Research suggests that more money makes people act less human.

No. Two things. First, taking this study and applying it to "money" is very correlative, and a decent leap considering the methods for the study. The real value of this study, if there's any at all, is about someone having huge unfair advantages in a general sense; having freedom to treat someone however you want because they don't have the means to rebel.

And second, the examination of this isn't new at all. Heart of Darkness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Apocalypse Now, King Leopold's Ghost, tons and tons of artists have examined what happens when someone has an unfair advantage without consequence; those are just some I plucked quickly, but there are so many.

I'm not saying the point is completely invalid. In a lot of cases, money gives people the exact freedom, privilege, and less-restrained power that leads to this behavior.

But saying "Research suggests more money makes people less human" based on a rigged monopoly game where the other person is severely relatively handicapped is...a bit of a leap, to say the least.

The other studies mentioned in the article don't sound very convincing, either.

quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people

Quizzes/questionnaires are notoriously prone to being bullshit, like the China Study's questionnaires including "Pizza" as meat and the book going on to draw correlations between its definitions of "meat" and diseases like cancer. I'd way rather see more info on the "in-lab manipulations and field studies", it was only touched on briefly, it seemed.

To show convincingly that more money causes you to have less "humanity", you have to have two groups:

1) Control group. Monitor their "humanity" over several years.

2) Test group. Give these people lots of money. Monitor their "humanity" over several years.

This would be quite an expensive study.

Not only is PG an existence disproof of the belief, but the mechanism by which he is getting richer is very much the same mechanism that other rich people employ, though often with less obvious social benefits. So, PG is not an anomaly that proves the rule. He's a more visible example of the rule that is often obscured with hot air, but that applies in the vast majority of cases. For instance, while I truly despise Bill Gates, I must recognize that Windows made billions of people's lives easier[1] and thus Gates made his money by improving the world.

Some people can get wealthy via pull and theft, for example, many politicians get wealthy essentially by trading pull. I'm sure there are examples of non-politicians that get wealthy this very same way (trading political pull at a net loss to society.)

But the real way to get wealthy is to make other people's lives better-- in fact, this is the startup advice often seen in other contexts as "find a real pain point and solve it."

[1] ...not easier than if those people had a good operating system, but that's not the comparison. The comparison is to those people not having any operating system, or having only MS-DOS if they already had a PC.