by John Tamny
Woods won the tournament in a nineteen-hole playoff, but without Williams’s steady hand, he probably wouldn’t have made the playoff. Caddying is a remarkably cerebral endeavor.
Williams’s father was an accomplished golfer himself and even had the option to turn pro with the backing of Wiseman’s, a sporting goods retailer in New Zealand. He was put off by his father’s telling him “there’s no future in golf.”14 The golfing legend Arnold Palmer said that his future father-in-law “hated my ass” and skeptically asked his daughter, “You’re going to marry a golf pro?”15 He had a point. But economic evolution was at work, changing the ways in which people can earn a living. Palmer’s father-in-law might have been less skeptical today.
Steve Williams focused his energy from an early age on sports. Uninterested in school, he regularly cut class, and by the time it was legal for him to leave school altogether, he did just that. He recalls that as a child, he “had no idea . . . you could be a professional caddy,”16 but when he was paid $150 for carrying the bag for the legendary Australian golfer Peter Thomson, a light went on. Thomson thought Williams had the skill to be a professional golfer, but Williams demurred, “No, I want to be a caddy.”17 And so he became one when he dropped out of school at fifteen. By the 1980s, when he was in his twenties, disposable income and rising corporate profits had made golf a much more lucrative sport. With tournament purses on the rise, there was plenty of demand for the best caddies. Williams caddied around the world, finding that “players would often win soon after hiring me.”18
Prior to the rise of Williams, Mackay, and other top professionals, caddies were mostly known for their capacity for alcohol, not to mention their playful nicknames, such as “Silly Billy,” “Mustard,” and “Goat.” But when the pay went up, a once colorful hobby became a profession.19 Williams “wanted to caddy, not party.”20
Then came Tiger Woods. The massive wealth he generated for golf changed everything about the game. As Williams recalls,
When I started, the prize pools were quite small by today’s standards, but since Tiger Woods came along and prize money skyrocketed thanks to increased TV ratings, a professional can earn over $1 million for a win, which means the caddy can pick up $100,000 for a week’s work, or a 10 per cent cut of a player’s earnings.21
Woods hired Williams in 1999, and the pair embarked on an incredible tear of eighty-four tournament championships. Soon enough the high school dropout was a rich man, accumulating so much wealth that he started his own charitable foundation and donated $500,000 of his own money to the Starship Children’s Hospital in Auckland.22 It’s the virtuous cycle again—growth leading to higher-paying jobs and more giving.
Williams is now retired with a secure legacy as one of the greats. Hank Haney, Tiger Woods’s former golf coach, has said that Williams’s “record as a caddy is the greatest in the history of golf.” Yet if he’d been born fifteen to twenty years earlier, odds are he would not have been able to turn caddying into a lucrative profession. It took the boom times of the 1980s to make that dream a reality.
The same could be said of Haney, whose coaching profession required prosperous times for it to evolve. He recalls wanting “to be a golf instructor from the time I was a teenager.”23 As Haney was growing up, “the best-known instructors built their reputations helping average golfers.”24 It was a living, but even Harvey Penick, the legendary teacher and author of Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, never traveled with top students such as Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite.25
But once David Leadbetter corrected Nick Faldo’s swing, launching Faldo on a string of six major championships, and Haney coached Mark O’Meara into a major-winner, the profession became rather professional. As Haney recounts, it drove “more tour players to seek full-time teachers; it led more instructors to travel the tour looking for business and developing stables.”26 The term “swing guru” became common. With all the money to be made in the sport, more people are able to turn what used to be a hobby or a passion into a career. And a cerebral one at that.
Haney contends that “Golf is what the ball does.” After that, the golf teacher enters the picture. As he puts it, “the flight of the ball tells the teacher where the student’s club was at impact. From there, the teacher can make appropriate corrections to grip, posture, alignment, ball position, plan, club path, or clubface angle.”27
Tiger Woods paid Haney fifty thousand dollars per year for his services, a relatively low figure explained by the opportunities it opened up for the teacher.28 Haney already had golf schools before he taught Woods, but now he’s a global instructor. It’s his obsession, and that’s the point. Haney asserts that “anybody who is really successful at anything has an incredible passion that is basically an obsession. My mother and my sister used to complain that all I ever talked about was golf, that all I ever wanted to do was practice.”29 Absolutely. But let’s not forget that had Haney grown up in a country where economic activity was restrained, he would never have been able to pursue his passion. Work that is combined with obsession is an effect of freedom and economic growth. Always.
Once upon a time, frequent golfing was the reward for a life of “real work.” Nowadays, golf, like football, basketball, and video gaming, can be a career. This truth is one of the great endorsements of economic growth. There aren’t career options like this in Peru.
Of course, not all of us who love sports have the talent to play them at a high level. Prosperity is taking care of that too. Ivy Leaguers run baseball teams by the numbers the way that CEOs run companies. Lance Thompson, an assistant head football coach for the University of South Carolina Gamecocks, has commented to me that lucrative pay for coaches is attracting people who didn’t play football themselves. They’re signing on as unpaid assistants in the hope of learning the game and eventually coaching it.
