I was reading about the “tax cuts” recently passed by Congress. Whoever wrote the article concluded that the new legislation wasn’t likely to alter the trend that seems to be that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
This brought to mind a study that was performed recently (I think it was published in New York magazine) that indicated that having a lot of money is not necessarily a benefit at least when it comes to embodying characteristics that lead to inner peace like empathy, honesty and compassion. One of the more interesting conclusions was that money can actually make you mean.
Another study at the University of California-Berkeley looked at the differences in the way rich and poor people think. The study found that the rich have less compassion for others — but — it isn’t because they have faulty “hard-wiring.” It’s because they lack an education from the school of Hard Knocks. They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering because they haven’t had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives. The study came to some other interesting conclusions, like: drivers of high-end luxury cars were more likely to cut off other drivers and the rich were more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people.
One could read the study and conclude that all rich people are jerks… of course that’s not true — rich people are just people and they come in various flavors and sizes and have different levels of empathy, honesty and compassion.
As you may have guessed, all this got me to thinking…. what does it mean to be “rich?” I guess that I don’t know any really rich people — at least not in the sense that most people think of as rich. If you ask me if I’m rich, the answer has to be, “yes!” Everyone can be rich in many ways — obviously you can be rich monetarily, but you can be rich emotionally, spiritually, socially, etc.
I certainly don’t have enough money to do all the things that would be nice to do, but if the market collapses and/or the economy goes south, we can probably still make ends meet and maintain a reasonable standard of living, I’m reasonably healthy, I have the very best wife in the world, the best kids and grandkids. We’re not social butterflies, but we have a good number of friends and enjoy socializing with them… I can sleep at night content. I’d say that comfortably puts me in the rich category — as someone once said, there is a gigantic difference between earning a great deal of money and being rich….
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