What would you do with a financial safety net?

faul_sname

In the open thread, moridinamael hypothesized that LWers would be willing to take more risks in order to become rich if they had a financial safety net. This seems like an idea worth exploring further.

What would you do if you had a financial safety net (maybe a year's worth of living expenses) to fall back on if your venture failed?

Thanks for posting this.

Peter Thiel's 20 under 20 contest pays 20 exceptional young people a $100,000 each. This is a good starting place for thinking about this type of thing, but I don't know if I agree with how he implemented it.

My reasoning underlying the original suggestion was this: "Self-made" highly wealthy individuals are often risk-seeking. Speaking for myself, I feel that I would be more risk-seeking if I had a guaranteed financial safety net. Without such a net, each individual spends most of their own life establishing financial security and never taking the kinds of risks that could lead to significant wealth. Thus, there's a tremendous amount of duplication of effort, in the sense that we're all making our own careers and yet we all agree that there are specific "more important things."

Even one ultra-wealthy* Less Wrong-style rationalist could do tremendous good through calculated donations and funding of projects.

*There is some ambiguity here obviously. Let's just say this means having enough personal discretionary wealth to fully fund one or more focused and effective long-term research projects.

"Self-made" highly wealthy individuals are often risk-seeking.

I think you have the causality reversed there.

0faul_sname15y

I suspect that you don't actually need to be ultra-rich to do this. $100,000 is certainly a sufficient amount of money, but I suspect that a tenth of that would be a good enough safety net for most people.

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