Warren Buffet is worth about 100 billion dollars. Like Bill Gates, he has pledged to give away a large portion of his wealth to help the world. Nobody needs 100 billion dollars, but I don’t think it’s odd that he worked hard for many years and earned it. Some very wealthy people have never worked a day and think they are superior to everyone below them. I see them as having the psychological issues.
Human nature is always a continuum. Whether it’s truly a bell curve or not, that’s the best way to imagine it.
Most people have a moderate amount of motivation to work, Some people really like their jobs; some people work out of sheer necessity. At the far ends are people who are driven to pile up more: more money, more fame, more power, more possessions and people who shun all possessions and try to live with nothing.
Six sigma people at both ends - six standard deviations away from the norm: very extreme personalities - obviously exist. If there are 8 billion people in the world, then 13,600 are at each extreme. That’s more than all the billionaires in the world. Even two sigma people - hardly extreme - leaves 200,000,000 at each end.
Yeah, some people are really, really different from you. Nothing else could possibly be expected in a society of 8 billion people with thousands of cultural heritages and hundreds of personality types.
Okay, now I’m wondering how you arrived at this number.
Simple math, if you know what “six sigma” means – it’s essentially the very ends of a normal distribution curve.
This site indicates that a “six sigma” deviation happens 3.4 times in every one million opportunities. Crank out the math, and that means that six sigma deviations occurs 27,200 times in a population of 8 billion.
Then, divide by two, assuming half of the six sigma deviations are on the far left end of the bell curve, and the other half are on the far right end, and you get 13,600 at each extreme.
But, again, not everyone is like that. Stop comparing the motivations of someone with billions of dollars to someone that has, quite literally, just enough to comfortably survive.
For many people, retirement isn’t a goal.
I think this is a good analogy, because like athletes, they want to run up the score. In the case of the rich, that score is money.
It’s all a game to them, and their balance sheets keep track of who is winning.
I want to shift focus from money to other things. Stephen King turned very wealthy with his first novel - Carrie - with the rights to the paperback paying him $400K. This was in '74 and if Google is to be trusted, adjusted for inflation that’s about $2.5M today.
That’s not fantastically wealthy, but it’s a very nice chuck of money, which properly invested would’ve set him up for life, if not excess.
King has written 63 novels since, about 200 short stories, movie scripts. He hasn’t had to keep writing and publishing for about 40+ years, yet he’s still at it.
Why, when he could read, watch movies, play with his kids, eat nice food, travel?
Thanks for trying, but I’m still confused. I know what sigma is but not what “six sigma” means (I’m mathematically literate but business-illiterate).
If it’s too complicated or too off-topic for this thread, feel free to start a new thread or just drop it.
From my perspective, what I think it should mean is the number of values that are more than six standard deviations away from the mean in a normal distribution. But if I’m interpreting this table correctly, that would be 0.000000001973 (that is, 0.0000001973%) of them. But 0.000000001973 of 8 billion would be just under 16 people (or 8 at each extreme), which is nowhere near 13,600.
Rich, BUSINESS people…not just rich people…I notice tend to think differently. Yes, I have known a few and have had to interact with a few that ‘let down their hair’ so to speak and talked to me like I was sympathetic/made a large amount of money etc.
They are very different from each other but one characteristic seems to be common. That is that there is not one ‘humanity’. “Regular” people are not really ‘people’ to them. WE are people. Others like us are people. Heck, they thought I made like 10 times what I actually did and I was pretty much a person to them so they do extend it down quite a ways…maybe not the .01% or even 1% but as far down as the 5%.
A characteristic that I saw common was the idea that ‘the regular folks’ should be working all the time. Free time for one of them is an inexcusable luxury…heaven forbid actual hobbies. Even a hobby that required little money is time they should be spending working. They should be working, their wives should be working. This work should be longer hours and it should not pay much more than they need as a bare subsistence level. Chicken is fine for them, but steak? That is a waste and like a sin in their eyes. They SHOULD be able to just get chicken or something is kinda wrong with the system. Cars are even fine, but it should be used, old and cheap. A new car is, again, like something is wrong with the system. It really is like they don’t see most of humanity as people but as machines that should be made as ‘efficient’ as possible or it is wasting resources.
Now, they are still rich but BUSINESS people. They understand that what they wish is not reality and they understand this…but it still seems wrong to them. These would be people like programmers, engineers, skilled trades etc. They also understand they need, for lack of better words’ “Foreman” and other skilled folk to ride herd/get things done etc…and they understand they need a good/comfortable lifestyle. These are their ‘upper managers’ etc (which is what they viewed me as the several times I got to hear them ‘let down their hair’) and these people are allowed some free time (just not a lot), steak, new cars etc and it isn’t seen as a sin or inefficiency.
Sample size is small (about 6) so yadda yadda and YMMV but that was my view.
That might be true of people you know who “genuinely enjoy their work” but I have known plenty of people who I assume enjoyed their work on some level because they certainly could afford to retire. One had a pension in the neighborhood of $132K (which wasn’t increased all that much by the extra 20 years he worked) , plus SS plus whatever he had saved. (Too bad he died less than six months after he retired.) He was not a billionaire . Maybe a millionaire but only in the sense that many 75 year olds who own a house in the NYC area have a million dollars in assets if you include the house. He’s just one example - I know lots of people who worked when they could have retired. Some had no family or friends, some didn’t know how they would spend their time as they had no hobbies , others had their identity tied up with their work and I assume some genuinely enjoyed the work. I don’t see any reason why multi-million or billionaires can’t have the same motivations.
