He and his colleagues found that as a person’s level of wealth increases, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, while feelings of entitlement and an ideology of self-interest increase.

I began to feel a terrible tension between having too much money and not having enough, at the same time recognizing that none of the money was really mine to begin with. While my parents never said so outright, I could feel the strings.

George Bailey Sr. is a kind, loving man who founds the Bailey Building and Loan, the kind of banking establishment that demands a sense of community to be successful. It was designed, first and foremost, to make home ownership available to the “common man” by leveraging the savings of the community to help one

What we have, and what we believe about what we have, greatly influence the decisions we make about how we live our lives and who

During the recession of 2007–09, for example, the average wealth of the top 1 percent dropped by 16 percent; meanwhile the wealth of the bottom 99 percent dropped 47 percent. The statistics go on and on and are startling.9

While I believe spiritual practice will benefit anyone, this book assumes that readers have access to a basic level of privilege, in that they are able to sustain themselves with a roof over their heads, food, and clothing.

In other words, our ancestors’ experiences can affect our own brains and, therefore, our own experiences. Studies show that traumas experienced in one generation, such as the Jews during the Holocaust or children who have been abused, can show up as inherited psychological and behavioral tendencies in future generations, even if the specific memori

A 2015 study found that children raised in wealthy families turned out wealthy, whether they were biological children or adopted. Although this study didn’t try to pinpoint exactly what in the environment was creating this trend, they found it was not related entirely to wealth being passed on from one generation to the other.

we think we are—in other words, how we live inside the whale.