1) Disparate industries seemingly conspiring to extract every marginal dollar out of wealthy people (good for them). That is, there seems to be no amount of money you can have that isn't easily disposed of in NYC, leaving you wishing you had 10x more.
2) Wealthy people by inheritance who seem to be genuinely room temperature IQ out competing high income earners for the best apartments, with all cash offers
In Brooklyn there are plenty of kids who inherited money and working jobs that do not match their wealth/housing/lifestyle. So they are spending down whatever wealth they inherited for sure.
The typical picture I've seen is that the parents/trust buy them a condo all-cash, and then the underemployed then live a lifestyle that implies easily a $1M/year income except in a job that would imply a $0-$100k income. So unless they inherit like $25M+, they are spending it down quickly.
I've also seen the early stages of this from the other end with my colleagues, where parents in NYC who come from more modest backgrounds, end up making FAANG level salaries but then having kids that want to get a philosophy degree and work at an NGO (while enjoying having a place in Manhattan to live and traveling internationally 3x/year).
I guess theres a fine line between giving your kids space to grow & pushing too hard / trying to choose their path for them.. But being raised in comfort does seem to remove the striving mindset and understanding that this lifestyle doesn't come for free or from a fun job.
>A senior lawyer who works for a private bank in Zurich says that, although egregious, the situation was hardly novel: it is widespread practice in Switzerland that independent wealth managers are given full power of attorney by clients.
>“We have clients where, basically, the authorised representatives, their financial advisers, do things like go and buy an expensive watch or whatever, and if we say, ‘No, don’t do that’, we will hear something back asking us why on earth we are making a fuss . . . They say they have given these people these powers, and it’s not up to us to decide what is reasonable or not.”
I mean, who believes $10 million is going to fall out of the sky and hit them except someone who has already been hit with $10 million falling from the sky?
Plus there is a limit for how much money you can scam out of a normal person.
Indeed, it seems very very likely that all correlations alleged of IQ, on independent performance measures, are just in this region (ie., that positive correlation above 100 comes merely from a trendline fit in the negatives).
I'm not sure it is as much "less bright" as maybe "more impulsive" or something like that. I think someone can be very smart and still want to "live for today".