>think some good evidence for this is that Ken Olsen, by most accounts, was a saint and he owned DEC

You're right that the money itself does not cause it but what mattered with people like Olsen was that he had a Scandinavian background and was born in the 1920s. 'Saint' is a telling description because people like him came out of a, not necessarily explicit but still functioning culturally Christian environment with virtues that tempered the influence money had on them, he often remarked that humility was most important to him.

Very different person from the current class of individuals who are completely unrestrained by the values people took for granted for a long time.

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mghackerlady 2 hours ago | parent [-]

if the US of all places isn't a culturally christian environment I don't know what is

	▲	bix6 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Has US Christianity always been like this or has it changed? It all feels very manipulative to me now and the morals / virtues seem to have fallen by the wayside.
	▲	Barrin92 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		it isn't, not in his sense anyway. The moderate, central and northern European mainline Protestantism that fostered democracy, education, an egalitarian social contract and temperance you if at all find now only in small pockets. It's a huge mistake to confuse that kind of deep cultural Christianity with what has been politically ascendant for a long time now in the US. That older, European set of values is still much more alive in say Sweden, which despite an even higher per capita rate of billionaires would not produce Garry Tan or Bezos or Musk.