekers of wealth needed only a proper money mind to achieve their goal, the world would abound in millionaires.  Instead, less than 1% of the world’s population controls assets of one million or greater.  95% of the world’s adults, and 75% of U.S. households, never achieve wealth greater than $350,000.  In their eagerness to promote the money mind, today’s finance gurus rarely discuss the Pecuniary Paradox:  in a world of abundant wealth, there remains a scarcity of wealthy.

     The word “abundance” implies a grandeur that affects us emotionally.  We imagine money in such quantities that it functions like the air, flowing through our bank accounts the way breath flows through our lungs, independent of conscious effort on our own.  As an income investor whose assets produce significant monthly cash flow, I admit the comparison has merit.  However, even though my dividends roll in automatically, I remain conscious of my spending, knowing the role budget-mindedness played in enabling me to attain HNW (high net-worth) status. 

     Yet if the word “abundance” over-reaches in its implications, it nevertheless provides a useful reference, denoting a state of wealth much greater than that suggested by mere “sufficiency.”  On the spectrum of retirement lifestyles, it occupies a place well opposite that of “leanFIRE,” the designation of financial freedom in its most basic form, where wealth generates income sufficient for life’s bare necessities —food, shelter, inexpensive hobbies, and perhaps an occasional social indulgence.    

The Metrics of Financial Limitation

     For the income investor seeking to build a retirement portfolio, financial abundance provides an aspirational guidepost, denoting a lifestyle much more robust than that of the retiree who merely “gets by.”  In order to properly orient our aspirations, we should ponder what it means to “get by.”  Even for most people whose wealth extends solidly into six-figures, a confident retirement happens late in life and depends upon substantial infusions from social security.  The typical monthly retirement income, according to 2017 data, hardly exceeds $2,600.  Annualized, this amounts to only $31,200, about double the 2017 Federal Poverty Guidelines for a family of two.  In fact, it approximates the income of someone working full-time at sixteen dollars an hour.  If any sales associates, customer service reps, or office clerks relish the prospect of a retirement lifestyle based on the income from a $16 per hour full-time job, I invite them to spend a month in a major American metropolis, which will quickly convince them that the average retirement income provides a below average lifestyle. In Southern California, where I live, this amount barely entitles the recipient to survive, let alone thrive.  A couple can easily spend 3K per month just on housing and groceries. Home ownership might reduce, but not eliminate, the cost.  Property taxes, insurance, upkeep, community association fees and utilities ensure that those without mortgages still face substantial housing-related expenses.  Add healthcare, transportation, plus an occasional entertainment or social activity, and the average retirement income quickly loses its luster.

     Of course, the world’s pattern of relative wealth translates to relative costs, and the budget that means subsistence in Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco might provide happy existence in Las Cruces, New River, or San Jacinto.  Geographic arbitrage provides a time-honored enhancement to the lifestyles of America’s retirees, allowing them to stretch pensions and social security payments inadequate for high-cost locales.  Promoted in recent years as a “lifestyle hack” by early retirement bloggers, the term hints positively about the joys available to ordinary Americans who relocate to Thailand, or an RV, or perhaps a cabin “off the grid,” where federal poverty guidelines presumably don’t apply.  

     Exhortations conveyed in print lose much of their dramatic effect, particularly if the sentiments so expressed pose a challenge to cherished notions.  The investor who quests for leanFIRE, and who finds in these pages a critique of leanFIRE philosophy, will likely raise a shield of counter arguments against Cash Craft ideas of abundance.  If, aged thirty to forty, the leanFIRE aficionado already holds the resources—a portfolio, say, of $500,000—necessary to make leanFIRE dreams a reality, then the shield may come burnished with pride.  Blessed with good health and the optimism of self-confidence, a person aged thirty-something may well regard $500,000 as “F-U money,” a ticket to a life untainted by the constraints of the cubicle. 

