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The effects of wealth on personality

Tero

Illuminator
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Oct 16, 2010
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We could just summararize the current billionaires in the news as "weid." Thanks, Tim Walz. And to be a billioniare, you have to have some business sense, some stinginess as far as your business goes.

What is the change that mone makes in you? How rich do you need to be before you start voting Republican no matter what the consequences are? (give me number) Because taxes. You can get all the abortions you want if you are wealthy. Just fly yout plane to Switzerland. Nobody will find out your daughter had an abortion. Go preach in your megachurch the next day.

I'm actually looking for a book that charts the life path of a number of wealthy people, not the one person biography. Not interested in the story of germophile Howard Hughes.

Back to the weird. Are some of them not neurotypical to start with? Or megalomaniacs from toddler age on. How do you become the teenage Trump?
 
I had a link on this from
but lost it. Anyone follow her?
 
The behavior of the wealthy reminds me of the old saw about the Greek gods: they behaved precisely as regular people would if only they could get away with it. Wealth makes it possible for a person to indulge in their worst behavior, and shields them from the consequences of that behavior. Not every rich person is a bad person, but being rich certainly permits a bad person much more scope to be bad than they would have if they were not rich.
 
Someone here said "show me a billionaire and I'll show you an a-hole". IMO, as a first order approximation it's not too far wide of the mark.
 
We could just summararize the current billionaires in the news as "weid." Thanks, Tim Walz. And to be a billioniare, you have to have some business sense, some stinginess as far as your business goes.
I think you also need to be lucky.
 
Someone here said "show me a billionaire and I'll show you an a-hole". IMO, as a first order approximation it's not too far wide of the mark.
I think it might be one of Bernard Woolley's irregular verbs:

I am a brilliant entrepreneur
You are lucky
He is a psychopath
 
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I'd be interested, too, in something like a proper study of what seems to make the extremely rich so often extremely alien other than simply being rich. Anecdotally it seems that the top tier of billionaires become more concerned with progeny and surviving the collapse of society than legacy and preventing it. They certainly seem to have bought into the conservative viewpoint that whatever they have they deserve, the inversion of the aspirational myth that the best become rich into the assumption that the rich must be the best.

Of course I imagine most of us have a little of the Gollum in us, and we can be understood at least, if not excused, for being acquisitive, and retentive when we have something to retain. But it does seem that there is some tipping point, when the luxury of abundance transforms into the entitlement of royalty, and one's elevation above the rest of society unbinds you to its rules.

But I'm far from being enough psychologist or sociologist to set it down as more than anecdote and impression. Nor have I observed enough different very rich people and their lives to be an expert on it. Does the wealth cause aberrations, or does it simply allow them? At what point might...e.t.a. seem to have posted this before finishing the sentence, and don't now remember quite where I was going. But, I do agree to a degree with TM above, that part of this is just the matter of permission to get away with things, like the gods we imagine. However, I think there's something more here, a transition from behaving as if one were a god to actually believing you are one.
 
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The rich are trained by their hangers-on to be functionally clue- and helpless when it comes to everything that is normal for most people. They are also very keen to prevent anyone who might say anything that will upset their lunch ticket from getting in contact.
The crumbs that a billionaire drops as part of his lifestyle feed dozens of professional toadies, making sure he never hears anything but praise from them.
As a result, there will be a huge gulf between what the superrich hear from everyone around them and what anyone else might tell them - and the toadies will make sure to agree that those must be haters, nothing else.

If you are very rich, and everyone knows it, it is almost impossible to remain grounded - and entire industry is dependent on them to lose all touch with reality.
 
Perhaps some of those rich dudes should take a lesson from days of yore. Once upon a time, at least in literature and legend, a king would have an appointed fool or a jester, one of whose functions was to get away with saying what his minions would never dare. Of course one of the requirements for this is that the king not be the greater fool, so I guess that's out nowadays.
 
It's easy to keep people like Musk and Trump and Bezos in mind. Let's keep Taylor Swift in there, too.
Let's keep ourselves in mind, too. Most of the people posting here are unfathomably wealthy, by both global and historical and measures.

What are the effects of my wealth on my personality? What are the effects of the OP's wealth on hers?
 
