Good thing most humans don’t look to monkeys for economic models or systems of government…
Outside of inheritances or lotteries, the rich probably share competitiveness as a strong personality trait.
This seems uncharitable. And I say that as someone who is somewhat like you in that I am only interested in retiring moderately lower-middle-class secure, not rich. I somewhat reflexively distrust and often find myself rather disliking the ambitious and driven, though I do try my level best to judge everyone as individuals and keep any pernicious pre-judgement to myself. I have indeed known individual very ambitious people that I overall liked.
But just because I am not remotely like them, I don’t think of those people as mentally ill (I mean excluding the genuine sociopaths among them). Because…
…I’m pretty much in agreement with the above. Some people are super-driven and super-ambitious and that’s perfectly within human norms. Some people are also super-anti-materialist, deriding the concept of working for the man at all and retirement benefits as sheer insanity. They’d rather build a yurt and live off the land as much as possible. Which, y’know - whatever.
I don’t define mentally ill as simply being at the far end of normal human variation. Otherwise I’d have to label those van-life folks as mentally ill as well. I mean I will refer to those people casually as nutcases, but that is a simple mild pejorative for liking things I don’t, not a genuine diagnosis of mental illness. I say the same thing about people who claim to enjoy Clamato 
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I think that was the prevailing wisdom for a long time, until some researchers started crunching the numbers differently (statistical explanation over my head)…
Anyway this was the study I was referring to
I want to note that I think $75,000 is a weird threshold because in my opinion, it’s not nearly enough to provide true financial stability in the US, especially if you have high medical expenses or multiple kids or are caring for ailing parents. It takes a long time to get from a higher income to a higher level of wealth. So the shorthand for income as a marker of wealth doesn’t really work for me either.
I read an article a long time ago in the Atlantic about upper middle class earners being in denial of their wealth. But it brought up the interesting, and I think valid point, that capitalism is a zero sum game, and we live in a society where you can be making very good income and be financially destroyed by a run of bad luck, and we all know this, and even people who make what would be considered high incomes live with this constant threat of losing it all, and so reinforce wealth inequality by hoarding resources.
And I’m not sure people with low incomes really grasp this about people with high incomes. I’ve been poor, and I would have assumed that once I hit a certain income threshold, I would cease to worry about money, but that’s not really how it works. Sometimes I wonder if I feel less secure because of my past experience of poverty, or if it’s really how everyone feels. But it’s very much a feeling of, “We have to hang on to every penny and execute it all perfectly because the bottom could drop out at any moment.” But I don’t, at this point, have real wealth, so maybe that changes as you build wealth.
So income is a terrible shorthand for financial well being, I think.
Capitalism and trade in general aren’t actually zero sum activities in the aggregate.
I knew you would say that.
If it’s not zero sum, it’s highly volatile at the individual level. There are ways to mitigate risk, but people usually get screwed anyway.
I believe I have heard of some studies that suggest that sociopathy is not all that uncommon at the high levels of society.
I think he is an artist and a creator, who would write even if he never sold a book.
He loves his work.
I’m still confused, but rather than hijack this thread further, I’ve opened a new thread in FQ.
It’s not.
Wealth is created, for the most part.
Yeah, a rising tide lifts all boats.
Yet wealth inequality is rapidly increasing.
Two things can be true at once.
I’m not sure that I would call it competitiveness. It seems that a large part of staying rich is creating circumstances, often with your fellow rich and the politicians that you all influence with your money, such that competition becomes impossible for everyone else. Sure, they want everything their own way, but they don’t want to compete to get it.
I think there is a lot of variability in what people consider “total financial destruction” and also of risk tolerance/risk awareness. In 2008 I was teaching at a decent public high school and a parent of a kid transferring from a good private school literally sat in my classroom and cried for an hour over her shame and despair that they couldn’t afford to keep her in private school. That, for them, was total financial destruction. On the other hand, I also know people willing to live without creature comforts I consider non-negotiable. The same for risk tolerance: some people just don’t worry about what if. They wull handle what if when it comes. And most of them end up okay, whoch blows risk-adverse me away.
People are weird about schools. I take your point though. Personality is probably also a big factor. People tend to react very negatively to a drop in their standard of living, even if it’s still better than everyone else’s. The drop in standard of living after a divorce, for example, has a psychological impact all its own.
And if you’re born into a wealthy family, even a relatively loving one, it would be hard not to define success as amassing even more wealth. There are people who choose a different path, but sometimes they can only do it at the expense of family cohesion.
Take Trump for example. Knowing what we know about how he was raised, by a father whose love was conditional upon him winning and succeeding at business, it’s hard to see him turning out any other way.
At it’s most basic physiological level, we do things that make us happy, and it’s the neurotransmitter dopamine that primarily controls happiness. It’s the “feel good" chemical. That along with serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins control how we feel, good or bad.
Different activities and things cause people to secrete more or less of these neurotransmitters in their brains. Maybe petting kittens causes a surge in dopamine in one person, while in another person it causes a depletion of dopamine, therefore making them feel bad. We tend to do things that make us feel good and avoid things that make us feel bad. Duh.
The accumulation of money causes a dopamine surge in many people and it’s easy to see why. When we are young our parents buy things that make us happy. Soon after, we learn that making money (perhaps with an allowance) allows us to buy things that make us happy. We henceforth associate money with happiness in our brains. This carries forth in getting jobs that pay money to buy things we like—dopamine surge.
Maybe retiring and petting kittens all day makes some people secrete more dopamine than making money. Everybody’s different. Maybe Musk and Trump hate kittens, but love money. Maybe they like kittens, but like money more. Who knows?
