Five types of jerks at work and how to cope with them by Jena McGregor

Five types of jerks at work 

and how to cope with them

by Jena McGregor, Sydney Morning Herald

Ten years ago, the typically sober and staid management book genre welcomed an off-colour title to its shelves.

Despite a name unable to be printed in a family newspaper, Stanford professor Robert Sutton's The No A--hole Rule became a runaway bestseller, selling 800,000 copies and sparking translations into languages including Polish and Japanese.

It was based on a simple idea, brought to life by crude language but grounded in academic research, corporate case studies and an entirely relatable idea: companies that adopt a no-jerks policy simply perform better.

But if that book was largely written for managers and human resources wonks as a warning against hiring creeps, Sutton's newest one is for the rest of us who actually have to deal with them.

Over the past decade, Sutton says, he's gotten emails - 8000, he estimates - asking for advice about coping with jerks on the job.

There was the retail worker whose boss whispered insults and sexual innuendo in her ear. A pastor asking about how to manage nasty but non-paid volunteers. The young attorney suffering through a corrosive clerkship.

The A--hole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People who Treat You Like Dirt is his answer, offering ways of spotting and coping with the various kinds of jerks we encounter at work.

After all, the abusive bosses, uncivil co-workers and tyrannical teammates who populate office cube farms are not all the same - and require different responses.

In their natural habitat, they inspire fear and loathing, dysfunction and even depression. And as with many unwelcome pests or predators, outright avoidance is typically a good strategy.

But quitting often isn't an option. To help identify the various breeds of difficult co-workers - and how to survive them - we spoke with Sutton, as well as a few other experts on hostile co-workers and toxic bosses he cites in his book. They are our field guides to coping with five types of jerks at work.

The lone "bosshole"

Who they are: Research finds that rudeness in the workplace operates almost like the common cold, infecting a "carrier" who spreads it to others. Sutton cites University of Maryland researcher Trevor Foulk, who found that when people experience even a single instance of rudeness at work, they become more aware of it - and are more likely to respond in kind.

"You start seeing it, you start responding to it," Foulk said. "You become more vigilant, more discerning, you tend to interpret things as rude." That's why, he says, it's important for organisations to oust a single pompous jerk quickly.

What to do: One strategy is to try to switch teams within the company, Sutton says, pointing to Salesforce.com, which he says allows engineers to change teams without getting permission from their current boss. If that's not an option, he suggests documenting the problems - and doing so with other people who may also feel victimised - and then reporting the problem to human resources. In a professional and amiable culture, "your chances for using the power structure are much higher than if you're working in 'jerk city' " - his name for cultures where problematic people are everywhere.

Christine Porath, a professor at Georgetown University who wrote a recent book on incivility in the workplace, says it's also important to remember how damaging those dysfunctional bosses can be to your performance. She suggests investing more time in the people who are respectful. "You have to build up those positive relationships to help buffer or neutralise the negative one," she said.

The powerful bully

Who they are: The engineer with hard-to- replace skills whose creepy overtures get overlooked. The rainmaking dealmaker whose boorish behaviour goes unpunished. Whether they're explicitly in charge or simply influential, too many organisations look the other way when top performers or top bosses behave badly. Sutton points to Roger Ailes - the powerful Fox News chief who left the media empire amid a swirl of sexual harassment allegations. "Going to HR didn't seem to help anyone for years," he says.

What to do: Tread carefully. "You're fighting the cool kids," Sutton says. In such cases, getting out is really often the best advice - especially if the behaviour goes beyond milder incivilities. "This is one when you often leave, or when you hide, or when you lie in wait until their power diminishes," Sutton said. Bennett Tepper, a professor at Ohio State University who studies abusive bosses, said that while he's not suggesting a blame-the-victim mentality, it may be possible to make yourself less vulnerable.

"Bosses who are jerks are usually pretty strategic about who they target," he said, and may go after underlings perceived as weak. "If you present yourself as competent, capable and connected to other people, it may make you a less desirable target."

Making yourself indispensable may even trigger the jerk's selfish streak: "Most bosses understand the success of their employees also shines a bright light on them," Tepper says.

The clueless jerk

Who they are: Many of us. Sutton says his mantra is to be "slow to label other people as a--holes and fast to label yourself one". That's because many people are simply not aware how much their rude remarks or short-tempered outbursts can hurt other people. He contrasts them to what he calls "strategic jerks" - people who've heard the stories about how Steve Jobs pushed and pushed employees and think they too should unleash their verbal wrath on co-workers to achieve success.

