Okay, the clarification was helpful.
This isn’t only about smart people and money, this could be about anything that otherwise intelligent people take for granted. Even something as seemingly mundane as electricity and fresh water. Or health, for that matter.
When people have been surrounded by “enough” money (or electricity, clean water, energy, whatever) for most or all of their lives, they tend to take it for granted. How many people think more deeply about electricity for 99.9% of every year than, “It comes out of those plastic receptacles in the wall.”? Or about fresh water: “Move the lever this way for hot or this way for cold, and push it this way to get more volume.”?
A lot of people (maybe not so many in Fluther, or so I’ve gleaned from the personal details that people share from time to time) have not had the same experience with money: they don’t take that for granted because they have to work hard for not-quite-enough of it. A lot of people have grown up in environments where this was not the case. They always had “enough” money for whatever they wanted to do and simply took it for granted that there would always be more.
Conversely, some who have to struggle to earn enough money to live comfortably don’t often realize how easily it can be acquired, if that’s where they want to focus their attention. They tend to think of it as a scare “substance” (in the same way that water can be scarce) that has to be hoarded, constantly striven for and diligently mastered. They can even develop fetishes and mysteries around it.
Sometimes, in fact, the smarter people are the more things they take for granted because of abundance – simply failing to realize the effort that has to go into some system somewhere to produce the resource – and the more mysteries and rituals they can get into when the thing becomes harder to find or produce.
On this basis, I like the question a lot. Something to think about.