Early in his academic career, Schervish was a committed Democratic Socialist. But around 1990, he began interviewing wealthy people and decided that his Marxist instinct to criticize the rich was misguided. “I realized good and evil are equally distributed across the economic spectrum and not particular to the wealthy or the poor,” he says. “A lot of wealth holders were very sincerely concerned about others and were doing something about it.” His recent papers, many co-authored with John Havens, the associate director and senior research associate at the center, have done much to exonerate the rich from the charge that they are more tightfisted than the non-rich. (They’re not, Schervish and Havens say: as individuals move up the wealth scale, they give away a greater share of their assets.)

Although Schervish may defend the wealthy, he clearly refuses to hold them in awe. He likes to quote Deuteronomy: “Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse.” As he explains, “Money is like fire: it will warm your feet or it will burn your socks off.” In the complaints voiced by the survey’s wealthy respondents, he believes he hears echoes of religious figures such as the Buddha, who gave up the life of a playboy prince to achieve enlightenment; and of Saint Ignatius himself, the 16th-century Basque nobleman who repudiated his wealth and founded Schervish’s own Jesuit order.

“Some of the respondents don’t yet know the depth of the yearning in their words,” Schervish says. “I hear Buddha and Ignatius very much saying that you have to discern your path and get rid of the things that are encumbrances. That’s what these people are trying to find out: Do I have what I want? Am I screwing my kids up? They have the quantity, now they have to figure out the quality of their wants. They don’t all say that—some are stuck way before that. But this is what’s going on, whether they realize it or not.

“I never forgot the concerns that I learned as a Jesuit. But I got rid of the absolute certainties that I had about how to achieve them,” Schervish says, adding, “Trump not, lest you be trumped.” The rich, he points out, could easily ask him why he is teaching sociology instead of donning sackcloth, selling his possessions, and giving everything to the poor. “I found that there is no telling people what needs need attending to, because needs are infinite. And they’d be better off channeling their work through inspiration, rather than dictation by others.”

In early 2009, roughly 115,000 American households were warming or singeing their toes on fortunes of $25 million or more—a population that had increased more than threefold since 1989, according to the center’s Havens. The broadest distinction among this group is between those who primarily inherited their money and those who primarily earned it. The former are members of what Warren Buffett famously dubbed “the lucky sperm club.” These inheritors sometimes display the stereotypical arrogance of privilege—the fast cars and wanton lifestyles—but the more introspective among them contend with worries that they’ll lack the motivation to accomplish anything in life or to escape the shadows of their parents. This self-doubt is magnified by the knowledge that they’re unlikely to find sympathy from anyone other than their fellow inheritors.