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Money Is Not Everything

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Essay on “Money Is Not Everything” Complete English Essay, Paragraph, Speech for Class 10, 12 Students.

Money Is Not Everything

Money is essential that brings for man all his necessities and luxuries for his comfortable existence. Life without money is undoubtedly a virtual hell, with pangs of hunger and thirst eating into man’s very bones. However, at the same time for man to think that money is everything, is also a great mistake Money is a necessity only in as much as, it is the thing which buys us all we need, but, beyond that, money is a harbinger of all sorts of vices. Let us remember that money is to be considered as a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The end is a comfortable life, and the means is money.

If we consider money as a means to our end of having a comfortable life then, we would be seeing money in its proper perspective for without money we cannot live as we are not able to buy anything if we do not have money. So much, so good but, in the present day scenario, money is no more a means to an end but, an end in itself. To collect money. to hoard money and become richer and richer has become our sole aim in life. It is here in our outlook towards money that we have erred, and so the disastrous situation we are placed in is not hidden from anyone. Each individual has set a goal of hoarding money and money only, and this also not fixed to a certain amount, we just have to go on and on irrespective of how much we need, for the lust for money has become our very style of life. It is a wild goose chase that we are all indulging in, and that, at the cost of all the rest we had.

True, money gives us all that we require but money is not the only thing that we need to keep happy and fit. There are several other things that make life beautiful and mind that these cannot be purchased with any amount of money. For example, a gush of wind from where we take our very breath of life, cannot be purchased at any cost. We can wear the most glamorous dresses but, to give health to that same body, no amount of money is enough. We can buy the thickest and costliest of mattresses with money but, no amount of money can buy for us a good sound, night’s sleep. These few facts are sufficient to awake us to the fact that, there are many other important things that make for a happy life, and money is not all. We should thereby give money only its due importance and not make it all-important for, if we do that, we are certainly going to sacrifice some other vital items of a good life. Now let us analyze to some extent how this money is capable of playing havoc in life.

In reality, the position of society today is far from being enviable, is largely due to this money mania that has caught hold of society. Each and every individual is busy in his/her money-spinning activities. At this juncture, I would like to mention the fact that in our Hindu mythology, the Goddess Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth has an owl for her transport. This is very significant as it is believed that the pursuit of money, as it is today, makes an owl of a man. I’d say that we have all become money maniacs, sacrificing every conceivable pleasure on the altar of wealth. Is this not owlish sense? When we lose our equilibrium, we become significant owls.

Today, we have sacrificed the bliss of a happy and contented family in the guise of material luxuries which we think are all that we need. We have no time to love each other, care for each other or, serve each other in the family because each member of the family is busy in the struggle of making money. In this unit of a family, where, at one time the love we got was an elixir for our tired nerves, is now a missing entity.

On the other hand, now, we have plush carpets, foam on our beds, and a beautiful dining table with, no one at home to share our joys and worries. This is what money has done to our family’s succor. The parents are busy making money and have no time, to spare for the children, the husband is busy buying diamonds for his wife, but has no time even to take a glance at her when she dons them. The wife is busy preparing the office routine but has no time for the routine service of the family. So, in this avenue of life, money has done more harm than good. In as much as money was essential to buy for a man his necessities and to some extent even his luxuries, it was good but, as soon as it became the be-all and end-all of life, it wreaked havoc in life.

On the social front also, no one has any time to be even aware of about the welfare of the neighbours and colleagues, as, each one is busy not only spinning money but, spinning money more than the neighbour. When such an unhealthy competition exists for the hoarding of money, where then will a society exist at all. Where no one knows anything about anyone, no does anyone care to know anything about anyone, then, where does society exist? The society has been blown up into fragments, with each family of the society only busy raising bank balances more than the neighbour’s.

It is this money and the lust for it that has afflicted uncounted miseries on man. All the competition that persists today is only to rise above the others not in any other way than just the other’s bank balances. Man has become so very deprived in this chase of money that he can do, and he also does anything; yes anything to get hold of money. Is this what money was meant for? Family squabbles, social bickering, political gains are all managed for the sake of this money. This is why today; no one understands any language, except the language of money. For the money, people have killed children or even adults are kidnapped. It is for this money the modern sophisticated man has become a little less than a beast.

After having a bird’s eye view of the present scenario are we still in a position to say that money is all that we need? Yes, money is all-important but, only to a limit. Once the limit of satisfaction is crossed it converts man into a mere animal, a brute, and a devil. It is this excess of money that leads man to all sorts of crimes. We should realize that money is not all that we need for happiness, for, I daresay, the opposite is correct — and all the unhappiness spread in the world today is the obvious corollary of excess money in circulation, and the lust for it. The unhappiness and crime registered in these days of lots of money surpass the unhappiness of many times before this. In spite of so much progress and prosperity, why is there so much ill will, degradation, and unhappiness? It is I think because we are laying too much stress on money and only money. The fact of rampant unhappiness goes to prove that, money is not all that we need to live, for, it is by now apparent that, to be happy, we need so many other things, which money cannot even buy for us. Now, the position is that, we have sacrificed all the finer needs of our happiness for this mundane money and the result is obvious and for all of us to see, and understand.

I suggest that a stage has now come when we must give up our on fighting for money and give it only the amount of respect and importance it deserves, it should be treated only as a means to an end, and not an end itself, only then we will be able to strike a balance between the inputs of money and the inputs of other things we need to live a happy and satisfying life.

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Does Money Brings Happiness?

Homework: Many pepple think that money brings happiness. Do you agree with them? Why or why not? Essay: “Does money bring happiness? ” This is the question that everyone has different answers. I agree with many people about money brings happiness. Money helps us have material comforts and spiritual joy. In fact, if we have no money, we can’t buy goods, clothes, and other necessaries which we need. If we have a lot of money, we can improve our spiritual activities easily.

We can go to the movies every weekend, and we can buy any expensive gifts for the people who we love. Money helps the poor have a will-fed life. For the rich, money helps them have pure happiness because they can help the poor and the victims of disasters. It is said that: “ Money is the root of all evil. ” No, it is not true. Money is normally the fruit of labour. The question is how one spends that money. There is nothing good or evil about money. The same money which can help bring relief to the suffering millions, can be used to build up armaments.

Power decides how to spend the money.  In summary, money brings happiness only when we use it properly. The right use of money may bring us a comfortable life and a cheerful heart.

Order custom essay Does Money Brings Happiness? with free plagiarism report

Being poor can certainly bring unhappiness, but having money does not guarantee happiness. Some people assume that because extreme poverty brings extreme unhappiness that the opposite must be true. It is not. There are a lot of very unhappy very rich people.

Acquiring money can too easily become the center of life's focus and that can become an obsession. Like most obsessions, it's not a good thing. The Bible says that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. That seems to be a universal truth. When you love money more than anything else in life you will find that you can never get enough of it. When life only revolves around getting money you start to obsess over what it can bring you and then you lose any chance of happiness. The happiest people I know are not the richest.

They are the people who have learned to be happy with what they have and make the most of life. I have seen people made deeply miserable by poverty, but at the same time I have seen relatively poor people who are happy because they have a positive and thankful attitude about life.

We are living in the 21th century, when many new inventions have discovered. As far as I know, one of them, which has big influence over the world is internet. So do you wonder: “ Why do they like to use the Internet? ” The internet always brings a better life.

In fact, without internet people are alive and still exist but nobody can deny the benefits of the it. Firstly, it’s a source of information. People can get the latest information about weather forecast, daily events all around the world at any time as well. Before the Internet was invented, people can’t get the information as fast as now, they must watch TV programs, buy newspapers or magazines. Thanks to Internet, we can widen our knowledge in an inexpensive and convenient way. Secondly, Internet is a source of entertainment. If y feel tired of bored, y can listen to music or watch any films y like.

