John Bogel Sounds off on American Society

John Bogle was recently interviewed on NPR. As a former CEO of the Vanguard Group, people are interested to know his thoughts on the economy. He shares those thoughts in his new book, Enough: The True Measure of Money, Business and Life.

Enough is a book about the American character. Bogel offers financial advice, but it’s mostly filled with his philosophical opinions and reflections on what is truly important in our lives. His main them and question is, what is or should be enough in money, business, and in life’.

Recently Bogle saw what was going on in the financial system and was furious. He says that we pay Wall Street investors millions of dollars to invest our money. This has created a system that in his estimation puts an unreasonable amount of our resources into a segment of the society that doesn’t produce anything.

Bogle said that this situation has caused a fascination with counting. We’ve become a counting society. In addition, many times we fix the very numbers that we’re counting to bring us prestige, power, and more wealth. However, he reminds us that we can’t count everything that’s important.

I have seen firsthand the problem of facing business issues, looking solely at the numbers I’ve seen business do well financially more out of luck, rather than through their own good business practices. And then when things go badly, they haven’t built the correct business infrastructure to combat those challenges.

Bogle points out that there’s a lot more to business than making money. He suggests that basic qualities like honesty and ethics can’t be counted, yet count for far more than we typically give them credit. He states that maybe how we spend our money may be more important than how much money we make.

Unfortunately, we live in a society that has been consumed by greed, and that greed has come back to plague us. It will continue to do so unless the majority of America starts to do what Bogel suggests in Enough. ‘The only way to work our way through today’s deep-seated problems is to return to values that stem from principle, virtue and character.