Quote: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

...Aside from the misperception of one's performance, there is a social treadmill effect: you get rich, move to rich neighbourhoods, the become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness...

...I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money... we should remember that becoming rich is a purely selfish act, not a social one. The virtue of capitalism is that society can take advantage of people's greed rather than their benevolence, but there's no need to, in addition, extol such greed as a moral (or intellectual) accomplishment...

Fooled by Randomness, 2004