Moreover, many people like to play games on the Internet because they are very interesting, wonderful and this doesn’t cost as much. You can also communicate with friends or ralatives by means of e-mail or chatting. Thirdly, Internet is a good mean of education. Teachers can teach on the Internet. Students can find various kinds of tests to do. In addition, they now can use the Internet as a time – saving decide by online schools or online lessons. In conclusion, almost every aspect of our life is concerned with the Internet. It’s a wonderful invention of our modern life. It makes our world a small village.

Can Money Buy Happiness

In our society, people often put great emphasis on materials and possessions. Many believe that having more money would make them happier in life; but does money really provide true happiness? Having the money to provide food, clothing, and shelter is essential for everyone’s well-being and happiness, but after those basic needs are fulfilled more money just offers materials not necessarily happiness. There are many ways I think money does buy happiness. Money increases quality of life which in turn buys happiness.

This is only true if one lives within his means, lives a modest life style and pursues happiness the right way. I think most people believe happiness is bought in a store. People overestimate how much pleasure they’ll get when they buy something luxurious. We really don’t need all these extravagant luxuries around us. Are they necessities to life? Are they just things to show your vanity? Or are they just trying to keep up with the Jones’s? In today's materialistic world, the phrase that ‘money can't buy happiness' is tending to be proved hence otherwise.

Social research and surveys have shown results based on an individuals income, health and the political scenario which is dominant in his or her region. It is quite obvious that the gap between the privileged and the not so is growing into a great divide giving rise to different class and status, thus defining ones social circle. It should therefore be understood how an individual’s economic status affects their personal happiness throughout all aspects of life.

Many tend to refer to this age-old quote especially when they tend to belong to sector of people who can't afford the modern day luxuries of life. What they do not realize is that money, might in fact do just that, buy happiness. On the other hand, those who have pockets as heavy as themselves think that money Is nothing but a burden and a complication in life, which is too networked to figure out. First of all, a comfortable life can be brought if we are rich. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to see people complain about their low standard of living.

The low educated groups always have to worry about their living. They may worry about losing their jobs as they always work as low skilled workers. Their jobs are not stable at all. They may not be able to cope with their daily lives, let alone being happy. Under such circumstances, money can buy happiness. If they have got more money, they no longer have to worry all the time. The idea of money buying happiness is interesting. Yes, most people feel they do need more money to be happy, but what is that "happiness" they are speaking of?

If that idea means owning newer appliances than before, then money can buy you happiness. If that idea is going out to eat dinner more often, then money can buy you happiness. But, if happiness is truly living one's life to the fullest, then money cannot buy happiness. People know that this idea of happiness is materialistic and shallow, and they are quick to point it out in others, but cannot see it in themselves. Money cannot buy happiness, unless happiness is measured by possessions.

Happiness from money is very short lived. While the happiness of people who receive large sums of money might rise immediately after they receive that money, that happiness declines to only slightly above or equal to their level of happiness before the money came to them. Different people have different beliefs of what happiness really is. However, money is often the bane of happiness, as is evidenced that affluent societies are often considerably more unhappy than poorer (not necessarily poverty stricken) countries.

This is a sign that too little, or too much money is not a good thing. A balance needs to be struck between earning money and more fulfilling activities. This is because happiness is not a state to be ‘achieved’ but a virtue, and all happiness is relative. Happiness is a virtue. Happiness cannot be ‘achieved’ or ‘attained’ through earning money. Money can be seen as the opposite of happiness. The rich often wield power, due to their wealth, which in turn corrupts their morals.

Earning, Saving and Spending Money

During the olden times, the trade of goods is done through what we have known as barter. Goods are offered in exchange for another. However, in this modern time, inevitably, money serves to make everyday transactions and activities possible. Money is offered in exchange of goods and services. Money has become a necessity. With money comes along the power and freedom. Thus, it can be said that today, money has become so powerful that it has almost turned our world around. Money has become so powerful that it has controlled our lives instead of us controlling money. Money can either make or break our lives.

It can either make our life happy or miserable. But, it would be best if money would serve to make our lives better instead of making it even worse. In order to achieve this, we shall consider money management for better money earning, spending and saving. In this paper, we shall discuss how to handle money so that we can manage to control it and not to allow money to control us. We shall discuss how money is earned, spent and saved. In everyday of our lives, we work to earn money so that we can have something to provide for our needs, both at hand and in the future.

However, it has become difficult to earn money, much to earn more money to save for the future. As it is provided by the National Endowment for Financial Education in one of its articles, “Life is a challenge. As the saying goes, just when you are about to make ends meet, someone moves the ends”. From this saying, it can be said that one of the most troubling problems that men have are problems that concern finances not only on how to earn the same but even worst, on how to manage them to make both ends meet and to leave something for the rainy days.

The issue of money management starts with the earning process. We cannot manage something we do not have. So in order to make both ends meet, we should at least try to earn and find reasonable sources of income. This challenge however, can be very daunting to some as problems of unemployment, low salary levels, and even personal circumstances like the lack of education, skills, training and aptitude for job placement can hamper one’s ability to earn money.

However, I do believe that nothing can stop us from succeeding with determination, perseverance, initiative and resourcefulness. It should be remembered that we earn money not only based on employment. There are also those we call as passive income from investments and also other forms on active income from services to which the only capital we might need is patience, and industriousness. In an article fore example written by Huffstetler, he enumerated various ways on how to earn extra money using simple money making ideas.

For example, Huffstetler advised to sell things that we no longer need. This can come in different forms like setting up ma garage sale or selling these items online, one of the easiest and most effective venues where buyers and sellers meet. Try also to earn money from hobbies and activities we love to do. Reading through the rest of Hufstetler’s advice, it can be said that earning extra money is also all about creativity, and productivity. To earn money, we should always try to make the most of our time especially avoiding idled moments.

After the issue of how to earn money is settled, the question now is on how this money shall be spent. Of course, this goes along with the question on how top spend this money in order to allow savings as well. In one of the books written by an evangelist named Bo Sanchez entitled, “Simplify”, he made mention that one of the best answers to these questions is to simplify. These means that we should not live beyond our means, and try to simplify things so that unnecessary expenses should be avoided so that money can go to the savings for future and more relevant use.

Setting money goals or setting expenditure ceilings are helpful in spending and saving money. It is always best to reflect on our spending lifestyle and see if there are some expenses we can forego and evaluate each expense if they are as relevant. Setting up money goals will help to motivate and encourage saving. With the money goals that we have, we can be guided if we are overspending or that if we should try to tighten our belts to fulfil our money goals and to set some amount for the savings.

As it is oftentimes said, money is perhaps one of the bets discoveries men ever made. However, as many discoveries turned into disasters, we should not allow our poor money management skills to turn money into the evil that it has now started to become. Money is something we should to make our lives better and not to make it worst. Thus, we should evaluate our money management strategies particularly on spending and earning so that we may avoid the common fate that money controls us making our lives miserable instead of being simple and more convenient.

As it has been shown, it is very easy to control money. It all boils down to having reasonable sources of money for earnings, proper spending lifestyle and the motivation and det4ermination to save for the future. Works Cited Huffstetler, Erin. “Ways to Earn Extra Money. ” 2009. 9 June 2009 ;http://frugalliving. about. com/od/makingmoney/tp/Ways_to_Earn_Extra_Money. htm;. National Endowment for Financial Education. “Changing Your Life Through Better Money Management. ” 9 June 2009 ;http://www. managingmymoney. com/;.

Money Doesn't Bring Happiness

As u have heard many times money does not bring happiness. Happiness has to be gained. Good morning ladies, gentlemen and my fellow students I am standing before u declaring a speech on the topic does money make u happy. no doubt you've met people who appear to be trapped in an unsatisfying cycle of materialism and unhappiness. they confuse money for what is really supposed to be measured and there by maximize the wrong thing. Among other things three leave out of the equation all kinds of success in our lives, in our families lives and in our friendships life that money does not measure.

