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You Can't Become Rich In Your Pocket Until You Become Rich In Your Mind | ||||
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George Soros linked his failure to finish the book with his decision to forgo the study of philosophy in favor of the pursuit of moneyLike Freud or Einstein In 1949, George Soros enrolled as a student at the London School of Economics. The LSE, as it was widely known, was one of Englands great educational institutions, an ideal place to study, whether one wanted a career or an academic life. The school attracted an student body and was generally regarded as leaning toward socialism, largely because the socialist theoretician Harold Laski taught there. It was an ideal place for someone like George Soros, who wanted practical training in economics and at the same time was eager to study current trends in international politics. He attended some of Laskis lectures and took a course with John Meade, who in 1977 won the Nobel Prize in economics, though, Soros confessed later, I didnt get much out of that course. The school was also home to a pair of unfashionably politically conservative thinkers, the free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek and the renowned philosopher Karl Popper. These two men proved instrumental in setting George Soros on the intellectual path he would later pursue with great fervor in the 1980s and 1990s, as he sought to encourage the replacement of closed societies with open ones. Hayeks 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, attacked fascism, socialism, and communism, lumping them together as kindred types of collectivism that all undermined institutions that allowed freedom to flourish. Of greater influence was Karl Popper. Though Popper was best known for his theories about scientific method, it was his 1951 book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, that served as the foundation for George Soross intellectual life. Young Soros was ripe for a book that explored the nature of human societies. He had experienced dictatorial rule, first at the hands of the Nazis, then at the hands of the communists. Now, in England he was getting his initial taste of democracy. He was eager to put his personal experiences into some intellectual context. Poppers book provided that framework. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argued that human societies had only two possible destinies. One was to become a closed society, where everyone was forced to believe the same thing. The second was to become an open society, whose inhabitants were free of the nationalisms and tribal wars that Popper found so disturbing. In this open society, conflicting beliefs have to be accommodated, no matter what the strains on the society. Open societies, Popper argued, however uncertain and insecure, were vastly superior to closed ones. Although Soros completed the course work for his undergraduate degree in just two years, he decided to hang around LSE for another year until he could obtain his degree in the spring of 1953. Familiar with The Open Society and Its Enemies, he sought out Popper to learn more from the master. He submitted a few essays to Popper, and the professor and student hit it off. Popper became Soross mentor. Nearly 92 years old in the spring of 1994, Karl Popper, in an interview with me, thought back more than 40 years to those days when a young George Soros first showed up at his door. He came into my office and said, `Im a student at LSE. Can I ask you something? He was a very keen student. I had written my book on open societies, and apparently it impressed him. He came frequently and presented me with his ideas. I was not his tutor officially. If he calls me his mentor today, that is very nice of him. While Soros had been taken with Popper, the young student made no lasting mark on the professor. I listened to what he had to say, Popper recalled, but I didnt ask him any questions. I didnt hear much about him. Poppers greatest impact upon Soros was in encouraging the young student to think seriously about the way the world worked, and to develop, if at all possible, a grand philosophical scheme that would help explain it. Popper was the master philosopher seeking to pass his wisdom down to a budding intellectual. He had no interest in helping Soros get along in the practical world. Philosophy, whether the thoughts of Karl Popper or anyone else, was not supposed to be a road map for making money in the real world. Yet for George Soros, philosophy would serve just that purpose. In time, he would go from the abstract to the practical; he would develop theories of knowledge, of how and why people think in certain ways, and from those theories he would spin new theories about the way the financial markets functioned. Later in life, Soros constantly cited Professor Popper as the source of his inspiration for his philanthropic efforts to promote open societies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He skipped over the contribution Popper made, however inadvertently, in helping Soros to fashion the theories he would use to amass a fortune on Wall Street. But in the meantime, there was no fortune. Being impecunious made for embarrassing, awkward moments. But George Soros felt he had no choice. In need of financial assistance for his studies, he approached the Jewish Board of Guardians. The board turned him down, explaining that it did not provide aid to students, only to the gainfully employed. The distinction made no sense to young Soros. Then, during one Christmas vacation, while working as a railway porter on the night shift, George broke his leg. Again, he needed money. This time he had a job working for the railroad. Surely, he could qualify now. This is the occasion to get money out of those bastards, I decided. Returning to the board, he decided to offer up a neat piece of fiction. He informed it that he was in a predicament: He had broken his leg, but since he was working illegally, he was not eligible for National Assistance. In fact, he