On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 6:23 PM, Eubulides <[email protected]> wrote:
> What do you think the Kochs and Waltons of the world are? > > If you are a billionaire, you are, by definition, a sociopath. > > ============ > > I’d really like to see some *evidence* for this claim. Not just a bunch of > strung together Ipse Dixit quotes by people who all simply declare that > rich people are sociopaths, creating a surrealistic circuit of self-serving > confirmation bias. > My main assertion here is that wealth (beyond a relatively modest threshold) is a purely positional good. If you accept that, it follows, pretty much by definition, that accumulation of wealth is a negative-sum game. It is an ontological rather than an empirical assertion, and as such, I am not sure what kind of evidence it is possible to provide for it. To put it slightly differently, wealth is a claim on some scarce resource, which by definition excludes others from using that resource. When you are very wealthy, you are making claims on resources that you cannot possibly use yourself, which means you are making claims for the sole purpose of denying other people the use of valuable resources. That seems to me the very essence of sociopathy. That being said, there is some evidence that anti-social behavior is strongly correlated with affluence: http://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/index4.html -raghu.
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