What to do: If their intentions seem good, talk to them - or have someone they trust do so instead. "Sometimes awareness is enough, especially when the last thing they want is to be seen as a jerk by others," Sutton says.

Porath agrees, but cautions to start by listing a fault of your own. "Instead of putting them on the spot and making them feel defensive, treat it like feedback," she said.

For those who are aware - and are doing it on purpose - Sutton says they have to be convinced that "treating the other person that way is detrimental to their career. If they're really strategic that way - and I always say the emotionally controlled a--hole who knows how to turn it on and off is the most difficult to deal with . . . you have to prove to them there are negative consequences to their behaviour."

The petty tyrant

Who they are: The office administrator who approves the expense reports. The HR coordinator who slows the hiring process with added rules. These "rule Nazis", as Sutton calls them, are people who lack prestige but have influence over the day-to-day details of work. Research, he says, has shown that when people have moderate responsibility but low levels of respect on the job, "they tend to take it out on other people, both to make themselves feel in some control and perhaps to exact a little bit of revenge."

What to do: Unless you have the power to ignore them - or get rid of them - the best tactic is to give them some of the prestige they crave, Sutton says.

Tepper agrees. "The person you're describing sounds like someone who is desperately wanting respect from other people," he says. "The word 'ingratiation' has some negative meaning attached to it, but there are occasions where it costs you nothing to be pleasant. It's incredibly disarming to other people."

The overbearing client

Who they are: The rude customer who's far too demanding. Or the selfish client who cruelly ignores your needs. This is another tricky one. The power structure works differently, after all, when you're managing a jerk on the outside rather than the creep within the organisation. It's not easy to fire the people who pay the bills.

What to do: That's why both Porath and Sutton suggest that managing the overbearing client is really more about managing yourself. Try not to answer angry emails quickly and stoop to their level. Set down the phone and let them rant without listening. Remind yourself that the project will last only a few months. In other words: "Find ways to reduce the amount of damage you take in."

There's More To Life Than Being Happy by Emily Esfahani Smith|TED Talk

Assume the worst about people and you get the worst by Dr. Ha-Joon Chang

Assume the worst about people 

and you get the worst

by Economist

Dr. Ha-Joon Chang, Ph.D. 

(Book Excerpt from 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, Thing 5) 

What they tell you

Adam Smith famously said: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ The market beautifully harnesses the energy of selfish individuals thinking only of themselves (and, at most, their families) to produce social harmony. Communism failed because it denied this human instinct and ran the economy assuming everyone to be selfless, or at least largely altruistic. We have to assume the worst about people (that is, they only think about themselves) if we are to construct a durable economic system.

What they don’t tell you

Self-interest is a most powerful trait in most human beings. However, it’s not our only drive. It is very often not even our primary motivation. Indeed, if the world were full of the self-seeking individuals found in economics textbooks, it would grind to a halt because we would be spending most of our time cheating, trying to catch the cheaters, and punishing the caught. The world works as it does only because people are not the totally self-seeking agents that free-market economics believes them to be. We need to design an economic system that, while acknowledging that people are often selfish, exploits other human motives to the full and gets the best out of people. The likelihood is that, if we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them.

How (not) to run a company

In the mid-1990s, I was attending a conference in Japan on the ‘East Asian growth miracle’, organized by the World Bank. On one side of the debate were people like myself, arguing that government intervention had played a positive role in the East Asian growth story by going against market signals and protecting and subsidizing industries such as automobiles and electronics. On the other side, there were economists supporting the World Bank, who argued that government intervention had at best been an irrelevant sideshow or at worst done more harm than good in East Asia. More importantly, they added, even if it were true that the East Asian miracle owed something to government intervention, that does not mean that policies used by the East Asian countries can be recommended to other countries. Government officials who make policies are (like all of us) self-seeking agents, it was pointed out, more interested in expanding their own power and prestige rather than promoting national interests. They argued that government intervention worked in East Asia only because they had exceptionally selfless and capable bureaucrats for historical reasons (which we need not go into here). Even some of the economists who were supporting an active role for government conceded this point.

