

How Can America's Rich Teach Their Children the Value of a Dollar? - kradic
http://nymag.com/news/features/42595/

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edu
Off-topic rant: why the hell the article is divided in pages? Six of them!
This is the WEB. W.E.B. Not a paper magazine. Argh.

Sorry, this kind of things really annoy me. Proceed to downvote ;)

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fallintothis
Agreed. The fix being the "Print" link, of course:

[http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&...](http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Rich+Kid+Syndrome&urlID=25718435&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fnews%2Ffeatures%2F42595%2F)

Though it's silly to have to jump through that hoop, as tucked away and hidden
as it is.

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paul
Interesting quote: "Writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1981,
George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who's spent the bulk of his career
devoted to the study of adult resilience and coping, argued that childhood
capacity for work is one of the best predictors of adult mental health and the
capacity to love. He based his conclusion on a famous longitudinal study of
456 young men from inner Boston who, starting in the forties, were followed
beginning at age 14. All came from blue-collar and welfare families, and none,
at least at the time of their selection, had juvenile records. The subjects
were assigned ratings for their ability to work as teenagers--in school, at
home, in jobs outside the home, in extracurricular pursuits--and they were
reinterviewed at several intervals since, at ages 25, 31, 47. The outcomes
were pretty stark. Those who demonstrated the greatest capacity for work as
14-year-olds were five times more likely to be paid well for their work at 47
than those who scored lowest, and sixteen times less likely to have
experienced unemployment--and intelligence, Vaillant was careful to note, did
little to mediate the latter outcomes. They were also twice as likely to have
warm relations with a wide variety of people and almost twice as likely to
still be enjoying their first marriages. But perhaps the most striking datum
was what Vaillant wryly called a "value-free definition of health": Those who
had the poorest ratings were six times as likely, at age 47, to be dead."

I think the premise that this is a problem for the rich is a bit off though.
Plenty or poor and middle class people are mean, lazy, or stupid too. The
truth is simply that money won't solve all of your problems.

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Alex3917
"The truth is simply that money won't solve all of your problems."

True, although I suspect there are a lot of problems that money could solve
that we just haven't figured out yet. A really cool book for someone to write
would be a collection of best practices for solving problems with money.

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noonespecial
To the founder type, as strange as it sounds, (inherited) wealth is a curse.
It will color every every success you achieve for the rest of your life.

"Yeah, he started X.com" they'll say, "but he had all of daddy's money; How
could he possibly fail?"

Even a small windfall will rob you of the ability to achieve greatness, if not
in your own eyes, certainly in the eyes of others. There's just something
right starting with nothing but a tiny apartment, 2 ebay computers and a
folding table!

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maurycy
There's yet another factor, which reminds me the Market Wizards book. One of
the famous traders asked who has, in his opinion, more chances to success, a
poor one or a rich one, picked the poor one, because the poor one _feels_ pain
when loses money.

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mynameishere
In some Eastern countries (and at least one Western state) there's a simple
solution: You make an exact correspondence between how much wealth you have
and how many wives you take. Thus, you have so many children that none of them
can become especially wealthy.

In most of the Western world, there was a similar fix: Primogeniture. The
first boy would get all the money, and the younger ones would have nothing.

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pg
Bill Gates would die of exhaustion first.

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Tichy
Or fall back to in vitro fertilization.

Come to think about it, wouldn't that law (the richer you are, the more
children you are required to have) fix a lot of problems? Inequality, dumbing
down of society...

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vitaminj
So would laws advocating eugenics, euthanasia of old people and cripples,
sterilization of dumbasses, etc. Doesn't mean they're good ideas.

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Tichy
Sure, I was only joking ;-)

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superjared
By comparing it to the Euro?

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whacked_new
Awesome read, thanks a lot!

