Here There and Everywhere

Rabbit Holes: Paul Samuelson, John Steinbeck and Anu Garg

It’s a rainy day in Pensacola, and Florida needs rain. The reservoirs are depleted, and a drought has been declared. As I go through my e-mail, I come to Anu Garg’s A Word a Day post. (Today’s word is “incubus”). I subscribed to his daily e-mail many years ago as I studied teaching English as an additional language.

Anu Garg is profound. He chooses wonderful words, words my foreign students adored. He also includes a quote at the end of each post. Today’s quote was from John Steinbeck.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. -John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (27 Feb 1902-1968)

And it just so happens that this coming month, my book club is looking at three Steinbeck novels; Tortilla Flats, Cannery Row, and The Moon is Down.

One thing leads to another. Tortilla Flats takes place on a hill above Monterey, California, where paisanos live.

Of all the places I’ve lived, I have never loved a place the way I love Monterey, California. We lived on a hill above Monterey, above the old Del Monte Hotel, now the Naval Postgraduate School. The location sounds very suspiciously a lot like Tortilla Flats. The book bring back so many wonderful memories, particularly lying in bed at night and hearing the sounds of the sea lions barking down on the rocks, the gulls screeching, and the fog horn warning – we had a lot of fog.

And I remember Paul Samuelson, the author of the Economics textbook I used for an introductory economics class I took my freshman year in college. I never intended to like economics, but I found Samuelson readable – and even riveting. I remember one quote from his text: “Man does not always starve quietly” which had to do with his theories on economic development. Within that chapter, he also explains comparative economic deprivation.

This was a long time ago, so I am paraphrasing what I remember, and I might be getting it wrong. Samuelson talked about how once the most basic needs are met in a developing country, food, housing, clothing, jobs – you’d think everybody would be happy, but once people can stop scrabbling to survive, once they are stable, they start looking around and see someone who has more – and this is relative deprivation. The see someone with something they didn’t know they needed, and now they need this, too, to be happy.

So how does this relate to Steinbeck, and La Mesa Village, and Paul Samuelson?

My husband and I and our brand new little baby were leaving one military school and headed for schools in Monterey when he got a call from military housing in Monterey. It was such a nice, positive call when it started out, telling my husband about the lovely house we were to have with three bedrooms and a fireplace in La Mesa Village, and went on to give information about measurements and furniture and we were joyfully amazed. Our military housing had never been so fine, nor had any housing office called us and treated us so respectfully.

And suddenly everything changed. “Oh wait,” she said. “You’re not Navy?”

“No,” replied my husband, “I’m in the Army.”

“You’re not a Navy Captain?” she confirmed.

(silence as we looked in horror at one another)

“No,” my husband said shortly, the way you respond when a short-lived dream-come-true has just died.

“Oh. Well you’ll be in normal student housing then. Sir,” she added, respectfully, but all the pleasantness was gone.

And that’s where my friend Paul Samuelson, the first Economist in the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize (1970) comes in. How much do you remember from your college classes? As we accepted our student housing – not a beautiful 3 bedroom house with a fireplace, but a flat in a quad with two bedrooms and linoleom floors (no fireplace) I remembered the concept of relative deprivation. I had a roof over my head in Monterey, California, heaven on earth. I had a baby and good child care and great grocery stores; I attended the Naval Postgraduate School and the Defense Language School. On weekends, we hiked at Point Lobos, and we were happy. Happy, except for that occasional twinge of jealousy when we passed the houses higher on the hill with three bedrooms and a fireplace.

And when I felt that twinge, I smiled and thought of Paul Samuelson.

February 27, 2026 - Posted by intlxpatr | Adventure, Community, Customer Service, Family Issues, Living Conditions, Marriage, Moving, Quality of Life Issues, Random Musings, Survival | CA, Economics, John Steinbeck, La Mesa Village, Monterey, Paul Samuelson, Relative Deprivtion