Money has long been on the mind of Kevin J. Delaney.
Growing up in a large, working-class family, the Temple University sociologist remembers watching at breakfast as his father made stacks of the one-dollar bills that were his income—all tips—from a side job at night parking cars. Each stack would represent an obligation, a sister’s school clothes perhaps, or an appliance repair. From an early age, Delaney says, he understood the sway money held in his family, the anxieties it produced.
Most of us see our social class and childhood as influences on how we view finances. What is less acknowledged, and less studied, says the scholar, is how the daily routines and economic structures of different jobs produce distinct ways of thinking and talking about money. Delaney’s goal for what he terms a “cognitive economic sociology of money and work” is to uncover the elements of cognition and emotion at play in a given job, as well as the “cognitive dilemmas” that arise from specific work circumstances.
At the start of Money at Work: On the Job With Priests, Poker Players, and Hedge Fund Traders (New York University Press), Delaney describes how he found his own views of money transformed in a succession of jobs. For example, during his time as a highway-toll collector he was amazed at how often his co-workers talked about schemes and scams for stealing some of the cash that surrounded them. However, they balanced that speculation with tales of collectors who had tried and were caught. “The anonymity of the transactions we engaged in over and over again also contributed to a sense of alienation that we felt toward the money we collected,” he writes. Toll takers’ storytelling and scheme-hatching was a way to manage the tension, while the cautionary tales served as a kind of policing and socialization.
When Delaney was a bartender, another cash-heavy job, money had a distinctly freewheeling nature. The author and his co-workers, obsessed with maximizing tips, would in turn tip lavishly as they went out after hours carrying lots of cash. Money, he recalls, “seemed highly discretionary, very immediate, and easy to spend.”
Though an academic workplace is less colorful, still Delaney notes changes in his view of money as he merged his research and teaching with administrative responsibilities as both a professor and vice dean for faculty affairs at Temple’s College of Liberal Arts.
In the new book, the priests, poker players, and hedge-fund traders, who seem assembled in the subtitle for a joke, are joined by other occupations Delaney studied in three pairings: commission salespeople and sports and entertainment agents; fund raisers and grant givers; and finally investment advisers and debt counselors.
The author opens with a coupling of the most flamboyant of the jobs covered: professional poker players and hedge-fund traders. Members of the two occupations have much in common in terms of risk taking. For example, they have a knack for following through where the rest of us might choke. To be successful, Delaney argues, poker players and hedge-fund traders both need to make wagers based solely on the odds in front of them and any advantages they feel they hold. “They cannot be rattled by what has happened in any of the preceding hands or trades” or by the amounts of money at risk.
This requires a certain dissociation from the money and what it means in practical terms. “The chips are just our way of keeping score,” the sociologist was told repeatedly in varying ways by poker players. Bravado? Sure. But also a cognitive trick. You cannot think of what the money would buy, one player told Delaney. “Because it buys a lot.” If you thought along those lines, she added, “you would not take risks and do what you need to be a winning player.”
For both poker players and hedge-fund traders, dissociative and other techniques help manage the pressure. But “there are still plenty of opportunities to hesitate, flinch, back off, make foolhardy trades or bets, or unknowingly give off a ‘tell’ that tips off your opponent to your trading position or poker hand,” writes Delaney. The continuous effort to balance risk and caution is exhausting, he says, and may be a reason that poker players and traders often talk about how long they can keep going. Is it wishful thinking when hedge-fund traders ask each other, “What’s your number to walk away?” That seeming money question intrigues the sociologist, not least because a concrete answer is hard to find. Hedge-fund traders sometimes chuckle, Delaney writes, and then say something like: “But most never really do walk away.”
At the same time poker players work to discipline their own emotions, they must read the emotional cues of other players. In a similar way, many traders use experience and emotional intuition side by side with rational calculation, says the author. The “endemic tension” between rationality and calculability, on the one hand, and emotion and intuition on the other, is part of what makes these professions appeal to those who “enjoy challenge, risk, and the adrenaline rush of uncertainty,” Delaney writes. The tension also helps create the two occupations’ distinctive money culture.
Later in the book, in a realm far from Wall Street trading floors and Las Vegas lounges, Delaney’s interview subjects include a variety of Christian clergy as well as rabbis and imams. All, he says, subscribed in some form to the notion that money belongs to God with human beings the temporary custodians. As such, he writes, “money represents qualitative meaning even more than it represents a quantitative measure of universal exchange value.” Frequently, he says, clerical talk of money got around to death—not as in the wages of sin, but as in you can’t take it with you, so it might as well do some good. Taking the long view, clergy talk about money’s role in a person’s entire lifetime, Delaney says, and about how people’s use of God’s money might affect their afterlife. For clergy, a kind of alchemy occurs with donations from the faithful. Because of the qualitative meaning clergy ascribe to money as God’s wealth in human stewardship, they can assert that less money is more money in a kind of cognitive twist in which meaning tops mass.