Let's keep ourselves in mind, too. Most of the people posting here are unfathomably wealthy, by both global and historical and measures.

What are the effects of my wealth on my personality? What are the effects of the OP's wealth on hers?
Historically and globally compared, sure, we are living pretty large. But realistically, in the here and now, most of us are a couple paychecks away from dropping down several notches very quickly.
 
Historically and globally compared, sure, we are living pretty large. But realistically, in the here and now, most of us are a couple paychecks away from dropping down several notches very quickly.
Thanks for the reminder. I keep forgetting that I'm one missed paycheck away from being a crazed fent head knifing people on public transit.

ETA: Are you a cheater? Because this forum is pimping a product you will *hate*.
 
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Thanks for the reminder. I keep forgetting that I'm one missed paycheck away from being a crazed fent head knifing people on public transit.

ETA: Are you a cheater? Because this forum is pimping a product you will *hate*.
Not to be overly dense here, but... what?
 
Which paragraph is confusing you? The first is straight sarcasm lampooning the "one paycheck away" narrative.
Which is far more hyperbolicly straw laden than what I said.
The second is reminding you of your proper place in this rhetorical ecosystem: a mindless demographic for desperate sales strategies.
Still lost here. Am I a "Cheater"? I can't see any ads yet so is this referring to one?
 
Let's keep ourselves in mind, too. Most of the people posting here are
unfathomably wealthy, by both global and historical and measures.

What are the effects of my wealth on my personality? What are the effects of the OP's wealth on hers?
That's undoubtedly true. But is there a point to the observation? I am undoubtedly wealthier than most of the people in the world, and probably than many people in the forum here, being 77, and having lived both frugally and a lot longer than many relatives, etc. Which is to say I'm certainly in no danger of falling very far over a couple of missed paychecks or their equivalent, and you are welcome to your obvious pride that you aren't either, but it seems hardly relevant, since many in this world are, whether or not you feel entitled to swing your righteous rapier at them from your superior equestrian seat.

Sure, I'm well off, and happy about that, and being unworried about many things that worry many others no doubt affects my actions in life, and thereby in some way my personality (I might hope for the better, or at least for the cheerier), but it does not seem to go very far in answering the question implied by the original post, that there is something different about the very wealthy, not just how large they live, but how they see themselves relative to the rest of the world, what part they see themselves playing, how they think. As I said earlier, I really don't know how this might be assessed, or what the results might be, except to note that whatever it is, the super-duper-rich have taken it to a visible extreme. Based on estimated annual income, Elon Musk makes about 35 million dollars a year. ETA: Excuse clumsy typing. That's 35 million dollars a DAY! And that's being overly generous. He gets an estimated 14 billion a year. I would entertain the thought that this dimension of wealth might relate to his overweening arrogance and his apparent thirst for power. It's not just about whether you can afford the luxuries, excesses and peculations of the few, but whether you have the right to them. At what point do people go from feeling special because they're rich to feeling they're rich because they're special?

And I truly have no idea what the question of "am I a cheater" means, and what significance it might conceivably have on that subject.
 
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Just for clarity what is the wealth level we are focusing on for this discussion? If just billionaires, it feels like too small a group to attribute much to. They don't feel like much of a unified group of personalities, although there is definitely a level of.. arrogance? Not really the word but some level of belief that their vision of the future, reality etc is more accurate than others.

I don't think this is really unifying in actions though. They don't seem to be that much more politically unified than the rich but less well off citizen. Plenty of high profile dems and reps between them. How they prioritize using their wealth also seems to be pretty wide ranging.

There seems to be a general hate at the idea but I kind of like it. Such a vast array of priorities on how to use their money. I wonder how many vanity donations alone are responsible for significant outcomes, or none at all, not to mention the more goal specific focused stuff.
 
Does anybody here even know a billionaire? I worked in commercial real estate finance and knew some very wealthy individuals, but I don't think I ever met anybody with a ten-figure financial (Nope, never met Trump). I have met a lot of high net-worth people and they are pretty much like everybody else; mostly okay but some are real dicks. IOW a person's net worth tells you little about the person.
 
