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The effects of wealth on personality

Tero

Philosopher
Tero
Joined
Oct 16, 2010
Messages
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Location
North American prairie
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
www.harpercollins.com

Emma Goldberg

Emma Goldberg is a reporter at the New York Times, writing for sections such as Health and Science, Styles, Gender, National, and Culture, among others. Her cover stories have featured campus techlash, surgeon moms, young women running for office, and low-income medical students. Since the start...
www.harpercollins.com www.harpercollins.com
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.
 
Tero said:
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.
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I think you also need to be lucky.
 
The Don said:
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.
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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.
 
Thermal said:
It's easy to keep people like Musk and Trump and Bezos in mind. Let's keep Taylor Swift in there, too.
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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?
 
theprestige said:
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?
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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.
 
Thermal said:
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.
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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*.
 
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theprestige said:
Which paragraph is confusing you? The first is straight sarcasm lampooning the "one paycheck away" narrative.
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Which is far more hyperbolicly straw laden than what I said.
theprestige said:
The second is reminding you of your proper place in this rhetorical ecosystem: a mindless demographic for desperate sales strategies.
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Still lost here. Am I a "Cheater"? I can't see any ads yet so is this referring to one?
 
theprestige said:
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?
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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.
 
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