Even their work choices reflect the sad mistake of forgoing what they love doing for what brings happiness. Do we really care about one-upmanship than material comforts? hardly. What the data tells us is that richer people are happier than poorer people. The reason is because richer think that they are more successful in life but it's success not money that we really crave Money can buy so many things except for happiness. Happiness is gained when u have fun in ur life with family and friends.

That in my opinion I can do without money. Happiness is a feeling the things that make me happy are swimming playing having fun all money can do is make a person live a life in a hard way without fun. nowadays rich people spend most of their time counting money and u know time lost is never gained. In conclusion people lets live life love life and not let money get in the way of our happiness. I stand here and inform u that my opinion is that money does not make u happy . Thank u                                   THE END

Money Is Everything

To some people, this is an easy and preferred answer. It is an easy answer because it’s ideal and it gives hope. However, this idea is a common misconception and is dangerous because money is everything. Without the ability to purchase tangible items, intangible ideas would not be able to be pursued. Money is what helps people survive and pursue ideological things in life. Therefore, the misconception “money isn’t everything” is a dangerous and mistaken belief. Money is what helps people survive.

Sodapop Curtis, from The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, quits his high school and stops his chances of getting his dream job to get more money for his family to survive and help his little brother, Ponyboy, pursue his dreams. According to Sodapop, money is essential for survival, and without it, life would be very difficult to manage. He had dropped out of school because he needed money to help put food on the table for his family and helps his family when needed. Money isn’t a luxury but a necessity in order to survive in today’s world, so the idea that money isn’t everything is a misconception.

The misbelief that money isn’t everything can result in devastating situations. A YouTube video, The Homeless Experiment, featured a man who did horrible in high school and eventually dropped out; he had thought that he did not need money do pursue ideological things. Although some people, such as Steve Jobs, may become a billionaire from dropping out, only a few actually become successful not having to chase after money. Many high school students believe in this misconception, and it may lead to dropping out to pursue a dream with false hopes.

“Money isn’t everything” is a dangerous and mistaken belief that may foster fake hopes. “Money isn’t everything” is a dangerous misconception because money is necessary to survive in the world we live in today and because it can make people believe that dreams can come true without having money. Money does not buy respect, but is needed to gain authority which comes with respect. Money isn’t everything but most things require money. Therefore, it is crucial to use money and wealth wisely.

Young People Need to Spend Less Money and Save More

Young People Need To Spend Less Money And Save More Human beings have different thoughts about their life. Some of them believe in enjoying life without considering anything, but some others believe in saving money for their future. But it is better for young people like me to save their money instead of spending it carelessly. Because young people have lots of expenses in the future, like education, unpredictable emergencies, besides that the job market is not steady. So it is better for youngers to save more and spend less.

One of the reasons that make youngers to save money and spend less is education expenses. Education is expensive so young people like me cannot totally depend on our parents to pay all the bills. We have tuition, books, maybe rent and other educational expenses to pay for. Even though our parents help us, but we have to pay part of it. So we should save some of our money for that. The other reason that saving money in youngers is better than spending it carelessly is emergency situations.

Emergencies could occur any moment. For example one of our family member may need help and we will have to give them money, or one of our parents might have an unexpected injury or serious illness and they could not go to work for some time so we must have some savings for that emergency moments in our life. Besides that there is other reason for younger people to save more and spend less and it is the oscillation of the job market. The job market is not steady, specially these days.

Due to oscillation in the job market we cannot predict what will happen next. For example one of my friend lost her job due to recession. She did not get a job for about one year and a half, but she had savings so she was able to overcome that bad situation, like paying rent, grocery, car loan and other bills. Without an income it is difficult to pay for these. It shows that if she did not have the habit of saving money, then she could not have managed hat situation. In the conclusion I must say that saving is a very good tendency for young people and it will never let a person down. You must plan a head. Youngers should know they will have expenses for their schooling, they also should know that they might be confront with an unexpected emergencies in life, besides that they know the oscillation of the job market so they must be prepared. They need to save money for these events.

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Guest Essay

Private Equity Is Gutting America — and Getting Away With It

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By Brendan Ballou

Mr. Ballou is an attorney and the author of the forthcoming “Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America,” from which this essay is adapted.

“Private equity” is a term we’ve all heard but which, if we’re honest, few of us understand. The basic idea is simple: Private equity firms make their money by buying companies, transforming them and selling them — hopefully for a profit. But what sounds simple often leads to disaster.

Companies bought by private equity firms are far more likely to go bankrupt than companies that aren’t. Over the last decade, private equity firms were responsible for nearly 600,000 job losses in the retail sector alone. In nursing homes, where the firms have been particularly active, private equity ownership is responsible for an estimated — and astounding — 20,000 premature deaths over a 12-year period, according to a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Similar tales of woe abound in mobile homes , prison health care , emergency medicine , ambulances , apartment buildings and elsewhere. Yet private equity and its leaders continue to prosper, and executives of the top firms are billionaires many times over.

Why do private equity firms succeed when the companies they buy so often fail? In part, it’s because firms are generally insulated from the consequences of their actions, and benefit from hard-fought tax benefits that allow many of their executives to often pay lower rates than you and I do. Together, this means that firms enjoy disproportionate benefits when their plans succeed, and suffer fewer consequences when they fail.

Consider the case of the Carlyle Group and the nursing home chain HCR ManorCare. In 2007, Carlyle — a private equity firm now with $373 billion in assets under management — bought HCR ManorCare for a little over $6 billion, most of which was borrowed money that ManorCare, not Carlyle, would have to pay back. As the new owner, Carlyle sold nearly all of ManorCare’s real estate and quickly recovered its initial investment. This meant, however, that ManorCare was forced to pay nearly half a billion dollars a year in rent to occupy buildings it once owned. Carlyle also extracted over $80 million in transaction and advisory fees from the company it had just bought, draining ManorCare of money.

ManorCare soon instituted various cost-cutting programs and laid off hundreds of workers. Health code violations spiked. People suffered. The daughter of one resident told The Washington Post that “my mom would call us every day crying when she was in there” and that “it was dirty — like a run-down motel. Roaches and ants all over the place.”

In 2018, ManorCare filed for bankruptcy, with over $7 billion in debt. But that was, in a sense, immaterial to Carlyle, which had already recovered the money it invested and made millions more in fees. (In statements to The Washington Post, ManorCare denied that the quality of its care had declined, while Carlyle claimed that changes in how Medicare paid nursing homes, not its own actions, caused the chain’s bankruptcy.)

Carlyle managed to avoid any legal liability for its actions. How it did so explains why this industry often has such poor outcomes for the businesses it buys.

The family of one ManorCare resident, Annie Salley, sued Carlyle after she died in a facility that the family said was understaffed. According to the lawsuit, despite needing assistance walking to the bathroom, Ms. Salley was forced to do so alone, and hit her head on a bathroom fixture. Afterward, nursing home staff reportedly failed to order a head scan or refer her to a doctor, even though she exhibited confusion, vomited and thrashed around. Ms. Salley eventually died from bleeding around her brain.

Yet when Ms. Salley’s family sued for wrongful death, Carlyle managed to get the case against it dismissed. As a private equity firm, Carlyle claimed, it did not technically own ManorCare. Rather, Carlyle merely advised a series of investment funds with obscure names that did. In essence, Carlyle performed a legal disappearing act.

In this case, as in nearly every private equity acquisition, private equity firms benefit from a legal double standard: They have effective control over the companies their funds buy, but are rarely held responsible for those companies’ actions. This mismatch helps to explain why private equity firms often make such risky or shortsighted moves that imperil their own businesses. When firms, through their takeovers, load companies up with debt, extract onerous fees or cut jobs or quality of care, they face big payouts when things go well, but generally suffer no legal consequences when they go poorly. It’s a “heads I win, tails you lose” sort of arrangement — one that’s been enormously profitable.

