Date: Tuesday, 01 July 2025
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/what-its-like-to-be-a-billionaire
https://theduran.com/what-its-like-to-be-a-billionaire/
What It’s Like to Be a Billionaire
1 July 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
First will be the empirical scientific findings about the relationship between wealth and happiness in humans; then will be given an example of a billionaire and how he exemplifies those findings:
On 21 September 2010, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton headlined at PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life But Not Emotional Well-Being,” and reported that, “There is no further progress [in emotional well-being] beyond an annual income of ... $75,000 [that’s worth around $95,000 in 2025 money].” Virtually all of the wealth-seeking beyond that level produced nothing but status-benefits. This finding constituted a crushing disproof of Pareto optimality (since Pareto’s 1912 Treatise in Sociology, which nonetheless remains the foundational mathematical work in classical and neoclassical economic theory), the Pareto Welfare axiom, also called “Pareto efficiency” or simply “efficiency” in economic theory — the theory that enables economists to ‘justify’ unlimited inequality of wealth by assuming that each dollar is equal in value to every other dollar regardless of how wealthy each given dollar’s owner is. Economic theory ignores the relationship between wealth and its owner. Economics is founded on faith, not on science at all. At its foundation, economic theory is not just false, but silly-false — in order to satisfy the ultimate funders of economists’ careers, the super-rich. Truth isn’t their goal, insofar as theory in economics is concerned. However, empirical economists have produced much scientific work — actual scientific findings — in the field of economics; and what follows here will be (like that Kahneman-Deaton paper) from this (the empirical side of economics), NOT from economic (or any other) theory.
As Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, and Stone, well summarized in their May 2006 “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer?”:
“Large increases in income for a given country over time are not associated with increases in average subjective well-being. Easterlin (1), for example, found that the fivefold increase in real income in Japan between 1958 and 1987 did not coincide with an increase in the average self-reported happiness level there. [Also], although average life satisfaction in countries tends to rise with GDP per capita at low levels of income, there is little or no further increase in life satisfaction once GDP per capita exceeds $10,000. (3 [p. 32 of Layard’s 2005 Happiness: Lessons from a New Science])”
In short: the common presumption (and it’s also, ever since the time of Vilfredo Pareto in 1912) that becoming richer makes one happier, can be relevant up to annual incomes of around $100,000, but NOT higher. Higher than that is fulfilling status-cravings but not any additional happiness from the additional wealth itself.
The billionaire who will be presented as an example, is the world’s most successful retailer, Jeffrey Bezos:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHRC-LPuXAj/?igsh=MWtjd2FzbjhuMzhkbg==
https://www.tiktok.com/@unastocker/video/7478485834996649262
https://www.tiktok.com/@mauriesherman/video/7521018763865558277 [But they’re NOT “hedges.”]
https://www.tiktok.com/@nypost/video/7513226263822290222
https://www.businessinsider.com/venice-yachts-jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-wedding-2025-6
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-wedding-details-2025-4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xembbhY0vAM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCCDV-OTDX0
That is all about status. However, along with a billionaire’s enormous wealth comes ALSO the power to influence the public so as to get the public to vote ONLY for candidates who are going to increase still-further the billionaire’s wealth, even if that will be at the expense of the public and will even suppress the growth-rate of the nation’s GDP — in other words, REDUCE the nation’s wealth. This is by now an established fact about all billionaires — the remarkably few individuals who actually control the U.S. Government. This applies both in national U.S. politics and in state U.S. politics, so that the billionaires have veto-power to prevent ANY candidate they don’t control, from even getting their Party’s nomination (much less winning the final campaign). It is the aristocratic type of dictatorship, and it is a natural outcome of our system of ‘democracy’ — that it inevitably degenerates INTO an aristocracy. It has nothing to do with any INDIVIDUAL billionaire: it is a feature of ‘democracy’ as that is and has been defined. The only way to get better governments than our present billionaires-controlled governments would be to replace that false ‘democracy’ by a REAL democracy — by a government whose policy-priorities are the same as the public’s policy-priorities. (Billionaires have very different policy-priorities than the public do. Especially status is far more of an objective for a billionaire than it is for the average person, but there are other differences too between billionaires and the public. To be ruled by billionaires is therefore to be ruled by highly abnormal people, in that sense, and so it CANNOT EVEN POSSIBLY be a democracy — not at all.) The very definition of “democracy” must be changed in order for there to be any real possibility for there to come to be a democracy in the real world. No other ‘change’ would even possibly suffice.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