Listening to this debate, a distinguished-looking Japanese gentleman in the audience raised his hand. Introducing himself as one of the top managers of Kobe Steel, the then fourth-largest steel producer in Japan, the gentleman chided the economists for misunderstanding the nature of modern bureaucracy, be it in the government or in the private sector. The Kobe Steel manager said (I am, of course, paraphrasing him): ‘I am sorry to say this, but you economists don’t understand how the real world works. I have a Ph.D. in metallurgy and have been working in Kobe Steel for nearly three decades, so I know a thing or two about steelmaking. However, my company is now so large and complex that even I do not understand more than half the things that are going on within it. As for the other managers – with backgrounds in accounting and marketing – they really haven’t much of a clue. Despite this, our board of directors routinely approves the majority of projects submitted by our employees, because we believe that our employees work for the good of the company. If we assumed that everyone is out to promote his own interests and questioned the motivations of our employees all the time, the company would grind to a halt, as we would spend all our time going through proposals that we really don’t understand. You simply cannot run a large bureaucratic organization, be it Kobe Steel or your government, if you assume that everyone is out for himself.’ This is merely an anecdote, but it is a powerful testimony to the limitations of standard economic theory, which assumes that self-interest is the only human motivation that counts. Let me elaborate.

Selfish butchers and bakers

Free-market economics starts from the assumption that all economic agents are selfish, as summed up in Adam Smith’s assessment of the butcher, the brewer, and the baker. The beauty of the market system, they contend, is that it channels what seems to be the worst aspect of human nature – self-seeking, or greed, if you like – into something productive and socially beneficial.

Given their selfish nature, shopkeepers will try to over-charge you, workers will try their best to goof off from work, and professional managers will try to maximize their own salaries and prestige rather than profits, which go to the shareholders rather than themselves. However, the power of the market will put strict limits to, if not completely eliminate, these behaviours: shopkeepers won’t cheat you if they have a competitor around the corner; workers would not dare to slack off if they know they can be easily replaced; hired managers will not be able to fleece the shareholders if they operate in a vibrant stock market, which will ensure that managers who generate lower profits, and thus lower share prices, risk losing their jobs through takeover.

To free-market economists, public officials – politicians and government bureaucrats – pose a unique challenge in this regard. Their pursuit of self-interest cannot be restrained to any meaningful degree because they are not subject to market discipline. Politicians do face some competition from each other, but elections happen so infrequently that their disciplinary effects are limited. Consequently, there is plenty of scope for them to pursue policies that heighten their power and wealth, at the cost of national welfare. When it comes to the career bureaucrats, the scope for self-seeking is even greater. Even if their political masters, the politicians, try to make them implement policies that cater to electoral demands, they can always obfuscate and manipulate the politicians, as was so brilliantly depicted in the BBC comedy series Yes, Minister and its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister. Moreover, unlike the politicians, these career bureaucrats have high job security, if not lifetime tenure, so they can wait out their political masters by simply delaying things. This is the crux of the concerns that the World Bank economists were expressing in the meeting in Japan that I mentioned at the beginning of this Thing.

Therefore, free-market economists recommend, the portion of the economy controlled by politicians and bureaucrats should be minimized. Deregulation and privatization, in this view, are not only economically efficient but also politically sensible in that they minimize the very possibility that public officials can use the state as a vehicle to promote their own self-interests, at the cost of the general public. Some – the so-called ‘New Public Management’ school – go even further and recommend that the management of the government itself should be exposed to greater market forces: a more aggressive use of performance-related pay and short-term contracts for bureaucrats; more frequent contracting-out of government services; a more active exchange of personnel between the public and the private sectors.

We may not be angels, but . . .

The assumption of self-seeking individualism, which is at the foundation of free-market economics, has a lot of resonance with our personal experiences. We have all been cheated by unscrupulous traders, be it the fruit seller who put some rotten plums at the bottom of the paper bag or the yogurt company that vastly exaggerated the health benefits of its products. We know too many corrupt politicians and lazy bureaucrats to believe that all public servants are solely serving the public. Most of us, myself included, have goofed off from work ourselves and some of us have been frustrated by junior colleagues and assistants who find all kinds of excuses not to put in serious work. Moreover, what we read in the news media these days tells us that professional managers, even the supposed champions of shareholder interest such as Jack Welch of GE and Rick Wagoner of GM, have not really been serving the best interests of the shareholders.

This is all true. However, we also have a lot of evidence – not just anecdotes but systematic evidence – showing that self-interest is not the only human motivation that matters even in our economic life. Self-interest, to be sure, is one of the most important, but we have many other motives – honesty, self respect, altruism, love, sympathy, faith, sense of duty, solidarity, loyalty, public-spiritedness, patriotism, and so on – that are sometimes even more important than self-seeking as the driver of our behaviours.