But it isn’t just that firms benefit from the law: They take great pains to shape it, too. Since 1990, private equity and investment firms have given over $900 million to federal candidates and have hired an untold number of senior government officials to work on their behalf. These have included cabinet members, speakers of the House, generals, a C.I.A. director, a vice president and a smattering of senators. Congressional staff members have found their way to private equity, too: Lobbying disclosure forms for the largest firms are filled with the names of former chiefs of staff, counsels and legislative directors. Carlyle, for instance, at various times employed two former F.C.C. chairmen, a former S.E.C. chair, a former NATO supreme allied commander, a former secretary of state and a former British prime minister, among others.

Such investments have paid off, as firms have lobbied to protect favored tax treatments, which in turn have given them disproportionate benefits when their investments succeed. The most prominent of these benefits is the carried interest loophole, which allows private equity executives to pay such low tax rates. The issue has been on the national agenda since at least 2006, and three presidents have tried to close the loophole. All three have failed.

Most recently, in 2021, as part of his first budget, President Biden proposed to end the benefit for people with very high incomes. But as he made his pitch, private equity opposition surged, and the largest firms each spent $3 million to $7 million on lobbying that year alone. One firm, Apollo Global Management, employed the former general counsel to the House Republican caucus, a former senior adviser to a past speaker of the House, a former chief of staff to another speaker and a former senator, plus more than a dozen other former officials.

As the plan wound its way through Congress, it grew weaker, and by the fall of 2021, the proposal to end the benefit was no longer a part of Mr. Biden’s budget negotiations. Instead, Congress approved an amendment that largely exempted small and midsize companies owned by private equity firms from a new corporate minimum tax. It was an obscure but important consideration, and with it, private equity firms managed not just to protect a preferred tax advantage — the carried interest loophole, which benefited people like Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, whose income in 2022 was 50 times that of the chief executive of Goldman Sachs — but also to win a new one.

The story further explains why the actions of private equity firms often have such sorry consequences for everyone except themselves. By protecting favored tax benefits, firms receive disproportionate gains when their strategies succeed. But, insulated from liability, they face little consequence if those plans fail. It’s an incentive system that encourages risky, even reckless behavior like that at ManorCare, and is designed to work for private equity firms and no one else.

But if private equity firms are powerful, so too are ordinary people, who’ve had surprising success confronting firms regarding unaffordable prison phone calls and surprise medical bills , among other issues. Even if we’re unlikely to fix our tax code soon, activists and others can still push to update our laws and hold private equity responsible for its actions. Congress can clarify that firms can be sued for wrongs committed by companies they effectively control. States and cities can do the same when portfolio companies are based in their jurisdictions. By making private equity firms responsible for their own actions, we can build a better — and fairer — economy, and make tragedies like that at ManorCare less likely. All we need is the courage to act.

Brendan Ballou ( @brendanballou ) is a federal prosecutor and served as special counsel for private equity at the Department of Justice. He is the author of the forthcoming “Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America,” from which this essay is adapted. The views in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Essay on Money in English for Children and Students

Essay on Money: Money is the medium used by people to buy required goods and services. It is used as the source to fulfill basic needs and is also a source of comfort in life. Money is the most important source to live a healthy and prosperous life; however, it cannot be compared with the significance of love and care. Both have their own importance and benefits. Nevertheless, money is a useful and necessary commodity to live contentedly disposing all your usual liabilities towards your family and loved ones.

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Long and Short Essay on Money in English

We have provided some simply written essay on money to help your kids to do better in their essay writing competition.

These Money Essay are written in easy English so that student of any class can easily understand it and also reiterate it or write it down, whenever required.

We have divided following essays under long and short essay on money in English according to the need, to help your kids to do better in their school competitions.

These essay on money will prove useful in your school assignments or general discussion with your family and friends.

Money Essay 1 (100 words)

Money is the most basic requirement of the life without which one cannot fulfill his basic needs and requirements of the daily routine. We can never compare the importance of the money with the importance of love or care. When one need money, love cannot fulfill this requirement and if one need love, money cannot fulfill this requirement.

Both are highly required for the healthy life but they have their significance and importance separately. Both are required by us on urgent basis so we cannot rank both on the same scale. We need money everywhere such as to eat food, to drink water or milk, to see TV, news, subscribe newspaper, wear clothe, get admission and many more requirements.

Money Essay 2 (150 words)

Money is the basic requirement of the life without which one cannot imagine a healthy and peaceful life. We need money even buying a little needle. In the modern time, where growth of civilization is going very fast and following western culture, we need more money because of the increasing prices of everything. Earlier there was a system called barter system in which one was allowed to exchange things to get goods however, in the modern one need only money to buy everything.

The importance of money is increasing day by day as the living has become so costly. The significance of money has increased to a great extent in the field of production, consumption, exchange, distribution, public finance and etc. It plays a very crucial role in determining the input, income, employment, output, general price level of anything, etc.

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Money Essay 3 (200 words)

In such a costly and competitive society and world, no one of us can live without money. We need money to fulfil our basic needs of the life such as buying food, and other many basic necessities of life which are almost impossible to buy without money. People in the society who are rich and have property are looked as honourable and respectful person of the society however a poor person is seen as hatred without any good impression.

Money increases the position of the person in the society and gives good impression to him. All of us want to be rich by earning more money through good job or business in order to fulfil all the increasing demands of the modern age. However, only few people get this chance of completing their dreams of being a millionaire.

So, money is the thing of great importance all through the life. Money is required by everyone whether he/she is rich or poor ad living in urban areas or rural areas. People in the urban areas are earning more money than the people living in backward or rural areas as the people of the urban areas have more access to the technologies and get more opportunity because of the easy sources.

Money Essay 4 (250 words)

Money is very much required thing in the life however; it cannot buy things like time, love and true care. It can only fulfil the outer needs of the person and not the inner needs like true love. Now-a-days, everything has become so costly but necessary to buy for living a simple life. And what if we have no money, either we would die or suffer more if saved.

Money has capability to buy anything virtually and helps us a lot throughout the life. By taking the importance of the money in our life we should never destroy or waste the money without any purpose. We should not compare the money and love because both are required separately to run a successful life.

In this competitive world, everyone wants to get good study with higher education from the popular college and university to get good job in order to earn more money. A person needs more money to fulfil the requirement of the all members of the family especially one who is only working person of the family.

He or she needs to fulfil the eating, clothing and living requirements of the family members and for that money is required. Rich people of the society are given particular recognition and popularity however poor people live their life by arranging just food for two times a day. All the changes and differences are just because of the money.

Money Essay 5 (300 words)

Money is really a very important thing for the human beings to lead their life in the satisfactory way. Unlike animals and plants, we need more money everywhere. In order to live in the society, we need to maintain our status and position in the society for which we need money. In order to eat food or drink water, wear cloth, get admission to the school, take medicine or go to the hospital and other many activities we need lots of money. Now the topic arise is, where we got such required money. We need to get higher level study and do hard works to get good job or open our own business which requires more skill and confidence.

Earlier the condition of poor people was very poor because of the pressure of the rich people. They were not helping the poor people and use them only as a servant on the very low salary. However the condition of the poor people has become good as the rule and regulations of the government as been change in order to equalize the condition of both. Now everyone has equal rights to study higher and get good job. Many people understand that money is the origin of the evil in the mind however I do not think so because thinking is the process of human mind and not the creation of money.

I understand and believe that money is the most important key of happiness gifted by the God. It is the human mind to take anything in different ways. Some people take it only to fulfil their physical needs and they never take it heartily however some people understand everything to the money and they can do anything for getting the money such murder, corruption, underworld work, smuggling, promoting bribe, etc.

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Money Essay 6 (400 words)

There is no any doubt that money is so essential for our healthy living. Money is almost everything for us to live a life and maintain the good stats in the society. It is the money which fulfils the need of bringing necessary comforts and amenities of the life. If one has money, he/she can get anything in his/her life. It is the money which helps us in developing good personality, improving confidence, makes us able to creditworthiness, improving capacity, increasing capabilities and enhancing our courage to a great level. Without money we feel helpless and alone in this world where no one is ready to help and assist. In the current materialistic world, money is very important and powerful thing without which one cannot live and survive.

