The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving.

The line is a wry, self-undercutting defense of the humanities: a “classical education” (Greek/Latin, philosophy, literature) is portrayed as cultivating refined values and critical distance from material success, even as it may offer fewer direct routes to wealth. The humor turns on a paradox—education both blocks the pursuit of riches and supplies the intellectual tools to scorn them—suggesting a psychological consolation as well as a genuine ethical stance. Read more generously, it argues that classical study trains judgment about what is worth wanting; read more cynically, it exposes how cultural prestige can be used to rationalize economic disappointment.