Our earlier example of Kobe Steel shows how successful companies are run on trust and loyalty, rather than suspicion and self-seeking. If you think this is a peculiar example from a country of ‘worker ants’ that suppresses individuality against human nature, pick up any book on business leadership or any autobiography by a successful businessman published in the West and see what they say. Do they say that you have to suspect people and watch them all the time for slacking and cheating? No, they probably talk mostly about how to ‘connect’ with the employees, change the way they see things, inspire them, and promote teamwork among them. Good managers know that people are not tunnel-visioned self-seeking robots. They know that people have ‘good’ sides and ‘bad’ sides and that the secret of good management is in magnifying the former and toning down the latter.

Another good example to illustrate the complexity of human motivation is the practice of ‘work to rule’, where workers slow down output by strictly following the rules that govern their tasks. You may wonder how workers can hurt their employer by working according to the rule. However, this semi-strike method – known also as ‘Italian strike’ (and as ‘sciopero bianco’, or ‘white strike’, by Italians themselves) – is known to reduce output by 30 –50 per cent. This is because not everything can be specified in employment contracts (rules) and therefore all production processes rely heavily on the workers’ goodwill to do extra things that are not required by their contracts or exercise initiatives and take shortcuts in order to expedite things, when the rules are too cumbersome. The motivations behind such non-selfish behaviours by workers are varied – fondness of their jobs, pride in their workmanship, self respect, solidarity with their colleagues, trust in their top managers or loyalty to the company. But the bottom line is that companies, and thus our economy, would grind to a halt if people acted in a totally selfish way, as they are assumed to do in free-market economics.

Not realizing the complex nature of worker motivation, the capitalists of the early mass-production era thought that, by totally depriving workers of discretion over the speed and the intensity of their work and thus their ability to shirk, the conveyor belt would maximize their productivity. However, as those capitalists soon found out, the workers reacted by becoming passive, unthinking and even uncooperative, when they were deprived of their autonomy and dignity. So, starting with the Human Relations School that emerged in the 1930s, which highlighted the need for good communications with, and among, workers, many managerial approaches have emerged that emphasize the complexity of human motivation and suggest ways to bring the best out of workers. The pinnacle of such an approach is the so-called ‘Japanese production system’ (sometimes known as the ‘Toyota production system’), which exploits the goodwill and creativity of the workers by giving them responsibilities and trusting them as moral agents. In the Japanese system, workers are given a considerable degree of control over the production line. They are also encouraged to make suggestions for improving the production process. This approach has enabled Japanese firms to achieve such production efficiency and quality that now many non-Japanese companies are imitating them. By not assuming the worst about their workers, the Japanese companies have got the best out of them.

Moral behavior as an optical illusion?

So, if you look around and think about it, the world seems to be full of moral behaviours that go against the assumptions of free-market economists. When they are confronted with these behaviours, free-market economists often dismiss them as ‘optical illusions’. If people look as if they are behaving morally, they argue, it is only because the observers do not see the hidden rewards and sanctions that they are responding to.

According to this line of reasoning, people always remain self-seekers. If they behave morally, it is not because they believe in the moral code itself but because behaving in that way maximises rewards and minimizes punishments for them personally. For example, if traders refrain from cheating even when there is no legal compulsion or when there are no competitors ready to take away their businesses, it does not mean that they believe in honesty. It is because they know that having a reputation as an honest trader brings in more customers. Or many tourists who behave badly would not do the same at home, not because they suddenly become decent people when they go back home but because they do not have the anonymity of a tourist and therefore are afraid of being criticized or shunned by people they know and care about.