Now-a-days, in order to earn more money in wrong ways, bad people are taking help of corruption, bribe, smuggling, murder rich people of the society, and other callous activities by degrading the moral and ethical values of the humanity. Lazy people follow wrong ways to earn money as they understand that these ways are simple and easy however it is not true. One can earn more money in less time and effort but not for long; surely he would be lost in the near future as he is following wrong and weak way. The people who are earning money by following all the rules of humanity earn less money but for long time and they become the high status personality of the society.

People doing corruption save their money as a black money in other countries to keep hidden from the common public and use that money for bad works or increasing their physical luxury. However, common people of the society respects a lot to the people earning money using wrong techniques as they have fear of them and little bit greediness that they can get some money in return whenever required by giving them respect. They are generally called as the bhai or dada or don. Money cannot buy or stay the time as well as cannot give true love and care however highly required by all of us to run the life on the right path. It cannot give time and love however gives happiness, confidence, satisfaction, feeling of well being mentally and physically, makes life easy by solving all the difficulties, and many more.

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All the essays on money given above are written by the professional content writer to help students in getting fulfilled their needs and requirements. Essay on money is generally assigned to the students to write something in their own way. Money essay is given under the category of general essay. You can get other related essays and related information such as:

Essay on Poverty

Essay on Jan Dhan Yojana

Essay on Honesty is the Best Policy

Essay on Honesty

Essay on Corruption

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Money Is Not Everything: The Importance Of Knowledge

Money is one of the most sensitive issues when we mention it under any circumstances. It is also an indispensable thing for each people. In many people’s opinion, money is very important and valuable. They think that with money, we will have everything. Besides these opinions, there are other conflicting opinions that money is not the most important thing and money is not everything. In my opinion, I agree with the second opinion and believe that money is not everything. We still have other things more important than money. The first thing that I believe the other thing is more important than money, is time. We cannot measure time by money. Paul Michael wrote on wisebread.com his idea about measurement time. Michael agrees time is more valuable when he writes, “you can’t make more time.” In other words, Michael believed that time is a thing when you miss, you cannot turn back time. Otherwise, you also cannot buy time because it will not turn back. 

Therefore, time is a thing that you cannot measure. You can make money in any way, and I believe that time is one of the things help you make money. In this case, we also see that our salary was paid based on the time and effort we have work. The time we do less, we get less pay and vice versa. Therefore, time is more valuable than money because we cannot make time. We cannot turn back time, and we also cannot buy time with money. Because of this, we must respect the time that we are. The second thing that I believe on, is health. Health is more valuable than money. Health is the base thing which we need to do something, include the wealth-creating. Otherwise, health can help us enjoy every other valuable experiment. In some countries, people value their health equally and sometimes with their valuable assets. Health is not just about your physical condition. It is integration between your body, mind, and spirit. Money can buy a lot of things but except health. It can buy treatments, but it cannot buy quality for our health as we want. When we are healthy, we can work. We will experience life. Therefore, we can build up the quality life for us. We can pay attention around our lives, or when we are sick, despite a mild cold, we all feel exhausted and uncomfortable. We feel difficult, inconvenient to do anything, even moving. 

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Contrast with that, when we are healthy, we are ready to do all the work in joy, full of energy. We can also say, with health, we will have everything, we can do what we want. The one of thing that I believe more important than money, is our family. As we know, the family is a cradle to nurture a person. Since we were born and raised, families have always been a place to nurture, support and bring us the best and safest things. The article “Why Is Family More Important Than Money?” of Erica Loop discussed some reasons that family is more important than money. Loop though “Although money is a must when it comes to providing adequate housing, food, clothing and education, the family relationship is just as essential — if not more — than the almighty dollar”. According to Loop, money is an important tool to help us have a stable life. It helps us have a good place, full of essential items such as clothes, “food”, and “education”, but the family is more important that. Money cannot buy the family for us. Loop also wrote “…strong familial social ties can actually improve your physical health”. After a tired, stressful day of work, family is a peaceful place that we find to rest, relieve all the fatigue and stress that we accumulate after the day. Some sharing sessions, connecting with relatives in your family gives us a sense of peace, repelling the feeling of stress. Therefore, our physical can improve better. In addition to physical development, the family is also a place to help us develop intellectually. Loop agreed “one of the primary functions of family, other than providing support, is to help each other learn and grow”. It can be said that the family is the first school of each of us. families teach us about moral perfection, controlling all our actions, which are things that hard money can help us buy. There are reasons that makes me believe family is more important than money. Family is the luckiest thing we have. 

A person who is nurtured carefully and best will become successful. Family is an important factor that helps us improve the best we can. It is a place that brings a sense of fun. A place where we shake off all tiredness, attempting. It is also a place to teach us about personality, teach us about responsibility, humanity. In the present life, we can say that money is an indispensable thing for each person, and it is valuable. It might be right with somebody, but in my opinion, I do not think money is the most valuable in our life. According to Wallet Groove, “Money may be valuable, but it is not the most valuable. Money can basically help you get things that you want and need but money doesn’t buy things that actually matter.” It is right, and I agree with his idea. Money is not everything. I believe that money is a tool that helps us have a quality life, but in our life, a lot of things are more valuable than money. For instance, time, love, family, health, and so on are things that more valuable than money. They are more valuable because they are things that we cannot measure with money. They are things that we also cannot buy with money. When we miss them, we cannot take it back. Otherwise, time, love, family, health, and so on are the foundation things in our life that help us make money. Therefore, we have to respect the things that we are having now.

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Past studies have shown that the motivation issues experienced in the work place are not necessarily caused by the work environment. In some cases, external factors not related to work environment are the primary reason that so many workers are incapable of performing to the best of their ability. “People tend to underestimate the importance of external factors and overestimate the importance of internal factors as influences on those behaviors” (Baack, 2012, Ch. 3.1).Through the exploration of how financial problems can affect motivation in employees and how the motivation of these employees can be boosted, a better understanding of performance issues and motivation can be gained.

Merit Pay System Does Not Work

The system allows organizations to create results by rewarding the employees who are responsible of making them happen. By rewarding employees who are high performers and coaching low performers to improve their performance can help improve the overall productivity of the company; However, the improvement will not last long. Not every employee finds a long-term motivation by a pay increase. Some employees are motivated by being recognized by their peers, others by having the same beliefs as the company, or by simply feeling like they are making a positive difference among their community. According to Kohn (1993), “Just because too little money can irritate and demotivate does not mean that more and more money will bring about increased satisfaction, much less increased motivation” (para 15), which is why it is important to seek different strategies to motivate employees. A way companies could sustain its’ culture by having employees who have similar core values. Creating a culture where employees look forward to spending the day at their job and making a difference, instead of feeling like their job is an obligation is a goal. Placing values on employees decreases turn-over and increases employee’s satisfaction with the job. Another way that

Motivation And Non Financial Methods Of Motivation

Money has become a large part in every man’s life, Maslow, a motivational theorist, set out the human needs in the form of a pyramid from their level of importance, the bottom of the hierarchy is basic/physiological needs (InnerWisdom, 2015), this is where money is needed to fulfil the basic needs (food, clothing and shelter). A basic pay rate is the starting salary/wage an individual would be on when starting with the company, they would know this before they begun their job. An increase in basic pay would motivate an employee, they would be receiving more money per hour, a reason an individual may received an increase in pay is due to promotion (non-financial incentive), this would give them the feeling of doing a good job.

