• Due to ongoing issues caused by Search, it has been temporarily disabled
  • Please excuse the mess, we're moving the furniture and restructuring the forum categories
  • You may need to edit your signatures.

    When we moved to Xenfora some of the signature options didn't come over. In the old software signatures were limited by a character limit, on Xenfora there are more options and there is a character number and number of lines limit. I've set maximum number of lines to 4 and unlimited characters.

The effects of wealth on personality

Does anybody here even know a billionaire?
I've known two billionaires personally: Mitt Romney and another guy we'll call Hal. My impression of Romney was that he was personable and likable on the outside, but that he would not hesitate to cut you off at the knees if you attempted to deceive him or defraud him. I knew Hal quite a bit better because we were both engineering students together and both junior engineers together at the same company. Hal has gone off now to Silicon Valley to become a tech billionaire and prolific Linked In personality. Now in my view, a fair amount of that was deserved: Hal is legitimately very smart and can see ahead more than I can. But if you want to talk personality, Hal was an a-hole even when he was poor. He had a very opinionated and abrasive personality that made him difficult to work with. I can't really use this as data to support an empirically valid conclusion, but my gut feeling based on experience is that being an a-hole can lead to becoming a billionaire. You don't necessarily have to wait until you're rich to become one.
 
...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.”
While that may be off-topic, it's topic-adjacent enough to merit discussion in my opinion. First, Catch-22 is a hilarious book. If you haven't read it, you really should. Heller may not have been a billionaire, but I would have much preferred to hang out with him than with any billionaires I know or know of.

But the mindless accumulation of unneeded and unusable wealth has always puzzled me. I hope I'm not the only one who isn't attracted by obscene wealth. That is, I would like the opportunity to be comfortable and to have a modicum of enjoyment. What I want out of life doesn't exceed my ability to provide it. On the other hand there seems to be a different mindset out there that focuses on the process of amassing wealth. It's almost like a contest: he who dies with the most money wins something, or whatever. There really is a limit to what even the most decadent person can spend in a lifetime. The desire to hoard many times more than that (even at the expense of one's fellow humans) seems pathological in a way. Equally baffling to me are people who worship this exercise as somehow healthy or praiseworthy while they simultaneously start a GoFundMe for their nephew's insulin.

One of the local business leaders I've tried to emulate said it to me best: "The measure of your success in business is not in how many millions you make, but how many millionaires you make."
 
I made a comment recently about Rupert Murdoch and his brood and their legal wranglings, all that money, so little joy.
 
The Victorians summed it all up in one word: "spoilt".

This is what happens to a person's character when they have everything handed to them on a plate. What people call 'character-building': suffering exigencies, hardships and the vicissitudes* of life, etc., means having to find inner resources to overcome them, such as getting a job or thinking creatively or facing problems full on.

Take King Charles III, one of the richest men in the world, owns a huge proportion of the UK, including the surrounding seas. Would you want to swap places with him? He can't even put toothpaste on his own toothbrush. Had an almighty strop live on air at his coronation because of a leaky pen ("A stinking pen!!" he screamed, his face turning puce, red and purple by turns, as Camilla cringed in the background, like a battered wife terrified of the next outburst.) Send him out to call his own taxi, book his own airflight and make his own way to the airport and he'd be a complete quivering wreck! Silly, effete, flimsy, frivolous. Would you still want to swap places?

*Vicissitudes....how this word rolls off the tongue: 'Vic-iss-it-uuuudes'.
 
Last edited:
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.”
Counterpoint: Heller kept writing his entire life. Clearly he never got enough of that.

A lot of athletes like the money, but they keep playing long past the point of a luxurious retirement fund, because they can't get enough of the game.

Enough means different things to different people.
 
I can't really use this as data to support an empirically valid conclusion, but my gut feeling based on experience is that being an a-hole can lead to becoming a billionaire. You don't necessarily have to wait until you're rich to become one.
There are a lot more a-holes than billionaires, and at any rate it's sort of the opposite of what the title of the OP implies--that the money actually makes the billionaire a jerk, not that being a jerk helps you to become a billionaire.
 
Wasn't Jeff Bezos kind of a mild, mousey guy when Amazon was just an online bookstore?
52235327-0-image-a-135_1640529819846.jpg
 
Wealth doesn't seem to have had a positive impact on Elon Musk despite his expensive hairline. Perhaps a nice personality is inversely proportional to wealth.

1736891094564.jpeg
 
There are a lot more a-holes than billionaires, and at any rate it's sort of the opposite of what the title of the OP implies--that the money actually makes the billionaire a jerk, not that being a jerk helps you to become a billionaire.
If you want to contemplate a correlation between a-holery and billionairity, you can propose that the causation goes one way, the other way, both ways, or not at all. As I wrote, I know two actual billionaires and only one of them I would categorize as an a-hole. And I know many a-holes, quite a lot of whom aren't even thousandaires.