was still a student. The board grudgingly agreed to give him some aid. To collect the funds, he was forced, while on crutches, to climb three flights of stairs. In time, however, the board stopped Soross funding. So he wrote a heartrending letter to the board, noting that, while he would not starve, it hurt him that this was how one Jew treated another needy one. The answer came by return mail. Georges letter had the desired effect. His weekly allowance was reinstated-and best of all the funds would now be sent to him by mail, ending his arduous visits to the office. He happily took the money, but, still steaming from the earlier affront, waited some time after the cast had been removed from his leg-he was hitchhiking in southern France-before informing the board that it could stop sending the money. The Board of Guardians treatment of him made Soros bitter about all charities long afterwards, and he had to overcome considerable reservations before setting up his own philanthropic program in the late 1970s. The intellectual stimulation at the LSE helped Soros overcome some of his loneliness. He was still poor, but he seemed to be enjoying himself more. During one summer break from his studies, he found work as an attendant at an indoor swimming pool in one of Londons poorer quarters. Few swimmers showed up, allowing Soros plenty of time to visit the huge public library next door. He spent a good part of the summer, therefore, reading books, caught up in the world of ideas. He later described the time as the best summer of his life. His professional goals were still unformed. But he enjoyed being engaged in the world of ideas, and he liked writing. Perhaps he might become a social philosopher or a journalist. He was still not sure. He could easily imagine himself remaining at LSE and becoming an academic, perhaps a philosopher like Karl Popper. How wonderful it would be if he could stretch his mind as Popper had, and above all else present the world with some major insight, like Freud or Einstein. On other occasions, he dreamed of becoming a new John Maynard Keynes, of scaling the same heights as an economic thinker as the world-famous British economist. It was the beginning of George Soross striving for intellectual achievement that would be one of the major themes of his life and career. Unfortunately, Soross grades were not good enough, and his academic pretensions seemed to founder. In late 1952 and early 1953, he wrestled with a host of philosophical questions. He was particularly interested in the gap between perception and reality. At some point, he came up with what he thought was a rather remarkable intellectual discovery: I came to the conclusion that basically all our views of the world are somehow flawed or distorted, and then I concentrate on the importance of this distortion in shaping events. He began writing a short book that he entitled The Burden of Consciousness. In it, he formulated notions of open and closed societies. Dissatisfied with what he had written, he put the manuscript down. Over the next decade, he sought to rework the text but eventually abandoned the effort when he could not make head or tail of what I had written the day before. This was not a good sign, and Soros knew it. It was unlikely he would become a professor. Soros linked his failure to finish the book with his decision to forgo the study of philosophy in favor of the pursuit of money. However much Soros wanted to teach, it was clear to him that he needed to make a living-and fast. He was 22 years old, and, while he longed to make some great contribution to human knowledge, he had to eat. However, a degree in economics qualified him for little. He took whatever job he could find, the first as a handbag salesman in Blackpool, the coastal resort in northern England. He had difficulty selling. To attract customers, he had to convince people early on that he was no different from them-tough for a foreigner, conversing in heavily accented English. It bothered him also to sell wholesale goods to shopkeepers who probably did not need them. Once, he made such a sale to a small shopkeeper whose shop was cluttered with unsold merchandise. This man needs my handbags like he needs a hole in the head, Soros thought to himself. Suppressing such thoughts, he convinced himself that he could not let his personal feelings surface. He sold the man the wares, but the guilt did not leave him quickly. It could be argued that LSE was the perfect training ground for someone like Soros who would eventually take up a career as an investor. Yet, Soros had learned nothing at the school about the financial markets, barely knowing they existed. Upon graduation, he sensed there was good money to be made in investing. Needing a foot in the door of a London investment bank, he drafted a letter to all the investment banks in the city, hoping his luck would change. When Singer & Friedlander offered him a job as a trainee, he happily accepted. Here was a firm with a flourishing stock market operation. Enthralled, he became a trader specializing in gold-stock arbitrage, trying to take advantage of price discrepancies in the different markets. Even if he had not been terribly successful-and the evidence suggested that he was not-he felt comfortable in this world, discovering the thrill of buying and selling in the markets. It would have been more stimulating perhaps to have become a social philosopher or a journalist. But he needed to make a living. Here the prospects seemed good. Soros found this world more and more appealing. The general estimate of George Soross London passage has him largely a failure. Even Soros does not dispute that. He has one defender in Edgar Astaire, the London stockbroker who knew Soros then and has since become his London partner: He was never establishment. He was only 25 and 26 years old. You couldnt do anything [in that business]. Young men were not allowed to do anything. Whatever the case, in 1956, the young investment banker believed that it was time to move on. |
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