![]() Impatience becomes dangerous only when it parts company with reality. There's nothing wrong with the vast majority of ordinary people being impatient to have better houses. Without impatience bankers would just be static strongboxes for storing cash. Some of the most useful inventions are symbols of furious impatience: The zipper grew out of an impatience with buttons safety razors, with the old cutthroat razors. Thomas Edison was a notoriously impatient man, as was James Watt, who greatly improved the Newcomen steam engine by adding a separate condenser. Economic progress is created when vigorous impatience is combined with existing ways of doing things.Īll periods of rapid advance, such as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, have been marked by impatience. If all people were models of patience, content with their lot and not eager for change, we'd still be living in primitive hunter-gatherer societies. The desire to get on, not slowly and patiently, but to get whatever it is one wants and have it now is a form of human eagerness that creates dynamism. Impatience is an interesting case in point. All powerful human impulses are constructive as well as destructive. The consequences of this behavior could be catastrophic.Ĭertainly not. Many of the world's top bankers lead highly competitive, high-spending lifestyles and are tempted to increase turnover-thus increasing their salaries and bonuses-through generous lending. Unfortunately, impatience coincided with excessive greed on the part of a number of bankers. The borrowers would then have had to contain their impatience until their savings accumulated to a level at which they could borrow prudently. As a rule, this would not be a problem banks and other loan agencies should simply have turned down such borrowers. They thus sought to borrow collectively immense sums that they could not hope to repay for many years-and, in some cases, ever. Impatience led many thousands of ordinary people to seek to acquire properties of much higher value than their savings justified. The state of the present market is the consequence of undue impatience combined with excessive greed. The accompanying inscription "Aux quatre Vents," referring to the house At the Four Winds, through which many of Bruegel's images were published, is found only on prints issued after 1570.All the same, markets are determined by moral strengths and weaknesses, and it is useful to identify what those are at each major episode. Bruegel" in the lower right corner, the engraving was probably not published until several years after the artist's death in 1569. The concerns for the dangers of acquisitiveness and avarice expressed here had deep resonance in Antwerp, the bustling mercantile capital of Northern Europe where Bruegel was active for most of his career. The image seems to suggest that humanity's lust for money is responsible for armed conflict. ![]() The Dutch verses inscribed in the lower margin inform us that "It's all for money and goods, this fighting and quarreling." According to the Latin portion of the inscription, the banner with the "savage grappling hook" in the right background exemplifies greed, the vice at the root of all this trouble. Strongboxes, piggy banks, money bags, barrels of coins, and treasure chests-most of them heavily armed with swords, knives, and lances-attack each other in a ferocious display of chaotic, all-out warfare. The unprecedented, and somewhat enigmatic, iconography of this image derives from the fertile imagination of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who executed the original drawing after which this was engraved. ![]()
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