A Logical Process to Understand True Wealth

I have tried out the following intellectual filtering procedure with both multi-thousand general public audiences and with audiences of only a hundred or so advanced scholars and have never experienced disagreement with my progression of residual conclusions. I proceed as follows: I am going to make a series of analytical statements to you, and if anyone disagrees with me on any statement we will discard that statement. Only those of all my statements which remain 100 per cent unprotected wil...

 Studies Link Wealth to Unethical Behavior Pt II

Study 6. Study 6 extended these findings to actual cheating behavior. Participants played a “game of chance,” in which the computer presented them with one side of a six-sided die, ostensibly randomly, on five separate rolls. Participants were told that higher rolls would increase their chances of winning a cash prize and were asked to report their total score at the end of the game. In fact, die rolls were predetermined to sum up to 12. The extent to which participants reported a total ...

 Studies Link Wealth to Unethical Behavior

Studies 1 and 2. Our first two studies were naturalistic field studies, and examined whether upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals while driving. In study 1, we investigated whether upper-class drivers were more likely to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection with stop signs on all sides. As vehicles are reliable indicators of a person's social rank and wealth (15), we used observers’ codes of vehicle status (make, age, and appearance)...

 Increases in Wealth in the Last 30 Years have been in the...

There have been trillions of dollars of wealth created in recent decades, but most of it went to a relatively small share of the population. In fact, economist Ed Wolff found that over 100% of all the wealth increase in America between 1983 and 2009 accrued to the top 20% of households. The other four-fifths of the population saw a net decrease in wealth over nearly 30 years. In turn, the top 5% accounted for over 80% of the net increase in wealth and the top 1% for over 40%. With almost a fr...

 Chemists Live More Sweetly Than Persian Kings

The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasures amid smoke and vapour, soot and flame, poisons and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that may I die if I were to change places with the Persian king.

 Nobody in This Country Got Rich on His Own

I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No!There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear.You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come an...