Quotes About Wealth

wealth does not count so much into one's well-being as the route one uses to get to it.

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status—but rarely for your wisdom.

You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references "money" in his conversation.

I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house.

It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researcher trying to tell you that you are wrong, by betting against his representation of the world.

social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness.

And, just as it is harder to have good qualities when one is rich than when one is poor, it is harder to be a Stoic when one is wealthy, powerful, and respected than when one is destitute, miserable, and lonely.

This anchoring to a number is the reason people do not react to their total accumulated wealth, but to differences of wealth from whatever number they are currently anchored to. This is the major conflict with economic theory, as according to economists, someone with $1 million in the bank would be more satisfied than if he had half a million. But

When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences for their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery.

The error in reasoning is a bit from wishful thinking, because education is considered "good"; I wonder why people don't make the epiphenomenal association between the wealth of a country and something "bad," say, decadence, and infer that decadence, or some other disease of wealth like a high suicide rate, also generates wealth.)

But we have evidence that collectively society doesn't advance with organized education, rather the reverse: the level of (formal) education in a country is the result of wealth.*2

Consider that all the wealth of the world can't buy a liquid more pleasurable than water after intense thirst.

the wealthiest are to be found among those less suspected to be wealthy.

A história mostra que, para a sociedade, quanto mais ricos nos tornamos, mais difícil é viver dentro de nossas próprias posses. Temos mais dificuldade em lidar com a abundância do que com a escassez.

Serious empirical investigation (largely thanks to one Lant Pritchet, then a World Bank economist) shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country. But we know the opposite is true, that wealth leads to the rise of education—not an optical illusion. We

There seems to be no such thing as a foolish decision if it results in profits.

Such businesses only care about the pool of funds available to the very rich.

Now I am punished by privilege and comfort—and I can't resist comfort.

2. No socialization of losses and privatization of gains.

I wonder why people don't realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon

My declared approach was to try to make money infrequently.

Sadly, it may be even worse for you to make $10 million, then lose back nine, than to making nothing at all! True, you may end up with a million (as compared to nothing), but it may be better had you got zilch. (This assumes, of course, that you care about financial rewards.)

What the French call "the caviar left," la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance—not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle. It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John XII, or the Borgias.