What you’re describing is a sickness in my husband’s family. Fortunately, my husband doesn’t have the sickness. The only real insight I have is that I think it replaces love for them. Money is love. They don’t understand the difference. They don’t understand how to have reciprocal, loving relationships, so they immerse themselves in work. A lot of them have deep emotional wounds stemming from childhood, including parents whose entire conceptualization of love was rooted in money and social status. They only received love when they made Mom and Dad look good. The stereotype is kind of true, I guess I’m saying.
I say “sickness” because none of them are happy. I don’t know a single rich person who is happy. I’m sure they exist, in fact, the latest research indicates that there is a more or less direct relationship between wealth and happiness*, but I don’t get it, I just see the seedy underbelly.
Yet I wonder if it isn’t in all of us, just waiting to be coaxed out in the right circumstances. The main issue we have right now is a culture that obsessively reinforces the supremacy of wealth, laws that endorse corporate exploitation and an internet sphere that prizes narcissistic behavior. It’s a perfect storm for creating rich assholes.
*the usual caveats about this sort of research applies. People are probably more likely to rate their happiness as higher after they report a higher income than they would if they were say, asked about marital problems.
I’m like you, I’m constantly shaking my head at some of the more ostentatious displays of wealth I see. We are doing well financially now, and I’m no saint. I’m working on my more consumeristic tendencies as we speak. But I will never understand the desire for the kinds of things people are actually spending money on. (Diamond thong? Private jet? Mega-yacht?) There’s a whole category of things for rich people to buy that exist solely to show other people how rich they are. And that shit is stupid. And here’s the thing - I’ve experienced some of this luxury myself, just by nature of being in a family full of rich people, and I still don’t get it. Like I get why someone would want an expensive thing, but I don’t get why someone would want an expensive thing so much that they would sacrifice their relationships and sanity to get it. And the only answer that makes sense is that the expensive thing represents something else, something much more important and forever out of reach.
Take my husband for example. He makes a good income in his own private practice. He routinely, by which I mean weekly, forgoes opportunities to make more money in order to spend time with our son. Not just to hang out with him but to take him to doctors appointments and daycare and the general business of being his father. By the family’s orthodoxy, this is bizarre, aberrant behavior, he should be working and I, the woman, should be absorbing 100% of the childcare responsibilities (while also having a high powered career and looking perfect at the same time.) My husband’s grandfather invited everyone over on Christmas Day and then interrogated all the men about why they weren’t working.
Yes, it’s pathological.
The one thing I will give to rich people is the food. Anyone in their right mind would eat that well every day if they could.
(Also, my experience is with multi-millionaires and the occasional billionaire, I don’t know anyone with Trump levels of wealth.)
I can’t find a cite right now, but I could swear I’ve read multiple times that more wealth does not correlate with more happiness once you have enough to securely meet all your basic needs.
(I did, however, find this cite suggesting that, on a national rather than an individual level, happiness tends to correlate positively with wealth but negatively with wealth inequality.)
Look at the table in kenobi’s link that’s captioned Sigma Level vs DPMO Defects per Million Opportunities.
Then look at the line sigma level six which has 3.4 under DPMO Defects per Million Opportunities.
8 billion people are 8,000 million. 3.4 times 8000 is 27,200. Half that is 13,600.
Six sigma eliminates 99.99964% of a population, leaving 0.00034%. 0.00034% of 8 billion is 27,200.
This is a myth.
Certainly you can find some who fit that notion but it is rare.
And his OP is asking for help to understand this mindset. It’s the point of the thread.
Well, if it’s in a table, it must be correct; but as I explained in my followup post, it’s not the number I would have expected, and I still have no clue where that 3.4 comes from.
I don’t get it either.
If you owe the bank $1,000,000 the bank owns you.
If you owe the bank 100,000,000 you own the bank.
It’s about power. Not money or riches.
Most of these people do not have ANY idea what it is like to be poor. It’s not even a concept that they can understand, such a situation never existed for them.
So it’s also about fear. They have heard about being ‘poor’ but don’t understand it. They know that it sucks is about it. A billion dollars is not enough
IMHO, People like Bill Gates and Musk are brilliant, and have done a lot for humanity overall. Also, they are very good business people. Some other’s just want to impress the rich ‘class’ with how powerful and rich they are. And often fall short of doing that.
Some have acumen, some are con men. (I trying very, very hard to not bring politics into this). I’ll stop with that.
This is not and should not be a Political thread, so I will moderate myself.
Given all the things we know specifically about Elon Musk, in his case, his entire personality does seem pathological. He his happy to hurt people—both ones he knows well, as well as complete strangers—for any reason, whether it actually brings him materal benefit or not.
3.4 is 0.00034% of 1 million.
Why 0.00034%? Because that’s the definition of six standard deviations of a normal distribution or bell curve.
Rich people, in my limited experience, are more different than similar. However, many view their success in terms of skill rather than luck, and in terms of individualism over a community focus - with many exceptions.