Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Two American Obsessions

Americans seems to have endless appetites for books on making money and on losing weight.
Despite all the advice dispensed by diet gurus selling get-thin-quick products and hucksters selling get-rich-quick schemes, both states are hard to come by.
Apparently one way to get rich quick is to sell diet products. I don't know if the converse is true, that if you make a lot of money you get thin. Oprah does seem to work at it....
But the big secret of accumulating wealth is SPEND LESS THAN YOU EARN.
Likewise the big secret of weight loss is EAT LESS AND/OR EXERCISE MORE. But people prefer complicated to simple, apparently.
And the answer to the classic Babe Paley observation that you can't be too rich or too thin? Wrong. Some people are so rich they have no idea what to do with their money, and as any mother of an adolescent girl will tell you, being too thin is a serious disease.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you earn minimum wage, spending less than you earn is a real challenge. If you have student loan debt, it seems practically impossible.