I'm from a family that didn't grow up rich but a one member in particular did become rich from work. Another family member profited from a lawsuit. Both showed serious personality changes and became disconnected from the rest of the family and seemingly unaware of "normal people's" needs and concerns after that. I wonder if being rich doesn't kill a lot of the empathy we would usually have for others who spend their whole lives in financial insecurity. Once that's taken away as a worry, it's harder to relate in a genuine way to others who still think about it all the time just to make sure they can eat and pay bills.
A while ago I read about a study that surveyed people with inherited wealth. IIRC they ranged from having inherited tens to hundreds of millions. No matter how much they had inherited, when asked how much they would need to have inherited to feel financially secure and not have to worry about money, they said they would need something like half again to double.
I may be misremembering the details, but that was the gist of it but I couldn't find the article again. I suppose expectations scale up with means.
On the other hand discovering people they know are actually very wealthy seems to have a massive negative effect on people's levels of empathy. Wealthy people who have suffered bereavement or personal tragedy report people who are less wealthy than themselves rarely offer sympathy and they often get comments along the lines of 'knowing what it's like for the rest of us now', or 'what it's like to have a problem you can't buy your way out of'.
There is an implied causality in this article. Being rich -> Lose empathy.
I'd be curious to know if there indeed is causality in either direction (Less empathetic people get richer) or is it just correlation masquerading as causality.
To an extent, but I think being rich also shields you from reality. Rich people don't realise how greedy they are because no one ever dares to tell them or even hint at it.
They get used to getting extra attention, extra laughs at their jokes, extra compliments about how generous they are, etc... Over time, their idea of normal becomes very abnormal.
What is interesting is that people don't even know they have a complex about money until they get "rich." I've watched many people, perhaps a hundred, go from "working to pay the bills" to "holy crap I can pay all my current and possibly my future bills with the money I now have." That doesn't include the guy who lived in our neighborhood and won the CA lottery one year.
It affects people in ways they don't expect. If its sudden (like lottery winning or sudden IPO surge) it can be difficult to process. But it is an important thing to realize that one is processing an exceptional event. Like having a loved one die or a spouse suddenly divorcing you.
Not everyone feels "guilty", not everyone feels "smug." A lot of millionaires and billionaires in the Bay Area are outwardly unchanged. But the bottom line is that the emotion comes from the cognitive dissonance between values and reality. What do you value? What is reality?
One woman I knew at Google was massively conflicted when she started work at Google. She always felt that she would help the homeless folks she saw, if she had more money than she needed. Upon becoming rich (on Google stock value), now she found that she wanted to save the money she had for her future kids education and needs. Was she a bad person? Before? After? Do your kids hate you if you give away their college education to the local foodbank? Do your peers hate you because you could close the current food gap at the foodbank and you don't?
When people tell me they wish they were rich, I tell them to be careful what they wish for.
tl;dr Wealth has a measurable effect on empathy. Individual stories and exposure to lower-income people can still compel wealthy people to be more generous in spite of this effect.
One thing I learned as a parent is that kids always compare up the wealth scale, never down. I'm sure my parents noticed that, too.
I've never heard about the negative effect on levels of empathy. I suspect that it is unusual for people to have friends far poorer or richer, and it is easy to be dismissive of the problems of those one does not know.
I had a friend who worked as a concierge for an ultra-rich family, and didn't like the toll it took on his personality. He said "The attitude is contagious, but sadly the money isn't."
Didn't downvote you and Im not denying that what you’re saying is to some extent true but want to point out that’s mostly the case for the old rich. The new rich get affected quite badly by this money bug. At some point money becomes second and power becomes #1, in other words there’s never enough of it because more is needed to feed the ego/power, worries never subside - worries of a different nature than poor people’s, such as maintain that status, comparing with others at that level, that others are to take advantage of their wealth, power games in the family, inheritance nightmares, false friends, trusting no one, not even the partner sometimes etc. These are demons of money. Sure, there are rich people that are truly illuminated which detach completely from that world to pursue other things but these are usually not first gen.
If you want to make a correct generalization, moderation is the key goes a long way.
Personally, my financial goal is to become self sufficient (decent but modest pension and such) and that’s about it. Amassing wealth and spending lots of money does not interest me in the least.
Very true. I have coworkers who I only found out years later were wealthy through family money. They worked as hard as anyone else, and no one had any reason to know they were wealthy.
The wealthy people I work for strive towards giving their wealth away as best as they can to maximise their impact. They are also susceptible to health crises and family tragedy like everyone else. All the money in the world can't bring back family members or magically solve incurable health issues. While there must be some bad apples, my experience has led me to believe that it's unfair to categorize all wealthy people as uncaring, greedy and selfish.
My big takeaway from watching how 'the other side' lives, is that money is like a magnifying glass of who you really are. If you're genuinely virtuous--for example generous and caring--the wealth allows you to express that. I'm sure if you're greedy or have an addictive personality, you'll be even more destructive to yourself, those around you, and wider society. I'm extremely lucky to have the ability to not have to work with people like that.
