Robert Mercer on the Value of Cats
Bob Mercer
Robert Mercer is a very rich hedge fund manager. It seems that all the super rich men in the world are hedge fund managers. Mr Mercer is the co-CEO with another man of an organisation called Renaissance Technologies. It is said that he has earned $135 million a year for the last 10 years or so. He is probably a billionaire. He is reclusive and shy and does not talk to the media and does not give interviews. Sensible, I’d say.
However, politically he is very influential. A guy called Nick Patterson, a former senior Renaissance Technologies employee told the New Yorker that Bob Mercer has used his money very effectively with regard to influencing politics and he said that Trump wouldn’t be president if not for Mr Mercer.
That’s the background. Mr Mercer is obviously a very intelligent and thoughtful person and he has some thoughts about the value of people and domestic cats. He has some fascinating thoughts about the value of cats in fact.
According to his colleagues he has a theory about humans. He believes that they have no inherent value. He believes that a human being is only worth as much as they can earn. As he earns thousands of times more than a schoolteacher it makes him more valuable than schoolteachers.
As for people on welfare he suggests that they have no value. In fact he regards them as having a negative value. However, and here’s the clincher, he thinks that cats have value, a kind of built-in, automatic, default value because watching them provides pleasure to people.
You could go further than that in point of fact by saying that cats almost always add to the life of the cat’s owner. They provide benefits to the owner and in doing so they automatically have a value and the value is sometimes greater than that of some human beings.
Personally, I have stated that humans do not see cats as having sufficient value which is why too many unwanted cats are euthanised and which is why there are too many unwanted cats. However, even if cats are undervalued by humans in general, in an absolute sense, according to Mr Mercer, some cats have a greater value than some humans.
I agree unequivocally, of course. I might be bold enough to say that domestic cats in general have more value than most humans.
Source: thenation.com – Jane Meyer writing for the New Yorker interviewed Stephen Bannon.