The Root of All Evil?

Money was also a theme in all the authors’ segments: the huge amount that the golf habit consumes; the fact that nerds became somewhat fashionable in the 1980s when the economy shifted in ways that put many of them on top; Hawley’s feeling that fame and money are the true American obsessions; and Jennings’ discussion of how the commercialization of country music inevitably “sanded it down.”

Once you get beyond having what we might refer to as a solid middle class life, does money make things better, or does it degrade things, as in the case of the authentic quality of country music?