Does anybody here even know a billionaire? I worked in commercial real estate finance and knew some very wealthy individuals, but I don't think I ever met anybody with a ten-figure financial (Nope, never met Trump). I have met a lot of high net-worth people and they are pretty much like everybody else; mostly okay but some are real dicks. IOW a person's net worth tells you little about the person.

Which proves that US mediocracy is a lie.
 
We could just summararize the current billionaires in the news as "weid." Thanks, Tim Walz. And to be a billioniare, you have to have some business sense, some stinginess as far as your business goes.

What is the change that mone makes in you? How rich do you need to be before you start voting Republican no matter what the consequences are? (give me number) Because taxes. You can get all the abortions you want if you are wealthy. Just fly yout plane to Switzerland. Nobody will find out your daughter had an abortion. Go preach in your megachurch the next day.

I'm actually looking for a book that charts the life path of a number of wealthy people, not the one person biography. Not interested in the story of germophile Howard Hughes.

Back to the weird. Are some of them not neurotypical to start with? Or megalomaniacs from toddler age on. How do you become the teenage Trump?
I reckon wealth is a bit like alcohol in that it amplifies traits, rather than changes people. What you're seeing is the true nature of the person because the wealth insultates them from the disadvantages that normally come with being a bit of a bastún.

And the thing is, the way our socioeconomic system is set up, you're going to have far more anti-society bastúns at the top than there are in the general population. Allowing the kind of hyper-wealth we have tlday is going to guarantee that we end up with Musks and Zuckerbergs, the modern equivalents of Crassus and Louis XIV.
 
My personal observation is, too much money will ◊◊◊◊ you up. I have a few friends I grew up with, some all the way back to kindergarten, others high school, that started with nothing, or not much, who now have millions. Most, I want nothing to do with, they are no longer who they were, and none changed for the better. I was at a party a few years ago, held by one, and attended by another. The guy throwing the party was, WAS one of my closest friends, we were in each others weddings for crying out loud. He, apart from inviting me, had little to say, and what he did say was filled with obvious lies. The other, did no better, despite talking to me for over an hour, most everything he had to say was also epic BS. Here's a guy who has traveled the world, mind you, but he feels it'd be better to try and entertain me with a made up story. Why? Don't you think I'd be as interested in something that actually happened? I don't get it.
My wife's little sister is another example. A few years ago she married into money. Before, in her past, she was so bad off her home was foreclosed on. We helped her out numerous times. Now she's buying $5000 dogs and rarely has time to even talk to my wife.
I know more people just like this. It's a reason I never want to be too well off.
 
Does anybody here even know a billionaire? I worked in commercial real estate finance and knew some very wealthy individuals, but I don't think I ever met anybody with a ten-figure financial (Nope, never met Trump). I have met a lot of high net-worth people and they are pretty much like everybody else; mostly okay but some are real dicks. IOW a person's net worth tells you little about the person.
I deal with several millionaires in a semi professional capacity, doing their remodeling and home improvements (it's for their personal life, not what they do for a living, so a bit more personal). No billionaires that I am aware of, but certainly very rich by the average Joe's standards. As you say, there is a variety, but I personally find them disproportionately on the right hand end of the ASPD spectrum. None that I would call actually pleasant or fun people, a bunch that I would call self-entitled and laboring under a god complex. YMMV.
 
...?

ETA: people that +/- made their own money (few do so in a vacuum) tend to be very good at holding on to it and increasing it. People that it was handed to, not so much. I've read that muti million dollar lottery winners overwhelmingly tend to go broke right pronto.
 
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...?

ETA: people that +/- made their own money (few do so in a vacuum) tend to be very good at holding on to it and increasing it. People that it was handed to, not so much. I've read that muti million dollar lottery winners overwhelmingly tend to go broke right pronto.
Gamblers being bad with money isn't all that surprising.
 
Gamblers being bad with money isn't all that surprising.
Not sure most lottery players are gamblers, per se. Playing a couple bucks (of which half actually goes to good ends, seniors etc) is trivial, not the "mortgage the house to double down" mentality.
 
Just reread the OP- how exactly are we supposed to know how money affects people over time? Are we supposed to have closely observed their development, taking accurate assessments of what variables were related to their personality development and which weren't?
 
