What you've had, you've had

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Almost everyone I know here in Pfitsch who has money didn't get it through their own work. They inherited it, were given it, or at least had a tailwind from home. This isn't an accusation. It's simply what I see.

It also doesn't mean these people don't work. Most of them do. It's just that the work barely counts in comparison. What's already there weighs more than what you sweat for.

Bronze, not gold

In my own case I see it most clearly. I took over the farm in December 1999; I was born in 1978. No silver spoon — but bronze or silver, that much it was.

My father worked hard, that has to be said. I myself was never fond of the stable. Alone, maybe. But we managed the place well, and the farm carried us.

This business of leaving things to the children, by the way, isn't all that old. Earlier generations thought less about passing something on. Saving for your descendants is more of a later idea. There's nothing wrong with it. For me it just has no meaning — I'll get to that.

That work loses value against inherited capital isn't a peasant's proverb; it's reasonably well measured. In Germany, depending on the estimate, roughly 30 to 50 percent of private wealth comes from inheritances and gifts, not from one's own work. In Italy it looks similar. The economist Thomas Piketty boiled it down to a simple formula: as long as capital grows faster than wages, the one who only works never catches up with the one who already has.

The farm as collateral

When you have a farm like that, you usually also have options. You can mortgage it, use it as security for something else. That works — but with a closed farm there's a catch.

The closed farm is indivisible. You can't pledge one meadow and leave the rest alone. The mortgage sits on the whole thing. If it goes wrong, it isn't one piece that goes to auction but the entire holding. What generations held together as one then leaves as one.

My own tally

For a long time it went well. I only really started spending money once I had the photovoltaic systems. From then on, more went out than came in.

I sold fields. Partly for investments, partly simply for consumption. One day I ought to sit down and add up how much it was. Sometimes it bothers me, sometimes it doesn't. Rationally, it's no catastrophe.

The reason it mostly doesn't bother me is simple: I have no descendants. I see no reason to save — at least not in order to leave something behind.

A bit put aside isn't bad, granted. But I do have the closed farm, the photovoltaics, and so far the software development — which, the way things are going with AI, I suspect may soon be over. But that's another topic.

My father is in his eighties; he needs nothing more — and honestly never needed much. My sister earns about the same as I do. There's no one I'd have to hoard for.

The last shirt has no pockets, as they say here. In English: you can't take it with you. Once I'm dead I can't take it along anyway. What you've had, you've had.

Here and now — or all's well that ends well?

Around here people often say: all's well that ends well. That actually sits badly with "live in the here and now." One looks at the result at the end, the other at the moment. I can't quite reconcile the two, and I no longer try particularly hard.

For a long time I thought Warren Buffett didn't think much of deferred gratification. On closer inspection it's more nuanced. With money, Buffett is the exact opposite: save, reinvest, compound interest, the same house since 1958, four dollars for breakfast. Patience in its purest form.

But about life he did indeed preach the other thing. Taking a job you don't like just for the résumé and putting off what really matters, he compared to saving up sex for your old age. Do now what you enjoy. So I wasn't entirely wrong — just only in one half.

Heinrich Böll nailed it in 1963 in his "Anecdote Concerning the Lowering of Productivity." A tourist explains to a dozing fisherman how he could work his way up — more boats, a factory, a restaurant — until one day he could sit comfortably in the harbour and gaze out at the sea. The fisherman says: but I'm already doing that now.

Those with an idea but nothing in hand

Which brings me to what's actually unfair — if I wanted to call anything unfair. Many people would have good ideas. They just have no way to realize them. A bank can't build on nothing. No security, no loan.

This is exactly where the farm I described earlier as a risk is also an advantage. It's the security the other person doesn't have. Whoever shows up empty-handed won't get far at the bank, however good the idea.

There are a few ways out. Guarantee cooperatives, for instance — they step in with their guarantee when you lack security of your own. Here in South Tyrol they actually exist, Garfidi and Confidi Südtirol; for agricultural loans they sometimes guarantee up to a hundred percent. Not everywhere has that.

And then crowdfunding instead of a bank. Often the better idea, honestly. The only question is how much comes together. For a village inn that people hold dear, a few hundred thousand is quite possible — a village in Vorarlberg raised half a million for its tavern, one in Lower Saxony a good two hundred thousand. For an ordinary restaurant that no one would emotionally miss, three out of four campaigns fail. The big chunk, in the end, is still carried by the bank.

There's no moral in any of this, and I don't want to make one. It's an observation, nothing more. That's how it is, that's how I see it. Whoever wants to draw something from it, may. I'm writing this mainly for myself anyway — as you can tell from the fact that practically no one reads this blog.

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