And some people may get a dopamine surge by making money, but it’s negated by a dopamine depletion resulting from working long hours at a job. In this case, the bad (working) trumps [not Donald] the good (making money). Early retirement is best for these people. The opposite is true for people like Musk and Trump. Different things/activities (and the associated things/activities) in different people results in a net gain or net loss of dopamine.
It’s all about biological evolution and the uniqueness of individuals. What’s good for the goose may not be good for the gander. Personally, I like money and petting kittens—I’m conflicted. 
Someone who kinda dealt with this subject during his career.
I have seen stats, though have not been involved, that money correlates with happiness. It isn’t a huge correlation, but it is pretty strong.
Now, what I DO have direct experience with as I worked as a statistician in market research and did quite a bit with employee retention.
The salary someone makes is UNBELIEVABLY HUGELY correlated with employee satisfaction…until you reach a certain level and then it dramatically drops off. This means that employees not making enough or them thinking they aren’t making enough will almost certainly be a pissed off/unsatisified employee. However, someone making what they think they should be making then offering them more money will not have that big effect on their satisfaction. It is still there, still positively correlated just not that strong.
What supersedes it, at that point, is their relationship with their IMMEDIATE supervisor followed by feeling they are recognised and respected for doing a good job. The relationship with their immediate supervisor is always a strong predictor only exceeded by money made if below that threshold. You could work for the best, most wonderful company in the world and if you don’t have a good relationship with immediate supervisor will likely be miserable…and the vice versa applies as well.
Well, yes and no. I’ve been poor, and happy. Right now I’m financially comfortable for sure. But I have a clogged sewer drain to my septic, and can’t even get anyone to call me back, let alone look at it. So that’s what I’m doing today. Luckily (I suppose) I know plumbing. It’s going to be kinda a shitty day.
Haven’t been able to take a shower or use the bathroom at my own house in 8 days. Can’t just move into a hotel, we have two dogs. Could ‘move’ into my recently deceased mothers house 100 miles away from my own. I can work remotely no problem. My Wife really can’t. I certainly can’t just split and leave her to deal with the issue. 
Rock, meet hard place.
Some of that is really just practical. It really would suck to be the “poor relation”. I mean, if everyone else can afford to split a house in Vail for Christmas and you can’t afford your share, what’s the alternative? You don’t go and they miss you, you take charity to go, or every holiday plan for everyone forever is limited to what you, the poor one, can afford, which is annoying. And that extends to all sorts of family things: things like gifts become tainted when one person’s extravagant splurge is someone else’s trinket.
I think this really, really sucks for kids whose parents were the first wealthy ones. Like, mom and dad both grew up middle-middle class. They went into law or medicine or tech or finance out of genuine interest, and got lucky: now they live in the Bay Area and household income is $600k. But it didn’t have to turn out that way: there are other timelines where they took their first post-college job at a bank instead of an up and coming dot-com or didn’t specialize in cardiology but instead matched in pediatrics, where that same couple is in Oklahoma City with a household income of $200k, still very very comfortable, still happy, and they don’t feel like failures, because they are doing better than their parents by a long shot, and doing something that they, if not love, like well enough.
But in the Bay Area timeline, with parents who are at the top of their own potential, their kid is trapped. To meet expectations, they need a career path that will reliably pay about what their parents make. Which means they have to go into law, medicine, CS, or finance regardless of personal interest–and they need to marry someone else that did that, too. And they can’t just go into those fields: they have to go to a top University, get the right internships, really thrive. They have huge advantages–they are way, way more likely to end up in the top 1% than anyone else, but it’s not a sure thing. They could fail. And unlike families with generational wealth, there isn’t enough money for them to have the sort of trust fund that would fill in any gaps.
This is where the mad panic to get into top schools comes from. You don’t have to go to a top-20 to be successful, but it’s a whole hell of a lot more likely that you will, when you combine the top-20 with the other advantages of affluence. It’s a very different thing than it was for their parents, who maybe went to a state school, but were inherently more interested in their field and didn’t feel nearly as much pressure not just to succeed, but to be at the top of their own field.
We have experienced this to some extent. Years ago the entire family went on a lavish cruise with the grandparents footing the bill - but one of the requirements was that each woman bring six pieces of evening attire - two formal gowns and four cocktail dresses. Most of the attendees already owned these gowns, but I didn’t have one. At the time we were barely out of college and it was tough to swing. Of course we did it. I had never left the country and it was a once in a lifetime experience. But that is also where I’ve always felt weird because it was nice, but I don’t have the desire to live like that all the time. Being frequently around people who demand that kind of luxury is really disconcerting.
It was also tough when we got married and we could not afford to invite everyone in his enormous family. Feelings were hurt. They forgave us, fortunately, but their idea of a wedding is an outrageously expensive 400 person affair. We got married in someone’s backyard with a guest list of fifty.
Now we just have a budget category called “Lastname Tax” and we save money for these inevitable expenses. It’s less of an issue than it used to be. But we started out with almost nothing and it’s not like they were being intentionally exclusionary, they just took it for granted that people would be able to afford what probably seemed trivial expenses to them.
Unfortunately these charities really seem to be scams, a way to keep power and control over the money and avoid paying taxes on it.
(Gives an example with the Gates foundation, whose investments included $538 million in Coca Cola shares in 2014. They invested into Kenyan agriculture to grow passion fruit destined for Coca Cola as one such “charitable project”.)
(The guy from “Adam Ruins Everything” describing these foundations as well.)