> What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.

In general, I advise people against believing psychology study results unless those results have been confirmed by other groups. From what I can tell though, the primal tendencies of people exist at all levels of the socioeconomic strata, and believing otherwise is ill-advised.

Secondly, it’s not that billionaires are different, it’s the systems which support them that make them who they are. China and Russia routinely let their billionaires know exactly who’s in charge of power.