     The wisdom of hindsight gives me a perspective that I hope the F-U money-minded will pause to consider.  Viewed from the Realm of Seven Figures, 500K represents less a ticket to paradise than a fork in the road.  On one hand, it opens the door to sustainable (albeit frugal) adventure away from the rat race.  On the other hand, for those who remain in the race, it opens the door to more robust cash flow.  Choosing the latter path, I doubled my 500K to a million dollars in just under seven years.  Along the way, I stopped thinking in terms of F-U money and more in terms of money momentum, a benefit I could gain by embracing the system rather than dismissing it.  In time, the sum I initially considered F-U money looked more like false summit, an achievement worthy of note but whose chief value lay in its position as a vista point on the road to higher attainments.

     To their credit, many advocates of leanFIRE recognize the opportunity cost inherent in their quest and offer a philosophical perspective to make that cost more palatable.  Quitting the cubicle, they contend, doesn’t mean an end to work.  Rather, it means an opportunity to work on terms agreeable to oneself.

 

Case History:  F-U Money Mistakes

     Debbie and Marlon, a thirty-something couple who maintained  a casual association with the investment club, provide a case history for work-optional living.  An attorney with a downtown firm, Marlon voiced frustration with eighty-hour weeks and office politics, a frustration that bred resentment when the firm refused to grant him partner status.  At that point, the couple unveiled their F-U money—about $450,000 in mutual funds and real estate equity—which they liquidated to fund their escape.  After purchasing a used RV, Marlon deployed the remainder of their assets into an income portfolio that produced about $2,000 per month—enough, they figured, to fund years of nomadic RVing.  If they needed additional cash, Marlon assumed he could do freelance legal consulting online and Debbie could follow her passion of writing travel articles.

     My investment club mentors criticized the plan’s opportunity cost, noting how the combination of the couple’s net worth and Marlon’s six-figure salary needed only a little time to produce powerful synergies.  Undeterred, the couple embarked on their plan, and for a while sent club members a glowing correspondence, replete with pictures of famous locales, intriguing landscapes, and acquaintances met on the RV trail.  Then, the correspondence ceased, leaving the couple’s status a mystery. 

     Some years later, entirely by chance, I encountered Marlon at a gas station in West Los Angeles.  Though evasive at first, Marlon confided that he and Debbie had split; unable to fund leanFIRE on his share of the net worth pie, he had returned to “the gripes of the grid.”  Unfortunately, his time away from the legal grind set him back professionally, and he found himself scrambling to earn half his former income.   Since my own portfolio had by that time swelled to nearly a million dollars and produced over $4,000 in monthly cash flow, I remained circumspect about the difference a handful of years made in our finances, lest Marlon see me as an unpleasant reminder of an alternative road.    

     I have no doubt that for every story like Marlon’s, another awaits telling, one whose protagonist successfully converts F-U money into years of leanFIRE inspiration.  From a portfolio perspective, I take issue not with the possibility of leanFIRE success, but rather the opportunity cost that work-optional living can’t sugar-coat. Though exhortations conveyed in print may lose their dramatic flair, I wonder what exhortations Marlon might invoke, if only he could mail a letter to his younger self.  With hindsight, the money that he invoked as a middle-finger gesture to the system proved less meaningful than hoped.

The Metrics of Comfort and Affordability

     If we want a budget that allows us to do more than “get by,” or that doesn’t force us to employ “lifestyle hacks” to conjure financial freedom from the equivalent of an office clerk’s salary, we must climb further up the wealth pyramid, into regions occupied by the global top 1%, where the minimum requirement for admission entails wealth ten times greater than the median U.S household.  An address in the top 1% means more than a nice view of the wealth pyramid.  Financial planners recommend a nest egg equivalent to ten times a worker’s final salary at retirement age.  Applying this recommendation to the average U.S. household, whose annual income averages roughly $75,000, we find that a 750K nest egg—in theory—represents the gateway to a comfortable retirement.  With inputs from social security averaging $1,300 per month, the retiree with $750,000 comes close to absorbing the $56,000 annual cash burn of the typical U.S. household.  If he/she has the benefit of a nest egg invested for cash flow, the $56,000 yearly budget comes easily within range:  $15,600 from social security, plus $40,400 from investment income, an easily attainable 5.4% yield on a 750K portfolio.