I recall a study many years ago correlating corporate rank with sociopathy or a propensity toward sociopathy. The feeble conclusion was that the more sociopathic you tend, the more suitable you are for the C-suite. That doesn't necessary apply directly here. But if you postulate that a-holes are less likely to obey norms, and you suppose that there are norms in place to spread wealth, then you can grope your way toward a proposition that some a-holes may be more adept at gaming the system in order to acquire more wealth. Conversely, people who are the wrong kind of a-hole might not be as successful. I think you have to consider "personality" more broadly in order to really get at this. Maybe wealth allows one to more freely let one's a-hole flag fly whereas we poor a-holes have to swallow our personality.
 
I'd just like to remind everyone that the above statement was made seriously.

That's all.
Yes. The people who go to therapists are mostly already miserable. And therapy doesn't change them. Has anyone ever been cured with therapy?
 
Yes. The people who go to therapists are mostly already miserable. And therapy doesn't change them. Has anyone ever been cured with therapy?
Nonsensical question. Your mental health is more of a sea of gray thing than a binary you have it or not, or you're cured or sick.

Its like your body. You eat well and exercise to be in better condition, but you're not "cured" of fatness or whatever. It's an ongoing effort for some peeps. For others, they don't hit the gym at all, and stay in pretty good shape. We're all wired differently, and require different maintenence and assistance levels to stay near the sweet spot.
 
Nonsensical question. Your mental health is more of a sea of gray thing than a binary you have it or not, or you're cured or sick.

Its like your body. You eat well and exercise to be in better condition, but you're not "cured" of fatness or whatever. It's an ongoing effort for some peeps. For others, they don't hit the gym at all, and stay in pretty good shape. We're all wired differently, and require different maintenence and assistance levels to stay near the sweet spot.
But who goes to a therapist? It's a type. It has nothing to do with wealth.
 
But who goes to a therapist? It's a type. It has nothing to do with wealth.
The same type who goes to a doctor when they are sick, no? The only correlation with wealth would be who has the financial luxury of attending to their well-being with more care. A lot of poor people would damn well be better off with regular visits to both a medical doctor and a therapist.
 
I have a theory that money is like power; it often just brings out just what a person really is.
 
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.
After the CEO was murdered UnitedHealthcare's share price plummeted by 20% in 2 weeks. $115 billion 'lost'. You can bet that made an impression.

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!
Or so the narrative goes. But is it true? According to a YouGov poll taken soon after the murder, when asked "Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to resort to violence in order to hold corporations accountable?", 70% answered "No, violence is never justified". Only 12% agreed with the statement that "Yes, violence can be justified". Considering that 30% of republicans think a violent insurrection is acceptable if the 'wrong' party wins, that's a surprisingly low proportion. Seems that health insurance isn't as important to them as immigrants and the price of eggs. Since nobody has gone to war over those things, I doubt we will see a revolution any time soon.
 
Last edited:
Moral questions asked in the abstract almost always generate the "right" answer in polling, even in the aftermath of a tragedy. But people's individual moral choices are often less noble. This is why you have so many good fundamentalist Christians getting abortions. It's easy to answer questions like, "Is it right to steal from your employer?" and slightly harder to answer, "Is it okay for me to steal from my employer?" Or conversely, you can easily imagine a billionaire agreeing that "It's wrong to pay less than one's fair share of taxes," and then arguing that it's okay for him to pay less than a fair share, because job creation, trickle-down, whatever.
 
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.
This doesn't match reality. According to Pew Research, republicans make up 27% of those earning less than $30,000, 39% from $30,000 to $49,999, and 45% from $50,000 to $99,999. You may say those 'poor' people are voting against their own interests, but are they? If your main 'interests' are selfishness and bigotry, what you get out of it financially may not be so important to you. You may even enjoy being treated 'unfairly' so you have more to gripe about.

I'm 'poor' and don't relate to 'normals' in part because I don't envy people who have more than me. I grew up in a farming area where the average family were millionaires simply because they owned a farm. The owners of the farm we worked on were especially wealthy. I used to enjoy going over to their place to swim in the pool etc., but I didn't envy them. Their wealth didn't do them much good, and the end it killed them.

In my experience as a telecoms technician working with businesses in the 1980's, small business owners were the worst. Many of them were full-on 'libertarian' types who thought they were superior to mere wage earners. These guys weren't billionaires, but expected to be treated like they were. Of course they all voted conservative.
 