There is some truth in this. There are subtle rewards and sanctions that are not immediately visible and people do respond to them. However, this line of reasoning does not work in the end. The fact is that, even when there are no hidden reward-and-sanction mechanisms at work, many of us behave honestly. For example, why do we – or at least those of us who are good runners – not run away without paying after a taxi ride? The taxi driver cannot really chase us far, as he cannot abandon his car for too long. If you are living in a big city, there is virtually no chance that you will meet the same driver again, so you need not even be afraid of the taxi driver retaliating in some way in the future. Given all this, it is quite remarkable that so few people run away without paying after a taxi ride. To take another example, on a foreign holiday some of you may have come across a garage mechanic or a street vendor who did not cheat you, even when there really was no way for you to reward her by spreading her reputation for honest dealings – particularly difficult when you cannot even spell the Turkish garage’s name or when your Cambodian noodle lady, whose name you cannot remember anyway, may not even trade in the same place every day. More importantly, in a world populated by selfish individuals, the invisible reward/sanction mechanism cannot exist. The problem is that rewarding and punishing others for their behaviors costs time and energy only to the individuals taking the action, while their benefits from improved behavioral standards accrue to everyone. Going back to our examples above, if you, as a taxi driver, want to chase and beat up a runaway customer, you may have to risk getting fined for illegal parking or even having your taxi broken into. But what is the chance of you benefiting from an improved standard of behavior by that passenger, who you may not meet ever again? It would cost you time and energy to spread the good word about that Turkish garage, but why should you do that if you will probably never visit that part of the world ever again? So, as a self-seeking individual, you wait for someone foolish enough to spend his time and energy in administering private justice to wayward taxi passengers or honest out-of-the-way garages, rather than paying the costs yourself. However, if everyone were a self-interested individual like you, everyone would do as you do. As a result, no one would reward and punish others for their good or bad behavior. In other words, those invisible reward/sanction mechanisms that free-market economists say create the optical illusion of morality can exist only because we are not the selfish, amoral agents that those economists say we are.

Morality is not an optical illusion. When people act in a non-selfish way – be it not cheating their customers, working hard despite no one watching them, or resisting bribes as an underpaid public official – many, if not all, of them do so because they genuinely believe that that is the right thing to do. Invisible rewards and sanctions mechanisms do matter, but they cannot explain all – or, in my view, even the majority of – non-selfish behaviours, if only for the simple reason that they would not exist if we were entirely selfish. Contrary to Mrs Thatcher’s assertion that ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’, human beings have never existed as atomistic selfish agents unbound by any society. We are born into societies with certain moral codes and are socialized into ‘internalizing’ those moral codes.

Of course, all this is not to deny that self-seeking is one of the most important human motivations. However, if everyone were really only out to advance his own interest, the world would have already ground to a halt, as there would be so much cheating in trading and slacking in production. More importantly, if we design our economic system based on such an assumption, the result is likely to be lower, rather than higher, efficiency. If we did that, people would feel that they are not trusted as moral agents and refuse to act in moral ways, making it necessary for us to spend a huge amount of resources monitoring, judging and punishing people. If we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them.

Unions, Pensions, Social Security, and Legacy Costs

Unions, Pensions, Social Security, and Legacy Costs

by Allen Laudenslager & Bryan Neva

In the 1987 film Wall Street, the antagonist Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) didn't want to buy the airline that Bud Fox’s father, Carl Fox, worked for (played by Charlie and Martin Sheen) in order to run it; rather, he wanted to close out the pension fund, distribute the cash and arrange to pay future pensions from future earnings.  Now Gekko knew full well there wouldn't be any money left when those pensions came due so his plan was to sell the company long before then.

Back in the mid-1960s, the government started “borrowing” from the social security fund (America’s pension fund) to pay for the war in Vietnam and the social programs of the Great Society.  They expected to pay the money back later from future tax revenues. This mixing of funds worked so well for the government that business lobbied for the same privilege and they got it. 

The American automakers then proceeded to do the same thing the government did, they collected money for future pensions and benefits as each car was sold, but they didn't put that money in a separate account, instead, they used it to cover current expenses and show bigger profits.  Now, as the bill is coming due and the automakers have to actually pay the pensions and benefits, they are bemoaning their union employee’s "legacy costs."  It's not the actual cost of the pensions and benefits that are the problem, it’s years of poor money management by the automakers that are the problem.  So when you hear pundits bemoan the huge “legacy cost” of autoworkers’ pensions and benefits, they either don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re purposefully lying to you because those costs have already been paid.  Any accountant could tell you this.

Economic theory posits that within an ideal free market, property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged solely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers. They engage in trade simply because they both believe that what they are getting is worth as much or more than what they give up.  Market prices are the result of buying and selling decisions en masse as described by the theory of supply and demand.  The wages the labor unions in the United States were able to negotiate with companies were either “free market” agreements or were the result of the union’s coercing the companies into unsupportable wage agreements.  But if (and this is a big if) the unions created unrealistic wage scales, how come the companies were still able to make huge profits during the heydays of unionism in the 60s, 70, and 80s?

