From Nassis Taleb’s “Skin in the Game”
Only the Rich are Poisoned: The Preferences of Others
“When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences for their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery. And these constructed preferences are of course the preferences of those who want to sell them something.” (p. 167)
“It is easy to scam people by getting them into complications—the poor are spared that type of scamming. This is the same complication we saw in Chapter 9 that makes academics sell the most possibly complicated solution when a simple one can do. Further, the rich start using “experts” and “consultants.” An entire industry meant to swindle you will swindle you: financial consultants, diet advisors, exercise experts, lifestyle engineers, sleeping councilors, breathing specialists, etc. Hamburgers, to many of us, are vastly tastier than filet mignon because of the higher fat content, but people have been convinced that the latter is better because it is more expensive to produce.” (p. 168)
“Same with real estate: most people, I am convinced, are happier in close quarters, in a real barrio-style neighborhood, where they can feel human warmth and company. But when they have big bucks they end up pressured to move into outsized, impersonal, and silent mansions, far away from neighbors.” (p. 169)
“Very few people understand their own choices, and end up being manipulated by those who want to sell them something. In that sense, impoverishment might even be desirable.” (p. 169)
“To put it another way: if wealth is giving you fewer options instead of more (and more varied) options, you’re doing it wrong.” (p.169)
“If anything, being rich you need to hide your money if you want to have what I call friends. This may be known; what is less obvious is that you may also need to hide your erudition and learning. People can only be social friends if they don’t try to upstage or outsmart one another.” (p. 170)
“So long as society is getting richer, someone will try to sell you something until the point of degradation of your well-being, and a bit beyond that.” (p. 171)
“We used to live in small communities; our reputations were directly determined by what we did—we were watched. Today, anonymity brings out the a**hole in people. So I accidentally discovered a way to change the behavior of unethical and abusive persons without verbal threat . Take their pictures. Just the act of taking their pictures is similar to holding their lives in your hands and controlling their future behavior thanks to your silence. They don’t know what you can do with it, and will live in a state of uncertainty.” (p. 176)