The Second Cow

Howard Stein told jokes the way other professors assigned books. He ran the playwriting program at Columbia and chaired its Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies, after teaching stops at Iowa and Yale. By the time I knew him he had trained a generation of American playwrights, and he still worked a classroom like a man with one good story left. The story he returned to was the one about the two farmers. He told it flat, without performance, the way you tell something you believe is true.

Two farmer friends are talking in a field. One farmer says to the other, so, we all gotta share to get along these days. The second farmer nods. Yep. So, if you had a million dollars, you’d give me half? The first farmer nods. Sure. Of course, without question. And if you had four houses, you’d give me two? Without question. So, if you had two cows, you’d give me one? The first farmer shakes his finger at his friend and shouts, hey, that’s not fair. You know I have two cows.

Stein was born in 1922. He died in October of 2012, and the joke outlived him the way jokes do. I have carried it for three decades and change. Somewhere along the way I stopped hearing it as a joke about farmers.

The hinge of the joke is one word: know. The escalation does the work. A million dollars is imaginary. Four houses are imaginary. The first farmer gives away halves of both with a smile, because the giving costs him nothing he can touch. Then the ask reaches the two cows standing in the actual field, and the man of principle turns into a man with a pointed finger. Everything before the cows is subjunctive. If you had, you would give. The subjunctive is the cheapest room in the English language, and a man can furnish it with anything he likes.

The first farmer deserves his due. Sharing is real, and the record of any farming county proves it. Neighbors still finish a harvest for a family with a man in the hospital. Church basements still feed whoever walks in. The joke never denies generosity. The joke prices it. Half of everything is an easy pledge when everything is hypothetical. The pledge gets expensive where the fence line gets real.

The parable left a paper trail. The Wall Street Journal printed a version in its Pepper and Salt column on November 15, 1938. Under socialism, you give one cow to your neighbor. Under communism, you give both cows to the government, which gives you back some of the milk. A Chicago Daily Tribune column that December traced the form to an address by a lawyer named Silas Strawn at the Economic Club of Chicago on November 29, 1935. Pat Paulsen built a monologue on it for the Smothers Brothers in the late 1960s and liked it well enough to carry it onto a comedy album and into his satirical run for president. Every ideology in the parade keeps a cow, and every teller assumes his own herd is exempt. Stein was sixteen when the Journal printed the parable. He grew up in that America. His version improves the old form in one move. The old parable blames the isms. Stein’s telling blames the man. No government enters his field. The failure happens between two men shaking hands.

Gallup asked the question in 2011. How much income would make you rich? The median answer was $150,000 a year. Then Gallup sorted the answers by the respondent’s own income. People earning below the national median said rich began at $100,000. Those at or above the median said $200,000. Respondents earning $75,000 or more said $250,000. The question has a twin, and its answer floats the same way. Asked how much savings would make them rich, Americans gave a median of $1 million, the same figure Gallup found in 2003, when the income threshold came in at $120,000. Rich is the next rung up, every time, for everybody. The poll never finds a respondent who locates rich at his own address. My own answer floats too. Tax the rich is the million-dollar promise of American politics. It polls beautifully because the rich man is always the neighbor. The bracket under discussion sits one rung above the voter’s own.

The laboratory has weighed the same instinct. In 2014, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a study by Kuziemko, Buell, Reich, and Norton with a title that could be the joke’s subtitle: Last-Place Aversion. In their money-transfer games, players gave to the person ranked below them about 75 percent of the time. Generosity held above 80 percent through the top half of the ladder. Then it collapsed below 60 percent for the player in second-to-last place. That player gave upward instead, to the person one rank above, at the highest rate of anyone. The same subjects chose gambles that might move them out of last place and rejected identical gambles from every safer rank. The surveys agreed. Workers earning just above the minimum wage opposed raising it more than anyone else measured. The people with the least to spare, and the most to gain from solidarity, were the stingiest toward the person one step down. The man one step below stops looking like a neighbor. He looks like a threat to rank. Hand the second farmer one cow of his own and his finger comes out like his friend’s.

The joke stars farmers, and the farm record is public. Farm country talks free markets at the co-op and self-reliance at the coffee shop, and much of the talk is honest. The tariffs of 2018 were not the farmers’ doing. The retaliation hit their exports, and the damage was real. Then the payments arrived. The Government Accountability Office totals the Market Facilitation Program at $23 billion across 2018 and 2019, more than all other USDA direct payment subsidies combined over its run. The GAO found the 2019 payments overshot the estimated trade damage for corn alone by roughly $3 billion. The department’s own auditors later flagged more than $800 million paid out improperly. At least $163 million went to farms and individuals reporting incomes above $900,000 a year. Less than 4 percent reached historically underserved farmers. The money moved through the Commodity Credit Corporation, the department’s own credit line, with no vote of Congress. Johnathan Coppess, an agricultural policy expert at the University of Illinois, told investigators the program taught farmers to expect payment whenever the road gets bumpy. The same map that votes against handouts deposited the largest handout the department had ever written, and no pointed finger appeared in any field. The check was the cow.