     A simple premise underlies the assertion that a budget of $56,000 represents the threshold of a comfortable retirement.  This number denotes the annual expenses of a typical American household and, by implication, buys a standard of living most Americans find comfortable.  With a $4,660 monthly expenditure, the budget supports a lifestyle three-and-a-half times better than the Federal Poverty Guidelines for a family of two and equates very closely to the monthly take home pay of a worker earning $38 dollars per hour. 

     Let’s put it bluntly:  if your income through passive sources lets you buy what most Americans seek through sweat, debt, and a paycheck-to-paycheck existence, you occupy an admirable place in the wealth pyramid. But, it’s still not financial abundance.

     Some investors may express surprise upon learning that a person could amass wealth greater than 99% of the world’s adults and yet still fall short of financial abundance. In part the surprise stems from consumer culture psychology, which conditions people to regard money not as capital but as a ticket to a shopping spree.  The materialist mind pictures a million dollars and dreams of pleasures the sum might purchase.  Sadly, the materialist mind often learns too late one of wealth’s subtle truths:  having the money to purchase an item doesn’t necessarily make that thing affordable.  To understand why, we must view affordability not by sticker price, but by the concept of “permanent capital equivalence”—the amount of capital required to purchase an item from dividends alone.

     Consider the coffee achiever whose typical weekday morning includes a Starbuck’s latte, a habit that costs $100 per month to satisfy.  Though this amount may not seem burdensome—particularly when viewed piecemeal as a $3 daily expense—the cost changes dramatically when displayed in terms of its permanent capital equivalence.  The capital required to sustainably generate $100 per month ($1,200 annually), if invested at the 6% yield typical of my portfolio, comes to about 20K.  For most people, the ability to perceive a $100 per month coffee habit in terms of its 20K permanent capital equivalence requires a shift in thinking so extreme as to comprise an uncomfortable disruption of world view. 

     My investment club colleagues found the concept of permanent capital equivalence so intriguing that they made it a recurring topic of conversation.  A club member in possession of a new car, garment, watch, or other accessory often came under immediate scrutiny as debate ensued over the true cost of the purchase. These debates provided an unusual perspective, rarely prevalent among the less money-minded, about the esoteric accounting by which savvy income investors understand the world. 

     Of course, sometimes items of limited utility count as necessities.  Unfortunately, in our culture of money-worship, most consumers succumb to messages that cloud the difference between necessity and the merely nice.  When people incur debt to purchase limited-utility non-durable items, the hidden costs balloon.   The human preference for instant gratification, combined with the pressure to consume, ensures that only a small minority of workers find the patience and discipline necessary to make assets the means by which they afford indulgence.  This, as much as anything, explains how in a world of abundant wealth, there remains a scarcity of wealthy.

 

The Metrics of Financial Abundance

      The Pecuniary Paradox suggests a minimum threshold for the attainment of financial abundance.  The fact that a small number of people control the majority of the world’s wealth implies that the numbers associated with financial abundance comprise a domain of exclusivity.  By definition, any numbers associated with the average—in wealth, income, or expenditure—don’t qualify.  Yet wealth exists on a continuum, and the numbers associated with average provide a basis from which we can extrapolate the minimum necessary for abundance. 

