The rich are different from you and me

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” All the Sad Young Men (1926).

To which I might add, "The rich are greedier than you and me." Consider this:

When Forbes first analyzed ... the value of NFL teams in 1998, the magazine valued the 49ers at $254 million... A rising economic tide of network television contracts and new stadiums has been raising the NFL's boats ever since... Forbes pegs the 49ers' value at $799 million in 2007.

"New stadiums lift NFL teams' value," Mike Swift, SJ Mercury News, 09/20/2007.

That's more than 3X increase in 9 years, or about 13% per year. Try to find that in your neighborhood bank's CD offerings.

Even the stock market didn't do nearly that well in the same time period: not the Dow, not the S&P500, not even the NASDAQ came close to doubling between January 1998 and 2007.

So what would you call this?

greed, n. An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.

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