Wealth & Money Quote by Harold Rosenberg

There is a trapdoor hidden under Rosenberg's genial phrasing. "What better way" sounds like common sense, the sort of line you could drop at a cocktail party to justify a consulting gig. But the sentence is built to curdle: it equates understanding with monetization, then dares you to disagree without sounding naive. The wit is in the inversion. Instead of money being a byproduct of expertise, expertise becomes the alibi for money.

Rosenberg, a mid-century critic who watched American culture professionalize itself into industries, is needling the era's faith in the marketplace as a truth machine. If you can sell it, you must "get" it; if you can't, maybe you don't. That logic flatters capitalism as an epistemology, not just an economy. The subtext is corrosive: what counts as knowledge is whatever can be packaged, pitched, and scaled. The quote doesn't simply mock greed; it mocks a culture that uses profit as a credential, turning critique into commodity and ideas into revenue streams.

Context matters here. Rosenberg wrote in a world where art, politics, psychology, even rebellion were becoming career tracks. His line anticipates the modern influencer economy and the corporate TED-ification of thought: the smoother the monetization story, the more "legitimate" the insight appears. The sting is that he isn't describing a cartoon villain. He's describing a temptation smart people feel - and a social system eager to reward it.