How Can America's Rich Teach Their Children the Value of a Dollar?

Off-topic rant: why the hell the article is divided in pages? Six of them! This is the WEB. W.E.B. Not a paper magazine. Argh.

Sorry, this kind of things really annoy me. Proceed to downvote ;)

Interesting quote: "Writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1981, George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who's spent the bulk of his career devoted to the study of adult resilience and coping, argued that childhood capacity for work is one of the best predictors of adult mental health and the capacity to love. He based his conclusion on a famous longitudinal study of 456 young men from inner Boston who, starting in the forties, were followed beginning at age 14. All came from blue-collar and welfare families, and none, at least at the time of their selection, had juvenile records. The subjects were assigned ratings for their ability to work as teenagers--in school, at home, in jobs outside the home, in extracurricular pursuits--and they were reinterviewed at several intervals since, at ages 25, 31, 47. The outcomes were pretty stark. Those who demonstrated the greatest capacity for work as 14-year-olds were five times more likely to be paid well for their work at 47 than those who scored lowest, and sixteen times less likely to have experienced unemployment--and intelligence, Vaillant was careful to note, did little to mediate the latter outcomes. They were also twice as likely to have warm relations with a wide variety of people and almost twice as likely to still be enjoying their first marriages. But perhaps the most striking datum was what Vaillant wryly called a "value-free definition of health": Those who had the poorest ratings were six times as likely, at age 47, to be dead."

I think the premise that this is a problem for the rich is a bit off though. Plenty or poor and middle class people are mean, lazy, or stupid too. The truth is simply that money won't solve all of your problems.

To the founder type, as strange as it sounds, (inherited) wealth is a curse. It will color every every success you achieve for the rest of your life.

"Yeah, he started X.com" they'll say, "but he had all of daddy's money; How could he possibly fail?"

Even a small windfall will rob you of the ability to achieve greatness, if not in your own eyes, certainly in the eyes of others. There's just something right starting with nothing but a tiny apartment, 2 ebay computers and a folding table!

In some Eastern countries (and at least one Western state) there's a simple solution: You make an exact correspondence between how much wealth you have and how many wives you take. Thus, you have so many children that none of them can become especially wealthy.

In most of the Western world, there was a similar fix: Primogeniture. The first boy would get all the money, and the younger ones would have nothing.

By comparing it to the Euro?

Awesome read, thanks a lot!