What surprises me the most is that this is true even for the self-made millionaires I know, they do not like showing off money in any way. Yet we keep praising people who basically live cashflow negative with inherited money. We focus too much on big spending and end up promoting consumption over real effort.
Maybe it's time we stopped making excuses for an unfair system and started looking for real solutions. We often quote Adam Smith for his invisible hand, but we should also pay attention to what he said about inequality and how dangerous it is when wealth is concentrated in too few hands.