     The number thus derived will seem laughably low to the Wealth Pyramid’s penthouse dwellers, yet still represent an amount so far beyond the reach of most people as to represent a fantasy.  If $32,000, two-times the Federal Poverty Guidelines, means “getting by,” and $56,000, a budget 75% greater (and 3.5 times the poverty guideline) means “comfort,” we can reasonably posit that a budget 75% greater still, or 6.1 times the Federal Poverty Guidelines, means financial abundance for a family of two.  These proportions suggest an annual budget of roughly $100,000 as a minimum threshold, a number, coincidentally, very close to the $102,000 that a recent Pew Research Center study, cited by CNBC in 2017, lists as the minimum required to qualify a family of two as upper income.  If, from investments alone, an investor sustainably generates income to cover a 100K annual budget, he/she has financial abundance. 

     Critics who disparage this sum should remember that, due to the different tax treatments of investment income vs. earned income, 100K of dividends roughly equates to the take-home proceeds of a $150,00 salary.  I venture that most early retirees, during their working years, would have found a $150,000 salary quite satisfactory.     

   Very few workers, even those lucky enough to enjoy increasingly rare defined benefit pension plans that provide a promise of substantial salary replacement, can realistically anticipate financial abundance on such terms.  The six-figure retirement income, if mentioned in personal finance literature, usually appears as an idealized salary replacement for a target audience advised to work until age seventy in order to maximize social security payouts and IRA distributions.  Building such a passive income stream in middle age, without the benefit of inheritance, lottery, or other randomly received capital infusion, merits tremendous acclaim.  To reference the wisdom of 17^th Century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”  So with financial abundance. 

     Savvy income investors who retain a robust cash reserve and build a portfolio with core assets yielding an average of 6%-7% range will need roughly 1.5 to 2 million dollars to qualify for this minimum threshold of financial abundance.  Those willing to embrace more volatility might supercharge their portfolios with closed-end funds, whose 8%-9%+ yields make the minimum threshold attainable with assets in the 1.4-1.6 million-dollar range.  My own portfolio, which tilts toward a more conservative 6% overall yield, achieves financial abundance with roughly two million dollars of assets and net worth equivalence, where “net-worth equivalence” refers to the capital conversion value of a $3,500 per month pension with 2% annual COLA.

    

Abundance—the Intersection of Philosophy and Finance

     Defining financial abundance in specific terms helps untangle the topic from the slick slogans that seem psychologically compelling but offer little in the way of substantive guidance. I recognize, however, that wealth remains a relativistic concept. An attempt to define financial abundance according to specific dollar quantities may invite criticisms of lifestyle bias.  In a relative world—assuming one has enough money to provide for basic needs—who can say objectively that happiness exists in some lifestyle circumstances but not others? 

     An objective inquiry based on references to the wealth pyramid, income levels, and budgets may ultimately matter less to the aspiring retiree than a subjective inquiry about how to best use that most precious of resources—time—which independent wealth, at any level, makes available.  Here, where finance intrudes on philosophy, we must acknowledge that even a lifestyle distinguished by its satisfaction of wants has limitations.  While the range of human desire extends to infinity, the ability of money to satisfy human desire remains constrained.  Some people may want to have a picnic on the moon, and a certain few even possess the resources to do so.  However, to indulge the craving on a frequent basis would deplete the wealth of even the wealthiest.

     Financial abundance may offer escape from certain aspects of the human condition, but it doesn’t help us escape being human.  In Rasselas, Samuel Johnson tells the story of an Abyssinian prince who left his luxurious valley in search of happiness.  “I fly from pleasure,” Rasselas tells a sage, “because pleasure has ceased to please.”  After many adventures he returns, convinced of the futility of finding happiness within the sphere of human experience.  While Rasselas provides a cautionary tale to those who think riches offer a panacea for Earthly troubles, his example also shows that riches confer a key benefit:  time freedom.  Ironically, Rasselas’ unique position within the range of human circumstance afforded him the rare chance to fully explore the unpleasantry of being human.  Financial abundance may not assure the satisfaction of all wants, nor can it assure happiness—yet it does confer that rarest of gifts:  complete ownership of one’s time.

--(CA$H CRAFT:  The Musings and Meditations of an Income Investor is available on Amazon in both paperback and e-book format.)