A deeply felt aversion to spending accumulated capital is an ancient part of the heritage of most societies. Although my father was a doctor, not a businessman, he taught this to me. He had lived through the bankruptcy of his own parents during the Great Depression, watching as they gradually sacrificed the inventory of their store in Passaic to keep the family in food and clothing. On one side of this store, my grandfather sold records, phonographs, and sewing machines and repaired the appliances that he sold; on the other side, my grandmother, a brilliant dress de-signer, prepared bridal gowns for customers who came from as far away as New York City. She would dress the brides on the wedding day, too, and was celebrated for her ability to make the plainest bride look beautiful. But as the depression wore on, business fell off, the customers stopped coming from New York, and the stock of goods dwindled away. There was no choice but to close the store; my grandparents’ livelihood was gone forever. Later, my father and the oldest of his four brothers made it a priority to pay their parents’ creditors in full, a decision that entailed sacrifices in itself. The lesson was handed down to me: you can spend your earned income and any interest you may have received, providing you first set aside a portion to increase your savings; but never spend the principal, your capital, except as an act of final desperation. To most of us, capital is associated with business, yet the habit of pre-serving capital and handing it on to the next generation started, I am pretty sure, not as an economic or financial practice, but as an agricultural one. In Neolithic societies, it must have begun when farming replaced hunting and gathering as the main source of food. From Anatolia to North Africa to Peru, the staple grains of wheat, rice, corn, millet, oats, barley, and rye, the legumes such as peas and beans, and other vegetables from squashes to radishes, were almost all annual crops.
Frank Albert Cotton. 9 April 1930 — 20 February 2007