Motivation In The Workplace Essays

Motivation in the workplace is one of the major concerns that managers face when trying to encourage their employees to work harder and do what is expected of them on a day-to-day basis. According to Organizational Behavior by John R. Schermerhorn, James G. Hunt and Richard N. Osborn the definition of motivation is "the individual forces that account for the direction, level, and persistence of a person's effort expended at work." They go on to say that "motivation is a key concern in firms across the globe." Through the years there have been several theories as to what motivates employees to do their best at work. In order to better understand these theories we will apply them to a fictitious organization that has the following

Money as a Motivator

In most organisation, money is often seen as a prime motivator for employee in the government and corporate sectors. It empowers them to perform better and contribute to the organisation objective goals and productivity, however, following the shifting of economic conditions and social values, people's desire is dramatically changing. Most employee may feel that they are affected by internal and external

Motivational Theory in Practice at Tesco

Tesco’s Employee Reward Programme has some similarity to Taylor’s theory. Its financial reward packages are one motivating factor. However, there are factors other than money which motivate people in both their personal and working lives. Tesco goes far beyond Taylor and gives more than just simple pay increases. It supports the varied lifestyles of individual employees through relevant and targeted benefits. Many non-financial factors can and do motivate employees to improve their output. One such factor may be the desire to serve people; others may be to improve personal skills or achieve promotion. A person may be motivated to be a professional footballer not because of the salary but because they love football.

Essay on Motivation

One of the first authors that dealt with the sources of motivation was Frederick Taylor who focussed on the overall productivity of an organisation. He linked this productivity to the effort an employee puts into their work which in turn is dependent on monetary rewards (Taylor, 1911). This theory was established in the context of the industrial age and thus is outdated for today’s analysis but it still provides a basic assumption which is often referred to by other authors. The total neglecting of a worker’s intrinsic motivators is a starting point for discussion for authors that conducted research in that area after Taylor.

Employee Motivation Research Paper

Employees are motivated by both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. In order for the reward system to be effective, it must encompass both sources of motivation. Studies have found that among employees surveyed, money was not the most important motivator, and in some instances managers have found money to have a de-motivating or negative effect on employees.  This research paper addresses the definition of rewards in the work environment context, the importance of rewarding employees for their job performance, motivators to employee performance such as extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, Herzberg’s two-factor theory in relation to rewarding employees, Hackman and Oldman model of job enrichment that

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Issue 45: middlemen.

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The Intellectual Situation

Why Is Everything So Ugly?

• The Editors
• Learning and Not Learning Abortion
• Laura Kolbe
• Three Times
• Charlotte Shane
• Victoria Lomasko
• HUMAN_FALLBACK
• Laura Preston
• Judith Levine

Fiction and Drama

• Area of Isolation
• Thomas Bolt
• The Suitors of Helen
• Stephen Squibb

Dead People Rule

• Introduction
• You Don’t Want to Know This?
• Gabriel Winant
• Blair McClendon
• Miyake’s Layers
• Hannah Baer, Nicole Lipman, Haley Mlotek, Su Wu
• Gen X Weighs In

The mid in fake midcentury modern

Published in Issue 44 : Middlemen

Publication date Winter 2023

• Art and Architecture
• Money and Power

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We live in undeniably ugly times. Architecture, industrial design, cinematography, probiotic soda branding — many of the defining features of the visual field aren’t sending their best. Despite more advanced manufacturing and design technologies than have existed in human history, our built environment tends overwhelmingly toward the insubstantial, the flat, and the gray, punctuated here and there by the occasional childish squiggle. This drab sublime unites flat-pack furniture and home electronics, municipal infrastructure and commercial graphic design: an ocean of stuff so homogenous and underthought that the world it has inundated can feel like a digital rendering — of a slightly duller, worse world.

If the Situationists drifted through Paris looking to get defamiliarized, today a scholar of the new ugliness can conduct their research in any contemporary American city — or upzoned American Main Street, or exurban American parking lot, or, if they’re really desperate, on the empty avenues of Meta’s Horizon Worlds. Our own walk begins across the street from our apartment, where, following the recent demolition of a perfectly serviceable hundred-year-old building, a monument to ugliness has recently besieged the block. Our new neighbor is a classic 5-over-1: retail on the ground floor, topped with several stories of apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford. The words THE JOSH have been appended to the canopy above the main entrance in a passionless font.

We spent the summer certain that the caution tape–yellow panels on The Josh’s south side were insulation, to be eventually supplanted by an actual facade. Alas, in its finished form The Josh really is yellow, and also burgundy, gray, and brown. Each of these colors corresponds to a different material — plastic, concrete, rolled-on brick, an obscure wood-like substance — and the overall effect is of an overactive spreadsheet. Trims, surfaces, and patterns compete for attention with shifty black windows, but there’s nothing bedazzling or flamboyant about all this chaos. Somehow the building’s plane feels flatter than it is, despite the profusion of arbitrary outcroppings and angular balconies. The lineage isn’t Bauhaus so much as a sketch of the Bauhaus that’s been xeroxed half a dozen times.

The Josh is aging rapidly for a 5-month-old. There are gaps between the panels, which have a taped-on look to them, and cracks in the concrete. Rust has bloomed on surfaces one would typically imagine to be rustproof. Every time it rains, The Josh gets conspicuously . . . wet. Attempts have been made to classify structures like this one and the ethos behind their appearance: SimCityist, McCentury Modern, fast-casual architecture. We prefer cardboard modernism, in part because The Josh looks like it might turn to pulp at the first sign of a hundred-year flood.

Writing a century ago, H. L. Mencken bemoaned America’s “libido for the ugly.” There exists, he wrote, a “love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States.” However mystical and psychosexual his era’s intolerability might have felt in its origins, by the 1940s the explanations were more prosaic. With the wartime rationing of steel and sudden dearth of skilled labor, concrete structural systems quickly gained appeal — as did buildings that could be made piecemeal in a factory, put on a trailer, and nailed together anywhere in the country. And as the postwar baby boom took hold, such buildings were soon in high demand, fulfilling modernism’s wildest dreams of standardization with little of the glamour. A few Levittowns later, the promise of salvation-by-mass-production would come to seem elusive: new manufacturing techniques were transforming both the buildings and the builders building them. In Prisoners of the American Dream , Mike Davis describes how, in the 1970s, “the adoption of new building technologies involving extensive use of prefabricated structures, like precast concrete, eroded the boundaries of traditional skills and introduced a larger semi-skilled component into the labor force.” If it’s cheaper to assemble concrete panels than to hire bricklayers, cityscapes will eventually contain fewer bricks.

A construction industry with newly decadent profit margins was ready to spring into action in the 1990s, when — after a violent, decades-long process of urban renewal and white flight — real estate developers, brokers, and local politicians started luring predominantly white homeowners and renters back to the cities they’d abandoned. By the 2000s, infill housing began to crop up in American cities that had for decades been defined by their plentiful surface parking. These residential developments were ugly, but not yet inescapable. Like the fresh-faced presidential candidate with whom it’s hard not to associate them (did every wood-and-concrete complex feature a knockoff Shepard Fairey mural, or have we been blinded by the mists of memory?), the buildings spoke to an upwardly mobile, progressive, even post-racial demographic that didn’t share its parents’ all-consuming fear of city life. Then came the ultimate stop-work order: the 2008 financial crisis.

The ruling class seized cities and chose to turn them into . . . this? To our right is a place that sells wiggly candles. Tweet

The urban building boom that picked up in the wake of the Great Recession wasn’t a boom at all, at least not by previous booming standards: in the early 2010s, multifamily housing construction was at its lowest in decades. But low interest rates worked in developers’ favor, and what had begun as an archipelago of scattered development had coalesced, by the end of the Obama years, into a visual monoculture. At the global scale, supply chains narrowed the range of building materials to a generic minimum (hence The Josh’s pileup of imitation teak accents and synthetic stucco antiflourishes). At the local level, increasingly stringent design standards imposed by ever-more-cumbersome community approval processes compelled developers to copy designs that had already been rubber-stamped elsewhere (hence that same fake teak and stucco in identical boxy buildings across the country). The environment this concatenation of forces has produced is at once totalizing and meek — an architecture embarrassed by its barely architected-ness, a building style that cuts corners and then covers them with rainscreen cladding. For all the air these buildings have sucked up in the overstated conflict between YIMBYs (who recognize that new housing is ultimately better than no housing) and NIMBYs (who don’t), the unmistakable fact of cardboard modernism is that its buildings are less ambitious, less humane, and uglier than anyone deserves.