There’s even room in sports for the non-athlete who “knows everything there is to know about sports.”30 As of May 2016, there were six investment groups dedicated to betting on games. The managers of these sports funds “are not gamblers but traders,” reports Sports Illustrated. “People who send money to them are not bettors but sophisticated, aggressive investors seeking to diversify their assets and earn a high return.”31
It’s important that such activity be legal. Sophisticated investors have savings, or have clients who want a return on savings, and sports wagering is yet another way for them to put money to work based on extraordinary knowledge among investors as to what makes a win or loss most likely. We live in a wonderful world, and it gets better all the time.
We have already learned about dog-walkers, but there’s much more to the pet business than that. Since, as the Wall Street Journal has noted, “pets enjoy new status in the social pecking order (think dogs with more Instagram followers than you),” some of them are getting to eat people food, particularly during the holidays. Flush pet owners are more likely to allow their dogs to eat as they do.32 That might not be good for Fido, as the Wall Street Journal notes:
The dog-obesity epidemic has spurred its own thriving cottage industry. There are canine diet consultants, personal weight-loss coaches, doggy fat camps, canine fitness boot camps and websites that celebrate the biggest losers. Dog fitness products monitor activity with GPS precision and plastic surgery can remove sagging skin after weight loss.33
That’s an indulgence that could take place only in the midst of prosperity, and prosperity is the greatest reward of all. For fun, let’s call it Tamny’s Law:
Laziness decreases as prosperity increases, expanding the range of work options so that every person can do the work that most accentuates his individual talents.
As the economy grows, so does disposable income, and with it the savings and spending that drive progress. This holds true even in North Korea, where, the New York Times reports, the economy “is showing surprising signs of life” in the marketplaces bubbling up around Pyongyang. “[T]here are now enough cars on its once-empty streets for some residents to make a
living washing them.”34 The arrival of those jobs in this most backward of cities perfectly illustrates the end of laziness.
Americans might not be impressed by new jobs at the car wash, but in North Korea they represent substantial progress. The important point is that these new forms of work in the Hermit Kingdom are an example of what happens in the developed world each day. For every old job technology takes away, it gives all kinds of new jobs. Prosperity is the path to the end of laziness.
If you are unhappy or unsuccessful at work, it’s not that you don’t have talent, a work ethic, or intelligence. Everyone has the capacity to work hard if his work engages and develops his talents, but that kind of job will be harder to come by if the economy isn’t growing as much as it could.
If we allow the economy to grow by letting people keep what they earn, preserving the value of the money they earn to encourage savings and investment, and allowing everyone to trade the fruits of his labor with anyone he wants without regard to national borders, will there be inequality? Without question. Massive inequality. Inequality is a feature of a growing economy, not a bug.
That makes sense if we focus our economic thinking on the individual. Is the NBA worse off because Steph Curry and LeBron James are the best players in the world? Is the NFL weaker because Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers are much better passers than Matt Schaub and Mark Sanchez? Of course not. Without inequality, the NBA and NFL would be a bore, and there would be little opportunity for anyone to make a remunerative career in either sport at any level.
Is it a disadvantage to you individually that Paul McCartney can look at an instrument and almost immediately know how to play it? Are you worse off because Taylor Swift can turn life experiences into songs that the world wants to buy and sing along to? Are the blind who rely on Google Maps worse off because Google employs numerous millionaires and billionaires?
Steve Jobs died a billionaire, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is worth tens of billions. Would you prefer that Jobs had been a layabout? Bezos, too? No, the world would be better and engaging work much more plentiful if there were hundreds of Jobses and Bezoses.
A more fundamental question is what will make you better off and happier in life, work that is least likely to elevate your talents, or work that isn’t really even work because you enjoy it so much? The answer is easy. In an economy of individuals, we’re all better off when each person gets to pursue what most amplifies his unique skills and intelligence. As individuals, we’re all in pursuit of inequality. That’s what makes us happy: doing work that elevates us as singular people.
Eric Ripert is a celebrity chef. Booming economic growth has allowed people like him to choose careers that accentuate their individual genius. In his autobiography, 32 Yolks, Ripert recalls, “Food—shopping for it, making it, eating it—was my greatest happiness.” And in describing the characters in kitchens today, he notes that the chefs have a “dangerous, rock star charisma that comes from those who are truly good at what they do.”35
Pay attention to Ripert’s words. He could be talking about you. The present doesn’t define your future. You too could exude charisma and happiness, but only if you find the work that isn’t work. It won’t necessarily be easy, but imagine the satisfaction that will be yours if you can find what inspires you and makes you a star.
The United States is already becoming a nation of happy workers, but we’ve only scratched the surface. The end of work has in a sense already arrived, but it could be so much better if our government taxed and spent more sensibly.
You’re not lazy, you’re not stupid, and you’re not bereft of talent. You, like so many others, simply suffer a capital deficit. That can change if we demand that it change. If that happens, a life of enriching work will be our reward, and a certain reward for our children.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the writing of any book, the people, places, and sightings that influence the final product are endless. This was particularly true for The End of Work, mainly because any discussion of its theme invariably led to lots of excited talk about jobs that don’t seem at all like work.
