I don't disagree dozer, but I think if you consider the population of people with winning-type personalities, you'd find only a very small joint distribution of people who also lack empathy. It'd certainly be the exception and not the rule. As for whether lacking empathy and being kind and outgoing would be good traits for making money, this is a judgment call and our arguing about it wouldn't yield anything constructive; but it still seems unlikely that if we were to accept it as true, we could then conclude that the wealthy tend to be sociopaths.

@eug, I think it's pretty easy to hate these finance types, especially after what we've collectively been through the past 5 years or so. I also think however that we've been sort of indoctrinated culturally against these types of people; I don't need to point out the examples of fictionalized billionaire badguys to you.

But more importantly, I think people want to believe that wealthy people are in some way inherently bad. We are unable to relate to the very wealthy. They must be different from us. We hear news stories about Enron and Goldman Sachs and subconsciously generalize from there. It's a bit of a romantic thing to think that the only way to become wealthy is through greed and sociopathic tendencies. In some way, it justifies our own lack of wealth. Hey, we didn't get to be rich, but at least we weren't dicks to everyone.

It's just human nature man. But I consider myself an empiricist, I'm not going to blindly accept stereotypes, especially when shown evidence to the contrary.