They’re also really gray. The Josh’s steel railings are gray, and its plastic window sashes are a slightly clashing shade of gray. Inside, the floors are made of gray TimberCore, and the walls are painted an abject post-beige that interior designers call greige but is in fact just gray. Gray suffuses life beyond architecture: television, corporate logos, product packaging, clothes for babies, direct-to-consumer toothbrushes. What incentives — material, libidinal, or otherwise — could possibly account for all this gray? In 2020, a study by London’s Science Museum Group’s Digital Lab used image processing to analyze photographs of consumer objects manufactured between 1800 and the present. They found that things have become less colorful over time, converging on a spectrum between steel and charcoal, as though consumers want their gadgets to resemble the raw materials of the industries that produce them. If The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit once offered a warning about conformity, he is now an inspiration, although the outfit has gotten an upgrade. Today he is The Man in the Gray Bonobos , or The Man in the Gray Buck Mason Crew Neck , or The Man in the Gray Mack Weldon Sweatpants  — all delivered via gray Amazon van. The imagined color of life under communism, gray has revealed itself to be the actual hue of globalized capital. “The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow,” wrote Hardt and Negri. What color does a blended rainbow produce? Greige, evidently.

A lot of ugliness accretes privately, in the form of household goods, which can make it hard to see — except on the first of the month. Today’s perma-class of renters moves more frequently than ever before (inevitably to smaller apartments), and on moving day the sidewalks are transformed into a rich bazaar of objects significant for ugliness studies. We stroll past discarded pottery from wild sip ’n’ spin nights; heaps of shrunken fast fashion from Shein; dead Strategist-approved houseplants; broken Wirecutter-approved humidifiers; an ergonomic gaming chair; endless Ikea BILLYs, MALMs, LACKs, SKUBBs, BARENs, SLOGGs, JUNQQs, and FGHSKISs. Perhaps this shelf is salvageable — ? No, just another mass of peeling veneer and squishy particleboard. On one stoop sits a package from a direct-to-consumer eyewear company, and we briefly fantasize about a pair of glasses that would illuminate, They Live –style, the precise number of children involved in manufacturing each of these trashed items, or maybe the acreage of Eastern European old-growth trees.

It occurs to us, strolling past a pair of broken BuzzFeed Shopping–approved AirPods, that the new ugliness has beset us from both above and below. Many of the aesthetic qualities pioneered by low-interest-rate-era construction — genericism, non-ornamentation, shoddy reproducibility — have trickled down into other realms, even as other principles, unleashed concurrently by Apple’s slick industrial-design hegemon, have trickled up. In the middle, all that is solid melts into sameness, such that smart home devices resemble the buildings they surveil, which in turn look like the computers on which they were algorithmically engineered, which resemble the desks on which they sit, which, like the sofas at the coworking space around the corner, put the mid in fake midcentury modern . And all of it is bound by the commandment of planned obsolescence, which decays buildings even as it turns phones into bricks.

Beyond the sidewalk, the street — which is mostly for cars, key technology of the 20th-century assault on the city. Barthes wrote that the 1955 Citroën DS marked a welcome shift in the appearance in cars toward the “homely,” meaning that they’d begun to carry the comfortable livability of kitchens and household equipment. Today’s automobiles, far from being “the supreme creation of an era,” are homely in the other sense of the word. A contemporary mythologist could sort them into either hamsters or monoliths. Hamster cars (the Honda Fit, the Toyota Prius) are undoubtedly ugly, but in a virtuous way. The monolith cars (the Cadillac Escalade, the Infiniti QX80) possess a militaristic cast, as if to get to Costco one must first stop off at the local black site. 1 No brand has embraced the ethos more than Tesla, with its tanklike Cybertruck. Even Musk’s more domesticated offerings feel like they’re in the surveillance business: sitting inside a Tesla is not unlike sitting inside a smartphone, while also staring at a giant smartphone.

Shittiness is a big tent — and the tent is falling apart. Tweet

Dodging huge grilles we walk on, pulled by ugliness toward a gentrified retail strip. Here the violence of the new ugliness comes more fully into focus. The ruling class seized cities and chose to turn them into . . . this? To our right is a place that sells wiggly candles. Past that is a boutique liquor store whose chalkboard sign proclaims, in cheerleader handwriting, that the time is Wine O’Clock, and past that is a Bank of America. Across the street, a row of fast-casual chains, whose names and visual identities insist on modesty and anonymity: Just Salad, Just Food For Dogs, Blank Street Coffee. (This raft of normcore brands finds its opposite in the ghost kitchens down the block, which all for some reason are called things like Fuck Your Little Bitch Burrito.) Up ahead is an axe throwing “experience,” and another Bank of America.

Who asked for all of this? Numerous critics — self-hating and otherwise — have argued that the mallification of the American city is the fault of the same millennials for whom all the new construction was built, who couldn’t quite bear to abandon the creature comforts of home even as they reurbanized. The story goes that millennials lived, laughed, and loved their way into an unprecedentedly insipid environment, turning once-gritty cities into Instagram-friendly dispensaries of baroque ice cream cones that call back, madeleine-style, to the enfolding warmth of their suburban childhoods. But the contemporary built environment is not the millennials’ legacy; it is their inheritance. They didn’t ask for cardboard modernism — they simply capitulate to its infantilizing aesthetic paradigm because there is no alternative. Or if there is an alternative, it’s between an $8 ice cream cone or an $11 ice cream cone (or a $49 ticket to the Museum of Ice Cream).

Our ugliness tour is leading us toward the $11 ice cream cone zone. On the waterfront, the spatial logic of The Josh persists, only at four times the cost per square foot. There is less random yellow, the concrete is glossier, and the view through the precarious glass is a little more ennobling. Too bad about the build quality. One paradox of the new ugliness is that it flattens the distinction between the rich, the very rich, the superrich, and the merely fortunate by ripping them all off in turn. These days housing at the most elite strata sucks nearly as much as the simply bourgeois kind. According to a parade of entertaining New York Times stories, residents of the toothpick-like towers on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row complain of elevator breakdowns, “catastrophic” flooding from poor plumbing, and “metal partitions [that] groan as buildings sway” in the wind. Shittiness is a big tent — and the tent is falling apart.

Our dérive has deposited us near a subway stop. We swipe in with a trusty MetroCard, soon to be replaced by the privately owned data-tracking behemoth OMNY, whose neon-on-black logo recalls the chilly visual identity of another threat to transit, Uber. 2 But at least as far as branding goes, OMNY is no uglier than other offenders. Our train car is covered in ads, all curiously alike despite marketing a staggering variety of superfluous stuff. How did workplace management systems, body-positive nutritional supplements, bean-forward meal kits, woman-owned sex toys, and woman-owned day-trading services all converge on the same three fonts? Everywhere we look there are little pool noodle–shaped squiggles, and where the squiggles end, there is muted flash photography that makes even otherworldly models look matter-of-fact. With the exception of the food delivery apps, which flaunt their violent takeover of the city in a meaningless word salad designed for shouting about salad —  WHEN YOU’RE SO HANGRY, YOU’D TRASH TALK ANY SLOW WALKER BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR BEC , goes one GrubHub ad — the advertising all seems sheepish about being caught in the act of selling something.

