Bacon's Essays

In 1621 the Lord Chancellor of England was convicted of taking bribes, fined a ruinous sum, and banished from office. Four years later he published the final edition of his Essays, including several of the shrewdest pages ever written on money. Francis Bacon wrote about wealth the way a man writes about the cliff he has already fallen off.

The Essays are fifty-eight short pieces on power, friendship, ambition, health, gardens, and gold, each one a few pages of compressed judgment. Bacon revised them across three decades, from a slim volume in 1597 to the full 1625 edition, and they only got sharper. They are the ancestor of every aphoristic wisdom book on the modern shelf, from Munger's speeches to the daily stoicism industry. The difference is that Bacon was writing from the top of the greasy pole, and then from the bottom of it.

For this library, five essays matter most. Together they form the closest thing the tradition has to a risk manual for family wealth.

Of Riches: wealth as baggage

Bacon's central image is that riches are the baggage of virtue. Baggage in the military sense: the supply train an army cannot fight without, but which slows the march and gets captured first. Wealth is necessary and it is a drag, both at once, and the skill lies in carrying enough without being carried by it.

The essay is bracingly unsentimental about how fortunes are made. Bacon runs through the means of getting, from the plow to trade to inheritance, and rates them by how much they cost the soul. Great and sudden fortunes, he notes, are rarely got by plainly honest means. The old families would have nodded along. Their whole model was the slow fortune: less brilliant, more durable, easier to keep clean.

Of Expense: the original savings rate

The shortest essay in the money cluster contains the most quotable arithmetic in it. A man who wants merely to hold his position, Bacon advises, should keep ordinary spending to half his receipts. A man who wants to grow rich should keep it to a third.

There it is: the fifty percent savings rate, prescribed in 1625. Every modern debate about lifestyle creep, every financial independence spreadsheet, every quiet family that lived on the income of the income, is a footnote to two sentences. Bacon adds the operational detail too: watch the small repeated costs over the grand occasional ones, and if you must be extravagant somewhere, be frugal somewhere else to pay for it.

Of Usury: the bridge position

Elsewhere on this shelf, Aristotle calls lending at interest unnatural and Aquinas calls it unjust. Bacon, the working statesman, takes the third position: lending is inevitable, so the question is not whether to permit it but how to keep its teeth ground down.

His essay is startlingly modern. He inventories the harms of credit, then the benefits, then proposes a regulatory scheme: a low general rate for ordinary lending and a higher licensed rate for merchant finance. Interest rate tiers, in 1625. Whatever you think about debt, Bacon gives you the full argument in five pages: the moral condemnation he inherited, the commercial reality he governed, and a workable compromise between them. It is the hinge between the medieval counting house and the modern one.

Of Followers and Friends: network hygiene

Bacon treats the people around a great man as balance sheet items, and he is unsparing about it. Costly followers drain the estate. Flatterers corrupt the information supply. Factious followers pull you into quarrels that were never yours. The essay is a short course in auditing your circle, written by a man whose own circle helped destroy him.

Pair it with his essay Of Great Place, on the servitude of power, and you get the confession hidden inside the counsel. Bacon knew the cost of every rung on the ladder because he had paid it.

Why it sits on this shelf

The Counting House shelf holds the moral philosophy of profit, and Bacon is its pragmatist. He does not ask what wealth is for in the abstract. He asks how it is gotten, kept, spent, lent, and lost, and he answers as an administrator of kingdoms and a survivor of his own ruin. If Aristotle and Aquinas set the moral boundaries, Bacon drew the operating manual inside them.

One caution, the same one that applies across this tradition: Bacon's view of people is instrumental to the point of chill. He praises virtue and teaches calculation in the same breath. Read him as you read Machiavelli, for the diagnosis rather than the prescription, and his coldness becomes clarity.

How to actually read it

One essay per evening. They are dense, and reading them in bulk turns wisdom into wallpaper.

• The money flight: Of Riches, Of Expense, Of Usury, then Of Followers and Friends. Under thirty minutes total, and you will think about them for weeks.
• The second flight: Of Great Place, Of Negotiating, Of Fortune, Of Ambition. The career counterpart to the money essays.
• For pleasure: Of Gardens and Of Studies, to see what the same mind does when it relaxes.