According to Fortune Magazine, GM made $873 million dollars in profits for 1960, $14,820 million in 1970, $32,215 million in 1980, $173,297 million in 1990, and $273,921 million in 2000.  If the unions were really behind the demise of GM in 2009, as some pundits claim, we should have seen a downward trend in GM’s profits over the preceding 40 years, but the reverse is actually true as profits went up not down!

If you factor in the “legacy costs” of employee’s pensions and retiree’s health care benefits, these didn’t actually cost GM anything because employee’s benefits are calculated into their hourly labor costs, which GM writes off on their taxes each year.  If an employee earns “x” dollars per hour and his benefits are “y” dollars an hour, then GM’s hourly labor costs are “x + y” dollars an hour.  The employee’s hourly benefits of “y” dollars are deferred compensation, and GM ideally should invest those tax-free dollars in a retirement fund so that the investment returns will lower GM’s benefits costs.

And when companies calculate the costs of making their product, they also include all the production costs for the product or service as well as raw materials, manufacturing equipment, and factory space. The production costs includes an employee’s "burden rate" which is the cost of the employee’s hourly salary plus the cost of their benefits, the cost of their share of heat, lights, their desk, computer, and any other tools or factory space, divided by the actual number of hours the employee works (usually about 1800 hours when you subtract out vacation, holidays, and sick leave).  (The burden rate = (((employees salary + employees benefits) + employee’s share of infrastructural costs) / 1800 annual work hours.)  And do you think GM actually pays those costs…of course not?  The customer pays those costs in the price of the vehicle they purchase.

By following the current fashion in corporate management, far too many companies are focusing on squeezing every last penny of profits out of each sale.  And in far too many cases, that has led to short-sighted decision making such as not saving for the retirement of their employees despite making huge profits.  The government is facing the same conundrum.  After over fifty years of “borrowing” from the social security fund, the bill is coming due as all the baby-boomers are retiring and there’s no money left to pay them.  Now lawmakers and pundits are bemoaning the cost of their citizen’s “legacy costs.”

Pride & Riches

Pride & Riches

by Bryan J. Neva, Sr.

“Get rid of Pride and Riches will do no harm!”

—St. Augustine of Hippo

Sometime around the year 400, there was a monk named Pelagius who, while living in the city of Rome, became concerned about poverty and the oppression of the poor by the rich.  And he conceived a simple solution: “Get rid of the rich and you will find no poor!”  In other words, he believed that the rich were the cause of poverty because they oppressed the poor, so if they just outlawed being rich then that would solve the problem of poverty. 

In response to Pelagius’ idea, St. Augustine of Hippo said, “Get rid of pride and riches will do no harm!”  In other words, Augustine believed that it was the pride of the rich that was the real cause of poverty and oppression of the poor.  Augustine didn’t buy into Pelagius’ argument that the divisions in the world were between the rich and the poor, but rather it was between the proud and the humble.  He believed that the inequality of wealth and power was a fact of life.  But if the rich stopped abusing their power and practiced humility instead then that would solve the problems of poverty and the oppression of the poor.

In ancient Roman culture, there was a belief that the rich could rule the city provided they treated those below them well and showed “civic love” by spending money to maintain the economy and provide work for the poor.  Augustine added to this belief by saying that the rich should also abandon their pride (instead of their wealth) and give alms to the poor.  There were “good rich people” and there were “bad rich people.”  The “good rich people” treated those below them well, practiced humility and did not abuse their power, and they shared their wealth with society through their spending and alms giving.  The “bad rich people” did none of these.

Over time, Augustine’s view on riches proved to be exactly right.  When communism reared its ugly head in the early 20^th century they did exactly what Pelagius proposed: they outlawed being rich.  But it didn’t solve the problems of poverty as those in power abused their authority and oppressed the poor.  The communist leaders weren't rich but they were still full of pride.  The failure of communism proved that the divisions in the world were not between the rich and the poor, but rather between the proud and the humble as Augustine said.  Wealth is not the problem in and of itself; the real problem is pride!

Nowhere in the Bible does it ever condemn being rich…what it condemns is the love of riches.  St. Paul in his first letter to the Bishop Timothy (6:10) wrote, “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”  Jesus said in Matthew 19:24, “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”  Why is it so difficult for a rich person to go to heaven because they love riches more than God and their fellow man?  

Jesus also said in Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money."  Jesus was talking about keeping our priorities straight.  Obviously, we all need money to live.  Jesus needed money too, but interestingly he gave the coin purse to the man who would betray him for thirty pieces of silver.  When we keep our priorities straight, we put God first, others second, and ourselves third.  And money should be really low on our priority list.