To Understand Sam Bankman-Fried, Read Dickens's "Hard Times"

He's part Thomas Gradgrind, Jr. ("the whelp") and part "the colourless boy, Bitzer."

Robert Friedrich Stieler (1847-1908).

The War on Poverty was born, famously, after President John F. Kennedy read Michael Harrington’s The Other America (or at least Dwight Macdonald’s authoritative review of same in The New Yorker). Harrington was a democratic socialist and writer, quite a good one, who is credited with coining the term “neoconservative” to describe his onetime Trotskyite comrades. In 1984 he published a sequel of sorts to The Other America titled The New American Poverty in which he identified the Reagan administration’s conservative domestic policymakers as “the new Gradgrinds.” This was an allusion to Thomas Gradgrind, a character in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) who is meant to lampoon the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and especially Mill’s father, James Mill. Hard Times is Dickens’s most overtly political novel, and it’s a favorite among lefties (even though it expresses inordinate suspicion of trade unions; well, nobody’s perfect).

In my latest New Republic essay, I suggest that a newer Gradgrind would Joseph Bankman, father to Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman is a liberal, not a conservative, but he is more explicitly a utilitarian, and he imparted that to Sam, who ended up embracing a variety of utilitarianism called Effective Altruism. I see Sam Bankman as a sort of amalgam of Gradgrind’s son Tom (“the whelp”) and Gradgrind’s star pupil, “the colorless boy, Bitzer.” You can read my piece here.