Still, a writer has to start somewhere. In this case, the idea for The End of Work came during a visit with my good friend Jeff Erber in Alexandria, Virginia, in 2015. He was generous enough to ask me to sign a number of copies of Popular Economics for his clients. As I signed, I referred to something I had recently read about the Beach Boys’ front man, Brian Wilson. Apparently, this musical genius had almost no formal musical education. As Jeff and I talked about Wilson’s otherworldly skills, I told him I’d like to turn the idea of combining work and passion into a book. While a book about the Federal Reserve came first, The End of Work was always on my mind. Big thanks to Jeff for encouraging it from the start.
I will never produce a book that doesn’t have Hall McAdams’s fingerprints all over it. For years, Hall had been discoursing on a variation of The End of Work’s theme. I’d like to think he’ll agree that I took the knowledge he imparted to me about B. F. Skinner and ran with it. Hall and his wife, Letty, can expect lots of visits in the coming years as I shake them down for more book ideas.
Bob and Ruth Reingold have encouraged me every step of the way. Bob’s experiences, especially in business, constantly inform my own thinking. As my wife, Kendall, would attest, I frequently quote Bob to explain why I’m doing something or why she should be doing something.
Ruth Westphal is a renaissance person. A successful businesswoman, the author of a bestselling book about art, and a rather generous supporter of the cause of liberty, she has never complained in my hearing about her treatment on the road to success. To Ruth, all entrepreneurs like her are discriminated against at first, and that’s the point. Ruth will always be an inspiration.
David and Karen Parker have been supporting my writing for years. Their high-profile promotion of my books has meant a great deal. David gave me the ultimate compliment years ago when he told me my writing reminded him of the late, great Warren Brookes. I’ll spend my working life trying to live up to that.
Bill Walton read an early manuscript of The End of Work and invited me up to his house to discuss it with cameras rolling. Bill’s eponymous show, with its long-form approach, allows for deep discussion of the issues. In giving important subjects their due, Bill enhances the policy discussion, and a lot more. Thanks also to his wife, Sarah, for easing some of Bill’s initial skepticism about my proposal that college football players major in football.
John Batchelor is to radio what Bill is to web-based programming. In an increasingly bombastic media environment, John continues to stage serious conversations about serious issues. His long-standing support of my work is much appreciated.
George Will’s Men at Work greatly influenced The End of Work, as anyone who reads this book will see. Not only did George write about the effect of rising disposable income on the nature of work, he also lived it. He viewed the writing of his incomparable book about baseball as the opposite of work, much as he delights in writing his columns. His encouragement of my writing over the years has meant more to me than he’ll ever know.
Scott and Vanessa Barbee knew me from the early days when I was raising money as a job so that I could pursue what doesn’t feel like work. Through the years their unceasing encouragement has meant a lot.
As he was for my first two books, Tim Reuter has been an invaluable sounding board and early editor. The great columnist Windsor Mann offered some useful examples about the explosion of jobs that don’t feel like work. I very much enjoy reading Tim’s and Windsor’s writings, and can’t wait for their books in the future.
Ed Crane made libertarianism a word and ultimately a movement. To this day, the Cato Institute that Ed co-founded employs dozens and dozens of passionate, energized scholars promoting freedom around the world. The work done at Cato that’s an expression of passion is a model for this book.
Cato’s former CEO John Allison always stressed the importance of “blood, sweat, and tears,” and
his powerful belief that hard work is the path to happiness has stuck with me. Indeed, it’s a major theme in The End of Work. People doing what reinforces their unique skills have the capacity for endless amounts of toil, and lots of fulfillment as a result. Grit isn’t enough.
Proving that assertion is the persistently impressive work in the field of hospitality performed by Jill Erber, Jennifer Ilecki, Kimberly Grant, and Anneli Werner. Each one of these women is eager to get to work every morning. I can’t wait to see what their kids achieve in a world that’s getting better all the time.
The End of Work was written while I was at Reason Foundation. Many thanks to David Nott, Julian Morris, Nick Gillespie, and Adrian Moore for their encouragement.
FreedomWorks is where I spend my days now. I remember well FreedomWorks’ president Adam Brandon’s excitement about a book that would reveal a largely unnoticed benefit of economic growth: jobs that we can’t wait to get to. Adam, Parissa Sedghi, Jason Pye, and the whole FreedomWorks staff have been unwavering in their enthusiasm for what I do. I look forward to completing many more books with them. Their belief that the story of expanding prosperity requires real-world examples is what energizes me every day.
Regnery’s Tom Spence edited Popular Economics, which means The End of Work is a reunion for us of sorts. While the mistakes are all mine, working with Tom has me certain that grammatical errors and mind-bending syntax will be kept to a minimum.
And then there’s Steve Forbes. His kindness never ceases to amaze. Here’s someone who’s been changing the global policy discussion for decades, yet he still has time to read my columns and attend my speeches. I’ll no doubt fail, but I’d like to be like Steve. My wife wishes the same. Indeed, in addition to teaching me endless amounts over the years, he’s the nicest man I know.