I'm going to say that roughly the income where you want to start voting for Republicans, mostly, is 300 000 a year. There you still have some contact with regular people. You might even have influence locally, and promote less awful republicans. You have money to donate.
500 000 a year and it will be hard to relate to us normals.
 
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I have some inherited-wealth acquaintances (relatives of someone who married into my family) and the ones I've met were either self-absorbed jerks or --a minority-- self-absorbed nice people. The latter you can tell mean well, but can't quite relate...they think an economic depression means people have to draw on the principal of their inherited investments for a few months instead of just living off the gains. The former...well, you can imagine your own out-of-touch ludicrous story. My go-to is the one where the 20-year-old was mad at his mom because in the mansion she bought him the elevator didn't work.

TL,DR; I think great wealth causes people --even nice ones-- to become out-of-touch with ordinary life, and end up saying and thinking and doing some fairly startling things.
 
I'm not sure it's entirely on topic but I like this story, so:

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island Kurt Vonnegut informed his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.

Heller responded “Yes, but I have something he will never have — ENOUGH.”
 
The OP is based on a logical fallacy: the assumption that the (somewhat) same experience affects people the same way. It doesn't. It's possible to draw very different conclusions from the same experience.

a) People who grow up with abusive, sometimes violent, parents may learn to abhor violence. Or they may learn that that's the way to do it! Be the abuser instead of the abused. As for sexual abuse, it is well known that some victims of abuse become abusers themselves. Most victims of abuse probably despise abusers.

b) People with a Jewish background have drawn very different conclusions from what Jews were exposed to in the Holocaust. They are often among the most ardent anti-racists (Wikipedia). I translated this article by an American Jew. But then there's Otzma Yehudit (Wikipedia), a Netanyahu ally.

c) We base our opinions of the billionaires on what we hear about them. That opinion has probably changed quite a bit since 2010 when we heard a lot about the Giving Pledge (Wikipedia). Recently, we have mainly been hearing about guys like Musk, Ramaswamy, Harlan Crow, or the Koch brothers, and not so much about Gates, Buffett and Soros. The discussions about the healthcare industry after Mangione killed Brian Thompson is also important in this context. (I still listen to songs inspired by that event every day: Deny, Defend, Depose, Deny, Defend, Depose, We Takin' Yo' ****. Great songs!!!)

d) The difference between billionaires as individuals is probably at least as big as between individuals in other segments of the population. I've never met any billionaires, but the multimillionaires I've have met weren't all alike. I think there are more constraints on how people can be among the lower (= poorer) classes.

ETA
It just occurred to me: Some people hear Greed is good and think it's a recommendation:
Gordon Gekko: Characterization (Wikipedia)
After the film's original character Gordon Gekko began being perceived as a hero instead of a villain, for his line "Greed is good," in 2008, Weiser wrote in op-ed in the Los Angeles Times titled "Repeat After Me: Greed is Not Good." He wrote that when he wrote the screenplay, "I never could have imagined that this persona and his battle cry would become part of the public consciousness, and that the core message of “Wall Street” – remember, he goes to jail in the end – would be so misunderstood by so many.
Some people watch Starship Troopers (Wikipedia) and applaud it as an endorsement of the kind of fascist society it portrays.
 
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Character mask is a concept from Capital by Karl Marx. Wikipedia has a page about it, but it's not very good. It psychologizes the concept, and Capital is about economics.
The concept means that the capitalist acts on behalf of his capital, i.e. that he is capital personified. (The German Wikipedia page is much better: Charactermaske: Personifikation ökonomischer Verhältnisse.)

And just like Scrooge McDuck said in one of the stories I read as a child (probably by Carl Barks), "There is no such thing as too much money."
There is not even such a thing as enough money when that money is capital. As an investment, its only purpose is to grow.

That is not to say that there is only one way for the individual capitalist to act. Let's say one whose investment is in housing, for instance. When he acts as a capitalist, his investment wants to grow, and he sees to it that it does. Capital is accumulation. If it doesn't grow, it stops being capital. So if people can't pay the rent, they're out. It may feel unpleasant for him. He may even know and like the people who are thrown out of their homes. But if he doesn't want to be confronted with this aspect of reality, he can pay somebody else to do the dirty job.

