alyssavance comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 January 2010 04:35PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 January 2010 07:06:48PM 16 points [-]

Surely you should be asking about the marginal utility of money spent on eating out before you ask about money spent on cryonics. What is this strange mental accounting where money spent on cryonics is immediately available to be redirected to existential risks, but money spent on burritos or French restaurants or an extra 100sqft in an apartment is not?

Comment author: alyssavance 20 January 2010 07:52:57PM *  10 points [-]

I have a theory about this, actually. How it works is: people get paid at the beginning of the month, and then pay their essential bills, food, rent, electricity, insurance, Internet, etc. What happens next is, people have a certain standard of living that they think they're supposed to have, based somewhat on how much money they make, but much more on what all their friends are spending money on. They then go out and buy stuff like fancy dinners and a house in the suburbs and what not, and this spending is not mentally available as something that can be cut back on, because they don't see it as "spending", so much as "things I need to do to maintain my standard of living"; people see it as a much larger burden to write a single check for $2,000 than to spend $7 every day on coffee, because they come out of different mental pools. Anything left over after that gets put into cryonics, or existential risk, or savings, or investments, etc. That's why you see so many more millionaire plumbers than millionaire attorneys, because the attorney has a higher standard of living, and so has less money left over to save.

Comment author: gwern 20 January 2010 08:04:53PM 7 points [-]

"A man does not 'by nature' wish to earn more and more, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and earn as much is necessary for that purpose... & a people only work because and so long as they are poor."

--Max Weber, Protestant Ethic

That's why you see so many more millionaire plumbers than millionaire attorneys, because the attorney has a higher standard of living, and so has less money left over to save.

We do?

Comment author: RobinZ 20 January 2010 08:06:03PM 3 points [-]

That's why you see so many more millionaire plumbers than millionaire attorneys, because the attorney has a higher standard of living, and so has less money left over to save.

We do?

I was going to comment on that, but I don't see any millionaires at all, so I thought I shouldn't.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 21 January 2010 06:06:30AM 2 points [-]

I was going to comment on that, but I don't see any millionaires at all, so I thought I shouldn't.

The main point of "the Millionaire Next Door" is that you might not notice millionaires.

Comment author: alyssavance 20 January 2010 08:24:28PM *  2 points [-]
Comment author: gwern 20 January 2010 10:32:28PM *  4 points [-]

It cites statistics, and actually says that there are X millionaire lawyers, and X+Y plumbers? It isn't just giving a lot of anecdotes?

I would be very surprised to hear that, because it implies that one is substantially more likely to become a millionaire by plumbing than by lawyering, since there are ~500,000 plumbers in the US and >1.1million lawyers.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 21 January 2010 06:42:55AM *  3 points [-]

It cites statistics, and actually says that there are X millionaire lawyers, and X+Y plumbers? It isn't just giving a lot of anecdotes?

According to wikipedia it (1) generally cites statistics and (2) says that doctors, lawyers, and accountants save a much lower proportion of money than other occupations. google books says that it doesn't mention plumbers at all.

I would guess that pretty much all lawyers permanently employed at BIGLAW are millionaires and pretty much no other lawyers are; but that's probably enough to beat plumbers. I think the other lawyers have a similar income distribution to plumbers.