The environmental movement keeps its own herd. In November 2001, developers proposed Cape Wind: 130 turbines, 417 feet tall, on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound, about five miles off the Cape. The project promised roughly three quarters of the average electricity for Cape Cod and the islands. A 2005 survey found 81 percent of Massachusetts adults in favor, and 61 percent of Cape Cod residents. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council and one of the most credentialed environmentalists in the country. On December 16, 2005, he took the New York Times op-ed page to say so. “As an environmentalist,” he began, “I support wind power.” Then he listed his objections: the noise, the flashing lights, the views from sixteen historic sites and lighthouses. Nantucket Sound, he wrote, was his Yosemite. Some of the objections had substance. Industrializing a sound is a real cost, and the fishing families said so first. The Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port overlooks that same water, and the turbines would have stood on the family’s horizon. His uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy, carried the fight to the Senate floor the following spring. When the younger Kennedy sailed with the opposition, Greenpeace pulled a boat alongside with a banner: “Bobby, you’re on the wrong boat.” A rival billionaire, William Koch, bankrolled the opposition alliance, which raised $40 million, and he summarized the strategy afterward in three words: delay, delay, delay. Cape Wind spent a decade and a half being delayed to death, and it was never built. Wind power was the million dollars here, and the view was the cow.

The wartime version is the hardest to read. Dick Cheney collected five draft deferments during Vietnam. The first four were for study. The fifth, issued in January 1966, was for a registrant with child. Timothy Noah of Slate later did the arithmetic: Elizabeth Cheney was born July 28, 1966, nine months and two days after the Selective Service revoked its protection for childless husbands. Deferments were legal, and millions of men took them. The Los Angeles Times checked his record against the era in 2004 and found the deferments unremarkable. Cheney himself told George C. Wilson of the Washington Post, “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.” As Secretary of Defense he prosecuted the Gulf War. As Vice President he made the public case for invading Iraq, and other people’s children did the fighting. He never served.

The pandemic version came with a tasting menu. On November 6, 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom of California sat down to dinner at the French Laundry in Yountville. A political adviser’s fiftieth birthday. A dozen guests, from at least three households, at one of the most expensive restaurants in America. His own administration was at that hour urging Californians to skip Thanksgiving and to avoid gatherings across households. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the dinner, and the photographs did the rest. Newsom apologized on November 16. “I made a bad mistake,” he said. “I need to preach and practice, not just preach.” Three years later, on Fox News, he said it plainer. “It wasn’t illegal, it was wrong,” he said. “I totally violated the spirit of what I was preaching.” He admitted it, on camera, twice. Most of the people in this essay never did.

The six ledgers agree on one pattern. The voter’s cow is the bracket above him; the near-poor man’s cow is his rank; the farm’s cow is the check; the environmentalist’s is the horizon; the statesman’s is his body; the governor’s is his table. Nobody in these six stories lied about the cause. Each of them meant the promise as far as the fence.

The same mechanism runs in all six cases. The ask is always calibrated to stop one rung above the asker. The proclamation comes in the subjunctive, over assets nobody holds. The audit arrives from below, from the second farmer, the only honest man in the joke. He never preaches. He counts. His final question is the only one that matters, because it is the one with a real herd inside it. This is where righteousness parts from rightness. Righteousness is the feeling of the million-dollar promise, warm and free. Rightness belongs to the man with the pointed finger, or to the man who answers the last question honestly. Every congregation has both men. Every party, newsroom, faculty, and family keeps them at adjoining desks.

The joke leaves behind a working tool. I call it the Cow Test. It works on any proclamation of shared sacrifice, including your own. The first count is the proclaiming party’s actual herd: what the man owns, in the indicative mood, this morning. The second is where the proposed sacrifice lands relative to that herd, one rung above him or inside his fence. The third is the record of the last time the ask reached him. Cape Wind has an answer, and so do the Market Facilitation Program and the French Laundry. A proclamation that survives all three counts is rare enough to trust.

The test is hardest to run on yourself. My own herd is smaller than my rhetoric, and so is yours. Every writer knows which animal he calls imaginary. I would share the byline and the credit in any hypothetical you care to name. Then someone asks for the source list, the one that took a decade to build, and I feel the finger rise in my own hand. The universities that teach public service keep herds of their own; I have written on this site about the school that priced its journalism degree past the new federal loan cap. The honest essay carries an inventory. The honest politics carries one too. The preacher who inventories his herd before the sermon has earned the right to finish it. Stein’s first farmer never made his. His promises stayed beautiful because nobody audited them in time.

Stein is gone, and the two farmers are still standing in their field. One of them is still promising halves of everything. The other is still counting cows. That was the lesson under his jokes: drama lives where the stated value meets the actual stake. A man is what he does when the ask reaches his own pasture. Everything before that is set decoration. The herd keeps grazing on the fence line between the two men.