I think that the general lack of empathy in rich people is mainly related to the fact that to succeed, you generally do have to try hard, work diligently towards a goal, and generally be reasonably smart, however, these things are necessary but not sufficient.
So rich people work their asses off and tend to assume that anybody who works their asses off will have the same result as they do, not realizing that you have to work you ass off, be in the right place in the right time, know the right people, grow up or have experience in the right environment and in general have all sorts of things fall into place in order to achieve a truly meteoric success.
Bingo. Money does not magically render a person impervious to the same insecurities, emotional reactivity, and other failings as ordinary people. It doesn't magically make someone more rational, more secure, less depressed, less fearful, or anything else. Rich people are just big bipedal monkeys with large integers in certain columns of a SQL table.
It's hard to sympathize with people feeling isolated because they're rich. They could at any time remedy their situation and return to the world of normal people. They choose to be in that situation.
They won't be seen as anti-social regardless. If they were no longer rich then they would be very differently. Beyond a certain point being rich is itself antisocial die to the societal cost of wealth disparity.
Wealthy people hold almost all of the power in America and the cultural reaction is to make sure other voices can be heard. I find that praiseworthy rather than something to disparage. I've known many wealthy people and many (not all) have been completely unable to comprehend the struggles poorer people deal with daily. Likewise, many of the poorer people I have known can't comprehend the lifestyle differences that come with being wealthy. My wife's mother, for instance, gives away all of her social security and alimony payments to struggling friends and family every month because her religion encourages it and she feels she is given too much in the first place. Her bank account is empty at the end of every month. My wife's nephew just graduated high school and also just had a baby with his girlfriend. He's working under the table and has no protections if his employer decides to stiff him, which has already happened multiple times on this job alone. He stays because he needs the money and is worried he wouldn't find another job soon enough if he left. He recently offered to get a payday loan to pay back her mother for some money she had loaned him for boots when she ended up being short on a utility bill. Fortunately he decided not to but no public high school in that area offers any kind of financial education course to tell him how bad of an idea those are.
My wife's brother drives all over the state looking for work, then once he finds a job he has to expect be laid off any day. On a recent job one of his team members stole something and didn't confess so the foreman fired the whole team. He pays child support for kids he doesn't see often and getting laid off can set him back months.
I have cousins who made dumb decisions when young and now have criminal records. A childhood friend reached out to me asking for money because his wife became addicted to heroin, ruined him financially and emotionally, and left him for another guy, taking his daughter with her. He had to spend a ton of money he didn't have on the court battle to get his daughter back from his heroin-addicted wife. Some of my best friends in high school were gifted but had great difficulty focusing on schoolwork and ended up coping with drug cocktails and are now working part time minimum wage jobs. I also know some dumb people who simply made bad choices and ended up putting themselves in holes they can't dig themselves out of. And they aren't even minorities, which are so statistically differentiated from white communities that when I build market models I have to remove ethnicity as an explanatory factor because it predicts nearly everything on its own and I don't want to reinforce stereotypes or abstracted discrimination among my customers.
On the other side, I know a wealthy international businessman who takes risks that would land anyone else in jail, like speeding around the city while driving drunk/high and crashing into a parked car. He broke his neck doing that but still drives drunk. For my wife's family that would have become a life crushing healthcare debt and at minimum a significant amount of time off work if not a life of disability, but for him it was a nuisance. He pays his workers under the table and his daughter just won a medal in the winter Olympics.
I work with several wealthy people who are working solely to make more money or have something to do. That's great but none of them have no understanding of the life of a poor person in this country, and they make assetions on how things should work based on how it impacts them and based on opinions they've heard from even wealthier people. I am related to people who have worked hard to become wealthy, and that is again great but now they claim anyone who is poor is lazy when that is not the case. They donate to causes that espouse the same.
I work in the real estate space so I also encounter a lot of lazy wealthy people who don't want to do any work but feel entitled to money because a piece of paper says they own a property. Legally and through market forces they usually are though they usually don't add any real value to society.
I've personally experienced both sides and my opinion is the poor need more help, whether that means education, healthcare, legal expenses, or just a voice in discussion. Successful people have their voice and are capable of amplifying it to the point where it reaches every voter in the US with little effort. The stories of millions of poor and working class are lost in the noise every day. It's not victimhood to describe your problems and explain why a certain ideology or policy will impact your life negatively. The wealthy in this country so often overlook real issues at lower levels that generally they will impact the lives of the poor whether they intend it or not. People are resilient, adaptable, and hard-working but sometimes they have a boot on their head keeping them dow and need help getting it off.
Also personally, I feel fortunate to have have lived and worked among many income classes in my life. I'm young, smart, hungry, skilled and effective so there is a high probability that I'll never have to worry about money again. I feel obliged to do what I can to change the balance of wealthy in this country to something that reduces suffering on a broad scale. I am working to get to the point where I can do that full time.
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