They may have used the word "noble", but very probably did not link that to wealth.
They may have used the word "noble", but very probably did not link that to wealth.
Support your statements, show it. Most people alive would have not been informed on basic ethics, nor basic language?!
Not your initial claim: the claim of the median human not being aware of basic dictionary and ethics.
Of course psychopathy as lack of restraint facilitates amassing riches.
To state the absence of family and schools and contact with books for a majority indicates a weird world view, or an impossibility to put heterogeneous populations in the same basket.
To be clear, I am saying that the link these words connote is wrong, and that it's indeed logical to expect a wealthy person to be selfish. I'm just saying that something drove our culture to forego that logic and make the erroneous link described, and it's written in our language. I can't tell you where that link comes from.
I can go along with us having the tendency to determine the value of things in terms of money, but not with determining how virtuous somebody in terms of wealth. The former is morally neutral (even though it does pull society away from thinking in terms of what actually matters to wellbeing etc.), the latter isn't.
None of the examples you mentioned equate wealth with virtue/ethical behavior. "Nobility" does to an extent.
With regard to modern day connotations of wealth: I'd say that most people associate it with either luck or being savvy in some way; definitely not with ethical behavior.