Wealth & Money Quote by Merton Miller

A clean, almost taunting reversal of the moral story we like to tell about wealth: origins are less important than outcomes. Coming from Merton Miller, a Nobel-winning architect of modern finance theory, the line carries the cool confidence of an economist who thinks in incentives, allocation, and measurable effects rather than biography. It pushes back against the romance of “earned” money as a special category, and it also sideswipes inherited guilt or virtue. In a world of capital markets, money is famously fungible; Miller’s phrasing borrows that neutrality and applies it to ethics.

The intent is pragmatic: judge financial behavior by what it enables - investment, consumption, charity, risk-taking - not by the mythology of its source. That’s very on-brand for the Chicago-ish, postwar belief that markets, properly understood, are systems for directing resources to their highest use. The subtext is more provocative: stop fetishizing purity tests around wealth. If you want better social outcomes, focus on rules and incentives that shape spending, taxation, and investment, not on sanctifying one person’s fortune and shaming another’s.

Still, the line courts controversy by flattening questions of power. “Where it came from” can mean exploitation, corruption, racialized exclusion, or monopolies - not just harmless luck. Miller’s elegance is part of the trick: it invites you to adopt the market’s amnesia, to treat history as irrelevant once the dollars hit the ledger. Read charitably, it’s a plea for forward-looking accountability. Read skeptically, it’s a permission slip for the rich to launder reputations through good works while leaving the machinery that produced the money intact.