Mountains to Molehills

“Men trip not on mountains, they trip on molehills” – Chinese proverb

A dear friend in response to my last musing had requested that I put some thoughts or research a bit more on the idea of redistribution of wealth.  I may not be the right person to talk about it because in the first place I do not have that kind of wealth that people would focus on these days; secondly, it is not what keeps me awake at night since I don’t have that much to redistribute to begin with. Economists have spent copious amounts of time on it already and when ten of them are put in a room we can and will get ten different answers.  However, what I lack in advanced degrees in economics is more than made up for with an idle mind that tries to imagine what it would be like to be wealthy.  I then need to share that in some arbitrary manner.  Imagination, which is probably the only form of entertainment one gets for free these days, is what the idle mind will engage in.

Let’s imagine a landscape where mountains make up two per cent of the area and the rest is all molehills.  Inhabitants of molehills complain that the top of the mountains gets the rain first and seem to be getting a lot more of it; furthermore, it was pointed out that the mountain inhabitants seem to be the only ones to touch the clouds and they’re so much closer to the stars and the moon.  The up-landers as they’re called by the low-landers are enjoying more than a fair share of the resources.

One day the lowlanders decided that the mountains should be torn down despite the fervent entreaties from the up-landers who say that much of the rain that falls on them goes all the way down as runoffs through the mountainsides anyway.  The mountaintops can retain only so much.  Nevertheless, the lowlanders won and the mountains were leveled to the height of molehills.

The landscape changed and so did the weather patterns.  Wind streams that carry cold and moist air flow through in the upper atmosphere and with no mountains to impede the flow or trap the moisture or cause the clouds to swirl and get heavy, the rain stopped coming.  The land below turned from lush to barren landscape. Now we know why there are mountains and yet though they make up only a small percentage of the surface of the earth we cannot and should not even be thinking of leveling them down.

Another metaphor is probably more fitting.  It took tremendous geological forces, upheavals of unimaginable energy from underground, and eons of time to create those mountains.  A business is built up the same way by people who chose to sacrifice their own personal lives and often to the detriment of their family well-being by spending the bulk of their energy and time to build up a molehill.  Sometimes they get lucky and  a mountain rises up.  Now you know how a classic cliché is turned upside down to a better light.

Let me stay with the subject of mountains for a while.  Physicists and geologists who have as much ample idle time as I do but with more sophisticated technical clout have calculated and declared that there is only so much height earth mountains can go up.  Their own weight (gravity) alone will limit their growth as the base can only take so much before giving way and there is wind and water erosion and the occasional earthquakes and volcanic activity as the other contributing factors.  Businesses can only increase in size up to a certain point because forces like competition, regulations, taxes and demographics act just like gravity and the erosive powers of wind and water.  In the U.S., antitrust laws prohibit monopolies and in most cases competition and regulations provide the best check and balance to the benefit of consumers.  Still we worry that certain mountains are way too high.

Billionaires do not keep their wealth under mattresses.  Much of their money does run off the sides of the mountains.  If it’s not re-invested it goes to acquiring yachts and Lamborghinis.  Let’s think for a minute about the number of people ship builders and car companies employ.  Let’s go back to the 1400s when Columbus embarked on what seemed like a frivolous ocean cruise financed by Queen Isabella.  The “Maria”, “Pinta” and the other ships whose names escape me were built by several hundred people whose livelihood, if not for the entrepreneurial spirit of the early seafarers, would have been relegated to building dugout canoes as their ancestors have done.  Today ordinary wage earners get to enjoy luxurious vacation trips even if only for a week because investors put money on shipyards to build super cruise ships.  Otherwise, we would still be paddling canoes through rivers and streams.  Not that there's anything wrong with that but we get better food and accommodation when we cruise and see more places in a week than Lewis and Clark saw in half a year.

Where there are mountains, small outfitters sell mountain climbing equipment and apparel.  Tourists come to offer their 'oohs and aahs', take pictures with their fancy digital cameras and boost the local economy at hotels, restaurants and the ubiquitous tourist traps.  Would they have come if there were only molehills around?

Let’s leave the mountains alone and let some molehills grow and aspire to become one.  The garage where Jobs and Wozniak started Apple, or the shack where Hewlett and Packard came up with their first scientific calculators, were molehills that went sky high.  Sam Walton started with a few molehills that went nowhere until Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club took hold.  Let’s not forget however that only a few mountains will rise from molehills, just as there could only be a handful of NBA stars or major league baseball players from thousands of aspirants.  But we do not spread Michael Jordan’s points among his team mates, do we?

This was obviously not Econ 501 in-depth analysis and I may have exceeded the legal amount of metaphors in a single note but I hope the visual images of molehills against the backdrop of “purple mountains majesty” are clear enough.