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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

If this is true, then I suppose that smarter people are also richer.

Happiness > Wealth Accumulation.

Depends on what you're optimising your life for. Money is very easy to measure, work/life balance, family and other factors are all incredibly difficult to measure and are arguably more important. Plenty of relatively poor people have extremely happy lives.

That's interesting. So I'd imagine that sharper folks might maximize quality of life, work/life balance, and friendships rather than a simple number.

This. Just look at Math Professors. I think of them as incredibly rich. The compensation of their life enjoyment, fulfillment, freedom and free time is not visible, but could possibly be estimated very high, monetarily. For instance, one estimation of fulfillment could be the price of yachts and other status symbols of super rich people.

There are plenty of unhappy poor people. It's probably the largest category overall.

there are plenty of unhappy rich people and probably the % is bigger.

I think it’s pretty well understood that the money/happiness relationship is initially very strongly correlated but reaches a point of rapidly diminishing returns once a certain economic threshold is met. i.e. it’s nearly impossible to be “happy” if you’re experiencing food shortages because you can’t afford food consistently, but it’s also possible to be “unhappy” if you didn’t get the right color Porsche for your 16th birthday

If you have to work to survive you are working class, simple as. Life's much happier without survival struggle

Working class life can be happy if you love your work.

Maybe that's what many smart people choose and why they are not rich.

> If you have to work to survive you are working class, simple as.

While the working class always have to work to survive, it is also possible for someone in the middle class and even the upper class to also have to work to survive.

In both the middle and upper class cases, if the capital portion of one's position is insufficient to cover one's survival needs, then the labor component remains necessary to their survival. In other words, they have to work to survive even though they have capital to take them out of the working class.

It is not so simple at all.

Well, in upper class you simply hire someone to manage your money, making sure that you have a high return on investments.

If someone needs $40,000 per year for survival while making $30,000 per year from capital investments and $10,000 per year from labor, they are upper class[1], but need to work to survive. Sure, long term, a talented hire might be able to transform that capital from earning just $30,000 per year into much, much more. But, in the interim the need to work to survive would only intensify.

[1] Some might call it upper-middle class instead, but the concepts remain the same.

I honestly don't understand what point you are trying to make.

Yes, there will be a level of income below which you will have to work.

Yes, there will also be a level of income above which you will certainly not have to work, given half-decent management of your wealth.

And yes, there will be an area in between where you may or may not need to work.

> I honestly don't understand what point you are trying to make.

We noticed. Oh well. Can't understand everything, I suppose.

It's a factor, but to a lesser degree than greed and selfishness.

And sheer luck.

On average, they are

Smart people know what enough is.

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