Glitter Gulch - a canary in the silver mine of capitalism

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Glitter Gulch – a Symbol
The Aspen Food and Wine Festival completed its 28th year last month and I was able to witness most of them, (generally as one of the working stiffs who make sure the Gucci crowd stays clean and drunk.) Aspen and its various festivals symbolize the good and the ugly of the world. First the setting is stunning with perfectly rounded mountains surrounding a flat valley just large enough to house around 5000 locals and an equal number of visitors. Anything larger would kill the quiet ambience. There are four perfect valleys with four perfect streams that all point to the perfect little village at the center. Yes, “Perfect” is the theme. The people who live and who come to Aspen are all Perfect, with perhaps just a few subtle flaws, (more about that in a minute).

Sitting on the Perfect outdoor mall with the mathematically timed fountain at the corner of Hyman and Mill, you will see it all: beautiful people with beautiful clothes, Perfect children and Perfect dogs.

Ugly and stupid people just do not seem to show up or if they do they self-select their way back to Vail. Eventually, everyone with enough money and style visits Aspen and those who can actually afford it will return and buy something. The average house or condo runs around $1.8 million which usually just gets you a fixer upper in a lesser neighborhood and if you really want a nice roof over your head get ready to spend over $10 million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen,_Colorado.

At one time my friend Andy Stone, who was the editorial writer for the Aspen Times, suggested that the real estate boom had it all wrong. Cute little Victorians were being scraped off to build mini and mega mansions that covered the entire lot while the owners visited their second homes for only a few weeks per year. These empty edifices of wealth changed the culture of the town because every time one of the cute little houses were scraped off, it meant a school teacher, cop or several bartenders would now have to live 20 or 30 miles “down valley”. The Perfect homes sat empty 46 weeks per year and the working stiffs spent 60 minutes a day fighting the traffic and weather of Highway 82.

So Andy suggested that if the ultra rich needed a symbol to show how much money they could afford to waste, the town should create a festival of burning money. Literally! The idea is that each extremely wealthy person or family would have an entire night devoted to them where the town would block off the corner of Main and Mill, build a fire and let them burn as many $100 bills as they would like while the rest of the town cheered their magnificence.

Capitalism at its best? Yes and no. In the past 30-40 years, capitalism has led to many people getting extraordinarily wealthy, far beyond what they could possibly need in their lifetimes. Capitalism is the system that motivates smart people to build businesses, create jobs and provide for their families. On a global basis, free markets have given more people a reason to get out of bed and fight their way into the middle class than all other economic systems combined. And while smart people like Joseph Stieglitz suggest that there may be another way, for now capitalism is the only system that has a chance.

The ugly part of this story is what those same 30-40 years of extreme wealth does to the culture of a community like Aspen’s. While the locals live at the fringes, the glitterati now inhabit the heart of town. Many of the extreme wealthy feel entitled as if their bank accounts give them rights that once were reserved for Mother Nature. The Roaring Fork River that runs through town has been rechanneled in places over the years to accommodate the perfect bend for the perfect house. (There is actually a beautiful tribute to John Denver where the river got artificially reconfigured to make his park the Perfect symbol for “Rocky Mountain High”.)

40 years ago, Aspen had a few millionaires and lots of people who loved the mountains, an outdoor lifestyle and the messy creativity of a small town. Today it has many billionaires and a falling Gross National Happiness index, (Nebraska leads the US and Butan leads the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_national_happiness)

Like the canary in the Ajax Silver Mine, Aspen may be foreshadowing the next level of capitalism and it does not look good for most of the world. Will the very, very few occupy the heart of the world while the rest of us get moved further and further “down valley”?

In the end, the mountains, valleys, streams, rocks and incredible wilderness areas that surround Aspen have not changed a bit since the Ute Indians summered here. Hunter Creek is just as beautiful now as it was when the first miners crossed Independence Pass in 1876 to discover a bit of gold and a whole lot of silver. The Maroon Bells are spectacular today just as they were in 1946 when Friedl Pfeifer and Walter Paepcke conspired to build The Aspen Ski Company and the Goethe Festival, (which morphed into the Aspen Music Festival).

And even if all the money in Aspen gets burned on Main Street and the glitterati lose their private jets the Maroon Bells will still be spectacular.

Life is a gradual escape from ignorance

Our job is to get a bit less ignorant every day. I am inspired by the intellectually curious; people who work hard to understand the why's, what's and how's of the world. I am inspired by those who believe that thinking and reflection should be a part of a daily routine. I am inspired by those who study history including the history of business. Whether you like it or not, commerce has been the driving force for change in the world and those who fail to study it will fail to be a part of it.

I just returned from a University of Denver sponsored trip to Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. At almost every meeting we had in Argentina, we heard, that "100 years ago Argentina was the fifth largest global economy". (You know an organization is in trouble when they spend more time reminiscing about the past than planning for the future.) For the past 100 years, a graph of the Argentinean economy would look like a picture of the Andes, up down, up down, and repeat.


The current president of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner, recently nationalized $36 billion dollars worth of private retirement savings, and the citizens of Chile just accepted it without little resistance. (How would you react if Obama just took your 401 K?) As we talked to a number of local business people, the general reaction to business investment was just “wait two years and she will be gone”. The problem is that it has been “wait two years” for the past 100. As an outsider, it seems that a cultural acceptance of corruption is a country killer.


On the other side of the Andes, Chile is a strong and sustaining economy that stopped the radical economic swings when President Allende was removed from office in 1973. (This was when Pinochet staged the military coupe. It was a very bad way to change the direction of a government and started 15 or so years of a military dictatorship.) The good part of history is when Pinochet decided to legitimize his regime with a plebiscite and was promptly voted out of office. (October 1988)

Chile is full of optimism, personal opportunity and people with a purpose. Argentina is a country of vast natural resources, a wait and see attitude, and an acceptance of corruption.

The lesson for me is that organizations and countries need high standards and a belief that they can control their own destiny.