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It’s been some time since the incident that made me think about writing this article. Or rather, made me question the conventional wisdom to ‘never leave money on the table’. But I’m finally getting around to it. It was an exchange with a young man, who bought my used hangers on Facebook Marketplace.
“Oh, I haven’t got my purse with me.” Indeed, what with carrying down more than a hundred black plastic hangers, I had forgotten to bring my purse down the elevator with me. So I could not give change for his RM50 note. Besides, I’d become used to QR code transactions in this type of exchange – the younger folks seem to never carry wallets anymore. Except this one.
The young man took it well – almost as if he expected it. Instead, he asked me to keep the change, speaking with a quiet dignity. The price I asked was too little, he said.
A matter of perspective.
And really, I did offer a bargain, from his perspective. A pair of newlyweds, newly arrived in the Klang Valley and just starting out, had to watch their money. The hangers were plastic – but black makes everything classier. They were in great condition, and most of them match. The nice wooden hangers would have to wait.
But from another point of view, it was not a loss for me either. The hangers were free ones from when I used to send out laundry to be ironed. So I could afford to be generous.
Conscious of the fact that we were standing in the shadow of a condo in the desirable KLCC area, I told him that I was only now getting the nice wooden hangers myself. That I, too, made do with these plastic hangers for 20 years, to assure him that they were also good enough for me, when I couldn’t yet afford better.
There are currencies other than money.
As he loaded the bags of hangers into his little car, I contemplated popping upstairs to get his change anyway. After all, I could afford it more than he. But then, in a rare moment of social intelligence, I recalled glimpsing his wallet when he took out the note. There were no other notes. But crucially, there were not even any cards or anything else. It was completely empty.
He deliberately came without the ability to give me exact change. For all I knew, he normally doesn’t carry a wallet either. He meant to pay me RM50, and truthfully say he could not give the exact amount.
Ah, I see. He was deliberately leaving money on the table. He felt the hangers were worth more, and something in his personal character could not allow him to take all the money off the table. Not even after arriving at the location. This kid has honour, I thought.
So instead of giving him his change, I gave him his dignity, and took the money. As I walked away, he called his wife to confirm the transaction. It sounded like they couldn’t quite believe getting such a bargain.
We both left money on the table. It broke the conventional rule of what we were ‘supposed’ to do. And yet, three people were happier than if we didn’t.
Never leave money on the table?
I grew up in the 90s, and began working in the 2000s. It was not quite the ‘Reaganite’ era. But it was the era when such worldviews had become default in much of the world. Privatisation is efficient. Gordon Gecko said “greed is good”. And of course, if you’re smart, you ‘never leave money on the table’.
Corporate training courses taught you these things, even when they don’t necessarily teach you that you should actually do it. Even courses that teach 3D negotiation, favouring win-win outcomes, still teach the win-lose form as the contrasting default.
These were such fantastic ideas in the business space, that inevitably people thought everything should be done by this logic. Why not deliver public services through privatisation as well, and drive costs down through competition? And why not corporatise it on the stock market, while we’re at it? After all, it was more efficient that way!
So, just like we did for ecological services, societal services gradually became monetised, and gradually viewed from a market worldview. And isn’t it easier when you value everything with the same currency, i.e.; money? You can optimise and maximise and always be able to tell if you’re leaving money on the table… right?
Maybe there are other things on the table besides money.
Now, don’t get me wrong. It was not difficult for me to see the value of never leaving money on the table. Optimisation comes naturally to me. Taking LEAN Six Sigma training merely taught me that apparently most people did not already know to work that way.
But I also knew that the money on the table isn’t the only value on it. I learned from my first job, that deliberately leaving some of it, means your contractor is better able to do you a solid and absorb variations that inevitably happen during a project – and would actually be willing to. In multi-year contract relationships, sometimes you’re gonna ask your partner to do something hard or risky, and they need to already trust you to say yes. Usually, if such a time comes, this trust is worth more than whatever it was you left on the table.
The time I took to explore the world outside my corporate bubble only reinforced this lesson. In fact, it taught me that non-money currencies are the more common, and may be more fundamental, than money. The strength of your word, for example, is a store of value, and so is the respect others have for you. Conversely, the respect and magnanimity you showed others, is part of a store of value called reputation.
Time is a currency, and so is knowledge. And sometimes, you’re not even part of the transaction. Sometimes, the transaction is between a devotee and his deity; you’re just the beneficiary of – essentially – an act of worship.
Learning what to do when you have enough money.
These other forms of value weighed more heavily on my mind, once I reached my FIRE* goal.
Of course, I’ve always valued most of these. Coming from a line of educated women, I was raised to respect knowledge and those who teach it, not to mention other core values.
However, I found myself reflecting on it a lot more after I resigned from my job. Specifically, after finding myself turning down an opportunity with considerable money and professional respect, when I felt that if I took the money on the table, I’d have to wager some integrity on it in exchange. No longer in need of the money, I found myself unable. I think I’m still a little surprised at myself (and relieved).
But then, I prepared for this, after observing my parents’ generation, who were the first to be upwardly mobile en masse, yet including some who were originally nobility that became poor during the Japanese invasion. I learned that when your family had always been poor, you tend to have the same mindset even after you get rich.
Even good examples typically just involve ad hoc donations to charity – which is just drawing down the money you earned, rather than a more structural, leveraged, or personally unique impact.
Relatively benign negative examples are the miser, afraid of spending anything – or the opposite, who splurge easily on luxury things yet reluctant to donate small amounts. In both is a lack of confidence that the wealth will last for long.
Why it matters for sustainability.
When a country starts at the bottom, its sustainability problems are simpler. As it gets more developed, the kinds of sustainability problems it faces change from poverty and hunger, to inequality.
Society increases in complexity with increasing economic complexity. So the distribution of economic benefits becomes more difficult. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep inequality from widening, which worsens social cohesion and trust.
But countries that are poor financially may not be poor in other, non-material “currencies” – such as trust. A healthy society requires the circulation of these currencies also, in a kind of moral economy or a social contract. And a high trust society often means that you deliberately leave money on the table, or even slide it back across the table, like the young man who took my hangers did.
As I reflect on the long-lived, stable civilisations of the past, it occurs to me that they all had cultural expectations from the rich, in spite of their worldview differences. A people with culture expects the rich to leave money on the table, and take social currencies instead. Respect, perhaps – or fame and public recognition.
I once saw this solely through an altruism lens. But I now wonder if this is because societies whose wealthy people increasingly take only money from the table, simply didn’t survive long enough to be a civilisation. The guillotines will come out.
If so, it seems like a good idea to proactively teach people not just how to get rich, but also how you should behave after.
It seems like voluntarily doing so through culture is more efficient than the… natural selection route.
Notes:
* FIRE: Acronym for the term Financial Independence, Retire Early.
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