But no single ad is as emblematically ugly as the digital screens that have appeared across the city’s train cars since 2017. Public transit has pivoted to video, and the function of its new giant iPads mystifies: their purpose is neither civic nor fully commercial. Instead, they’re given over to a bewildering set of images for the TikTokified city, the worst of which belong to a marketing campaign called “Moments in Food.” We watch, a little nauseated, as the Moments loop by: video tutorials for Homemade Pesto Hack, Homemade Chipotle Chicken Cutlet Hack, Homemade Three-Ingredient Oven-Free Blondie Hack. Why are there no measurements? Would this even seem edible, in the distinctly non-subwaylike atmosphere of an actual kitchen? Like The Josh’s synthetic not-quite-surfaces, it all seems gesturally foodlike, a step removed from the real thing. Above us, pesto glistens.

Speaking of moments in food, it’s lunchtime. Exiting the train, we pass a food hall, where, again, the theoretical possibility of endless variety manifests as lackluster sameness. Dozens of restaurants’ satellite stalls all feature the same signage, the same subway tile backdrop, the same impression of having been shrunk to diorama size and turned into IP. We turn instead to the outdoor dining sheds. After sprouting with uncharacteristic speed in the first chaotic spring of the pandemic, the sheds have performed a sort of guerilla Haussmannization of the city — in a good way, clawing back public space from cars. The ugliness they’ve introduced to the built environment diverges, happily, from the usual kind. Unruly and old-school, the sheds have pissed off deranged community boards and their mouthpieces in the media. “The shanty outside Dumpling Man on St. Marks is unspeakably hideous,” declared a recent New York article, “its colorless wood fragments hammered together so arbitrarily that you would rather eat in a pile of Lincoln Logs.” Yeah — just the way we like it!

Around the corner is a movie theater, one of those places where they bring snacks or cocktails right to your seat. Filmmaking today is supposed to be more powerful than it’s ever been, capable of representing everything everywhere all at once. As the world offscreen recedes into sameness, movies can and should look great — but onscreen there is more ugly sameness. The thing we wander into is at first indistinguishable from any other blockbuster of the late green-screen era: only after Ryan Reynolds cocks his signature “terror gun” do we recognize this as Army Soldier II , a digitally shot Netflix-financed production based on a TV show based on a comic book. Can a movie be a remake of itself? This is the depleted vibe Army Soldier II and its ilk are giving off. The easy recourse to postproduction — “we’ll fix it in post” — has resulted in a mise-en-scène so underlit as to be literally invisible. Despite its $275 million budget, the movie looks like it was filmed underwater in a polluted lake. The action scenes are nearly monochromatic, the color palette ranging from Tentative Black to what looks like Apple’s proprietary Space Gray. Lighting isn’t a lost art, but subsumed in all that murk, we’re having trouble finding it.

Our neighbor to the right tells us she was hit by a Tesla while e-biking to Roosevelt Island to deliver a single unicorn latte. Tweet

Two and a half hours in, Army Soldier II suddenly becomes a comedy, with Reynolds vamping his way through long, flat takes designed to accommodate his “riffs.” Now everything is over lit, as if the gaffers were only available for the second half of the shoot.

Such bad lighting  — and such large portions! We exit the movie theater to a bright realization: our films are exactly as overlit as our reality. As our environment has become blander, it has also become more legible — too legible. That’s a shame, because many products of the new ugliness could benefit from a little chiaroscuroed ambiguity: if the world has to fill itself up with smart teapots, app-operated vacuum cleaners, and creepily huge menswear, we’d prefer it all to be shrouded in darkness. For thousands of years, this was the principle of illumination that triumphed over all others. Louis XIV’s Versailles and Louis the Tavern Owner’s tavern had this in common: the recognition that some details are worth keeping hidden. But now blinding illumination is the default condition of every apartment, office, pharmacy, laundromat, print shop, sandwich shop, train station, airport, grocery store, UPS Store, tattoo parlor, bank, and this vape shop we’ve just walked into. 

Surveying a suite of candy-colored bongs, we reflect on the primacy of LEDs. (One of the bongs is bedecked with LEDs.) The shift to cold lighting in recent years was borne of urgent environmental necessity, and we accept that climate change requires concessions. We’re prepared to make those: we will eat crickets and endorse, if necessary, the blockage of the waterfront park around the corner by a giant seawall. We will even help build the seawall! Change is inevitable. But LEDs can appear in many colors, as demonstrated by our new light-up bong. So why this atomic, lobotomizing white?

Outdoors, the situation is depressingly similar. After New York replaced the sodium-vapor lights in the city’s 250,000 streetlamps with shiny new LEDs in 2017, the experience of walking through the city at night transformed, almost . . . overnight. Forgiving, romantic, shadowy orange gave way to cold, all-seeing bluish white. Again environmental concerns necessitate this scale of change, and again we wonder why, when it comes to its light bulbs, New York has chosen to back the blue. Inertia, disinterest, thoughtlessness, yes, but also the promise of increased police vigilance. Still, what is most striking about New York’s ominous glow-up is the sense that the city has been estranged from itself: the hyperprecise shadows of every leaf and every branch set against every brick wall deliver a Hollywood unreality. New York after hours now looks less like it did in Scorsese’s After Hours and more like an excessive set-bound ’60s production. The new ugliness is defined in part by an abandonment of function and form: buildings afraid to look like buildings, cars that look like renderings, restaurants that look like the apps that control them. New York City is a city increasingly in quotation marks, a detailed facsimile of a place.

Gah! Blinded by the intense glare of an LED streetlamp, we bump right into said streetlamp. Fortunately there’s an urgent care across the street, still open in the dwindling dusk. We’re no doctor — at least not until they start giving out PhDs in walking around — but we can tell that our knee is bleeding. If anything is broken, the CityMD’s MD will take care of it. We stumble inside, into the intersection of exploitative private insurance and inadequate public options. Here, like everywhere else, a clash of patterns and surfaces — gray tile, gray bricks, greige wood paneling — enfolds us in a numbing palliative aura. We try to check in at the front, but the iPad doesn’t react to the tap of our index finger. Are we a ghost? Is this the afterlife? The lighting is giving gates of heaven, but as with the supertall buildings and their elevators that never work, our problem is technical: the iPad is frozen. Another one is wheeled out and we make our way through a questionnaire. Allergic reactions? None. History of medical litigation? Huh, weird.

Our estimated wait time is three and a half hours, which gives us ample opportunity to reflect on our surroundings. Is there a more contemporary urban form than the urgent care facility? How did the entire world come to look like this nonplace, flimsy and artificial and built unsuccessfully to stave off emergency? Above our heads, the original Army Soldier plays on a flatscreen, Ryan Reynolds’s leaden features motion-smoothed into alarming definition. Our phone buzzes with a push notification from Zillow: a 0.5-bedroom studio is now available for $4,775 a month in the sub-basement of The Josh. We examine our fellow patients, because nobody else is. The bleeding young man to our left looks to have been the victim of an axe throw gone very wrong. Our neighbor to the right tells us she was hit by a Tesla while e-biking to Roosevelt Island to deliver a single unicorn latte. We overhear someone behind us describe a harrowing food poisoning incident involving a Homemade Chipotle Chicken Cutlet Hack.

In the end we pay $75 for a Band-Aid, two Advils, a Blank Street Coffee gift card, and a branded pen we have no plans to return. After a long day of digital encounters we’re asked to sign a paper receipt, and we click the pen. It looks like a pen and works the way a pen ought to work. Our eyes fill with tears at this satisfying tactile experience. Maybe it’s just the bruising.

See also the increasing dominance of cars with opaque and foreboding matte paint jobs, described by the newsletter Blackbird Spyplane as “putty-lookin’ ass whips.”  ↩

Along with Molly Fischer’s 2020 study of the “millennial aesthetic” in New York , Jesse Barron’s 2016 essay in Real Life remains an authoritative critique of neoliberal startup semiotics, from Uber to Seamless. “In 2012, Uber stood alone. Black, sinister, efficient. The logo like devil’s horns. The invisible umlaut. In the place of cuteness, Uber offered a fantasy of minimalist sadism, with the user holding the whip.”  ↩

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