4 ms·
There was an article a while back that discussed how most people's perception of what is "enough" wealth is always ~30% more than what they currently have, be i
by chroem 13y ago
There was an article a while back that discussed how most people's perception of what is "enough" wealth is always ~30% more than what they currently have, be it thousands or millions of dollars. Unfortunately I can't find the article at the moment, but the point still stands that, to a certain extent, wealth addiction has become embedded in our culture and we are taught to seek it from a young age. So to say that the financial industry is somehow immune to something everyone else around them is suffering from seems to be pretty disingenuous.
- gjm11 13y agoI'm sure there are a lot of people in the finance industry who constantly think that "enough" is 30% more than they currently have (or maybe rather more than that -- someone well placed in finance can accumulate wealth pretty fast). I wonder, though, how much of what's gone wrong with finance is because of that. The spectacular cockups and conspiracies that have become public seem to be more about seriously pathological greed than about ordinary garden-variety wanting-a-bit-more. (Also, I offer myself as a counterexample to the strongest versions of the enough-is-30%-more theory: my current estimate of how much is "enough" is lower than it was 10 years ago, even though I have a lot more money now than I had then. However, I am not in the finance industry and I'm only one person :-).)