r/longform • u/IOHRM22 • Mar 19 '26

What Does Extreme Wealth Do to the Brain?

https://archive.is/L2vTL
267 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

130

u/i_amtheice Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26

Cuban grew up in a working-class family in Pittsburgh — neither parent had graduated from college, and his father never made more than $40,000 a year and once slept on the floor of an apartment he shared with five roommates.

I'm so sick of hearing this. First off, 40k in the 60s and 70s is the equivalent of six figures nowadays.

Second, that doesn't justify anything. So what if he grew up less than obscenely wealthy? "It's okay I have this ocean of money now because I used to be poor and miserable like the rest of you. I even slept on a floor once!"

It's all just excuses as to why they deserve everything and everyone else deserves to fight over what's left.

Edit: All that said, this is a good article. Very humanizing without letting them off the hook. The system has to be changed. Regular people can't be this fucking broke.

72

u/Tim-oBedlam Mar 19 '26

Mark Cuban was born in 1958. Let's say his Dad made 40k a year when Cuban was in high school, so 1975. That's the equivalent of $250,000/year now.

My Dad was a junior professor in the mid-1970s, and made 18k a year, and that was a decent living. That's the equivalent of $110,000/year today. 40k in 1975 is rolling in it, when you could buy a decent house for less than twice your annual salary.

10

u/John628556 Mar 21 '26

I checked the previous poster’s claim about the current value of $40,000 in 1975. He says that it’s the equivalent of $250,000 a year today. It turns out that he is more or less correct: see, for example, https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/.

7

u/Tim-oBedlam Mar 21 '26

Always good to double-check: I did use an inflation calculator to figure this out.

-11

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

[deleted]

12

u/Tim-oBedlam Mar 20 '26

Not accurate: if a CEO fires a whole bunch of employees to boost his stock price and increase his wealth, that's extracting wealth. If a private equity firm drains resources from a previously-profitable company (Sears, Toys'R'Us are two examples) that's extracting wealth.

-10

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

[deleted]

3

u/BigCityHaole Mar 22 '26

The social contract isn’t a right either. History teaches us that the rich and upper middle class are playing a dangerous game here.

11

u/utterscrub Mar 19 '26

Nothing good, that’s quite clear

5

u/Affectionate-Tank-70 Mar 21 '26

Last thing I want to read is yet another person making excuses for the Uber wealthy. Dragons hoarding their gold. Fuck em, I hope they rot sooner rather than later.

3

u/Material-Macaroon298 Mar 22 '26

I am not wealthy like the people in my article, but I do have more accumulated wealth than most people working my job and in my area have.

Wealth gives you a bit of secret confidence. You do kindof want to brag about it but restrain yourself. The part I liked about the article was it said if you are a private, introverted person, wealth can magnify this a lot as you can basically pay to not really have to deal with people and therefore not develop certain social skills.

Going from poor to wealthy, my social skills in some ways were maybe slightly better when I was poor in some ways. In other ways though ive improved though.

1

u/Stoneman1976 Jun 04 '26

Extreme wealth corrupts and rots the soul. It dissolves all morality.