And what's their share price now, and how does it compare?
It's bounced back a bit, but only up 4.7% on a year ago. You could probably get a better return from a regular bank account.

UnitedHealthcare got a lot of flack for turning down less than 10% of claims. Shocking, right? Well a public health system isn't necessarily going to be any better. It will also be budget contrained and have to decide who gets treated and who doesn't. In New Zealand the conseravtive National Party, which has been in power for most of the 21st century, siphoned money off the health system to hand out tax cuts. It took me two years just to be evaluated for a hernia operation. I was bumped off the waiting list twice because they didn't consider my condition bad enough. Luckily the doctor took pity on me despite not meeting the criteria.

People in New Zealand are dying because they can't get the medical care they need until they are actually dying - by which time it's often too late. But hey, at least you got a tax cut. And of course National got your vote. In the last election they blamed the Labour government for the state of the health system, which was run down for years due to National's policies, then had to handle Covid. And they promised to fix it - which so far has involved sacking hospital staff and cutting budgets!
 
In other words, a significant minority.
A pretty large minority actually. At the lower end only 50% are democrat leaning, with 23% 'on the fence'. In the $30,000-$49,999 bracket it's 39% republican to 46% democrat, and $50,000-$99,999 is 45% to 43%. Above $100,000 is 47% republican to 44% democrat. This puts to bed the theory that (only) rich people vote republican. In fact more of the 'middle' class lean republican than democrat.
 
This doesn't match reality. According to Pew Research, republicans make up 27% of those earning less than $30,000, 39% from $30,000 to $49,999, and 45% from $50,000 to $99,999. You may say those 'poor' people are voting against their own interests, but are they? If your main 'interests' are selfishness and bigotry, what you get out of it financially may not be so important to you. You may even enjoy being treated 'unfairly' so you have more to gripe about.
Yeah, I was not describing the voters or GOP or MAGA. I was simply saying that people who might have voted Democrat or not at all, once they get this icome (whatever the true number is), they will never vote for any candidate again who is going to raise their tax. This is also the point where they start losing empathy. Limited only to a rather small family circle who are still supported.
 
I'll fix my origianl statement:
Im going to say that roughly the income where you want to start voting only for Republicans, mostly, is 300 000 a year.
That is, the peopel could have voted either way to that point, but there is then no way to go back once you decided the less tax party is for you.

The very small percentage of Bill Gates never start, and will hold to it no matter how many billions they own.

My whole point is that once you flip over there is no going back.
 
Me too.

She said: "You need to stop working, it is killing you."

So I retired, and I've never been happier!

Psychologists for the win!!!
My wife likes to tell people that I quit my job because I won free fries at McDonalds once. It's technically true, but more of a coincidence.
 
A pretty large minority actually. At the lower end only 50% are democrat leaning, with 23% 'on the fence'. In the $30,000-$49,999 bracket it's 39% republican to 46% democrat, and $50,000-$99,999 is 45% to 43%. Above $100,000 is 47% republican to 44% democrat. This puts to bed the theory that (only) rich people vote republican. In fact more of the 'middle' class lean republican than democrat.
If this were true, we'd have a President-Elect Harris right now.
 
Does anybody here even know a billionaire?
Vaguely, in that I occasionally share the same elevator with one that I know of
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.
Do you know the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? We're talking about fortunes at a scale the human mind cannot comprehend.

You don't know anyone in that stratosphere because they isolate themselves among each other. that's another thing that may be causing the alien like behavior. They simply aren't exposed to a lot of people on a personal level. Its either other aliens like them or people whose livelihood revolves around making said billionaire happy.

I'll have to find the video, but an art student in NYC did a school project of taking pictures of the New York skyline by posing as a billionaire's wife so realtors would show her the apartments in all the big empty skyscrapers. they didn't care how weird and "quirky" she acted, they all groveled for her.
 
Jeff uses the d word for billionaire masculinity.
 
Yeah, I was not describing the voters or GOP or MAGA. I was simply saying that people who might have voted Democrat or not at all, once they get this icome (whatever the true number is),
they will never vote for any candidate again who is going to raise their tax.This is also the point where they start losing empathy. Limited only to a rather small family circle who are still supported.
There's basically no data that supports that.


Above 200k/year, its about 50/50. I can't seem to find any data on voting or registration by wealth. Even there, both are highly correlated with age. Older folks in the US tend to be wealthier than younger folks and older folks tend to vote republican more than younger folks. Is that wealth or age that causes them to be so stingy and cruel?

 
Last edited:
There is no data and there is no need to look at polling. People in the wealth range do not answer polls. This would be a field of study of psychologists. You would need to track a person for many years.
 
Back
Top Bottom