Albert Barnes Commentary Psalms 49:13

"This their way is their folly: Yet after them men approve their sayings. Selah" — Psalms 49:13 (ASV)

This their way is their folly—This could be understood as, "This is their way or course of life. It is their folly;" or, "Such is their folly." Regarding the word "way," see the notes on Psalm 1:6. The idea is that it is folly for a man to cherish these hopes; to feel that wealth is of so much importance; to imagine that it can deliver from the grave; to suppose that he can perpetuate his own name and secure his possessions in his own family on the earth.

And yet the world is still full of people as foolish as those were in the psalmist's time—people who will not be admonished by the suggestions of reason or by the experience of 6,000 years in the past. This is one thing in which the world makes no progress—in which it learns nothing from the experience of the past. And as the beaver, influenced by instinct, builds its house and home now in the same way the first beaver did, and as animals all act in the same manner from generation to generation, accumulating no knowledge and making no advances from the experience of the past, so it is with people in their desire to grow rich.

On other points, the world accumulates knowledge and profits from experience, gathering the lessons taught by past experiment and observation, and thus becoming wiser in all other respects. But in regard to the desire for wealth, it makes no progress, gains no knowledge, and derives no advantage from the generations of fools who have lived and died in past ages. They now engage in the pursuit of gold with the same zeal, expectation, and hope that were shown in the first ages of the world, and as if their own superior skill and wisdom could nullify all the lessons taught by the past.

Yet their posterity—The coming generation is as confident and as foolish as the one that went before.

Approve their sayings—The margin reads, "delight in their mouth." That is, they delight or take pleasure in what proceeds from their mouth; in what they say; in their views of things. They adopt their principles and act on their maxims; and, attaching the same importance to wealth that they did, they seek, as they sought, to perpetuate their names on the earth.