Other capitalists may even enjoy the power they have over the renters. Or they may come up with ways to throw people out their homes even though they do pay the rent and the capital does grow, but they know that there are ways to make renters pay even more and thus contribute to making capital grow faster. Are Hedge Funds and Private Equity Firms Driving Up the Cost of Housing? (The Sling, July 12, 2024) No, I don't thing the answer will surprise you!

The two kinds of capitalists both exist, in fiction! We kind of find the 'good' as well as the 'bad' capitalist in the original Scrooge, the one in A Christmas Carol (Wikipedia). However, the 'bad' capitalist in the Dickens novella isn't really a capitalist. He is a miser and thus acting irrationally instead of on behalf of his investment. And when he is transformed into a 'good' capitalist after having been confronted with the consequences of his irrational avarice, he no longer considers what happens to his money at all because ... it's a work of art, of fiction.
In reality, no number of Tiny Tims will ever persuade the investors at UnitedHealthcare to accept a lower profit rate than the maximum that a CEO can squeeze out of the insured by denying, delaying and deposing. It didn't even impress them much when their CEO was shot before their meeting. They carried on, probably to discuss his replacement.

However, what does impress them is the aftermath of the murder, the reaction of the vast majority of the population:
Multi-Millionaire Warns “We Risk Revolution” As Americans Grow Increasingly Desperate (The Humanist Report, Jan 9, 2025)
Multi-millionaire Scott Galloway offered a refreshing perspective on mainstream media about income and wealth inequality. He warned MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that America is susceptible to a revolution as a result of widespread disillusionment with the system. He goes on to explain how the tax system is rigged in favor of wealthy elites like himself and calls for that to change. In this video we react to his comments and supplement his arguments with additional context.
Chapters: 0:00 Scott Galloway Warns of Revolution
You can't claim that that don't impress them much!
 
Character mask is a concept from Capital by Karl Marx. Wikipedia has a page about it, but it's not very good. It psychologizes the concept, and Capital is about economics.
The concept means that the capitalist acts on behalf of his capital, i.e. that he is capital personified. (The German Wikipedia page is much better: Charactermaske: Personifikation ökonomischer Verhältnisse.)

And just like Scrooge McDuck said in one of the stories I read as a child (probably by Carl Barks), "There is no such thing as too much money."
There is not even such a thing as enough money when that money is capital. As an investment, its only purpose is to grow.

That is not to say that there is only one way for the individual capitalist to act. Let's say one whose investment is in housing, for instance. When he acts as a capitalist, his investment wants to grow, and he sees to it that it does. Capital is accumulation. If it doesn't grow, it stops being capital. So if people can't pay the rent, they're out. It may feel unpleasant for him. He may even know and like the people who are thrown out of their homes. But if he doesn't want to be confronted with this aspect of reality, he can pay somebody else to do the dirty job.

Other capitalists may even enjoy the power they have over the renters. Or they may come up with ways to throw people out their homes even though they do pay the rent and the capital does grow, but they know that there are ways to make renters pay even more and thus contribute to making capital grow faster. Are Hedge Funds and Private Equity Firms Driving Up the Cost of Housing? (The Sling, July 12, 2024) No, I don't thing the answer will surprise you!

The two kinds of capitalists both exist, in fiction! We kind of find the 'good' as well as the 'bad' capitalist in the original Scrooge, the one in A Christmas Carol (Wikipedia). However, the 'bad' capitalist in the Dickens novella isn't really a capitalist. He is a miser and thus acting irrationally instead of on behalf of his investment. And when he is transformed into a 'good' capitalist after having been confronted with the consequences of his irrational avarice, he no longer considers what happens to his money at all because ... it's a work of art, of fiction.
In reality, no number of Tiny Tims will ever persuade the investors at UnitedHealthcare to accept a lower profit rate than the maximum that a CEO can squeeze out of the insured by denying, delaying and deposing. It didn't even impress them much when their CEO was shot before their meeting. They carried on, probably to discuss his replacement.

However, what does impress them is the aftermath of the murder, the reaction of the vast majority of the population:

You can't claim that that don't impress them much!
I was really not expecting a last-second 1998 Shania Twain earworm in a post talking about Marx on capital.
 
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