Decius comments on How To Have Things Correctly - Less Wrong

57 Post author: Alicorn 17 October 2012 06:10AM

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Comment author: Bugmaster 16 October 2012 05:04:36PM 2 points [-]

If money doesn't buy you happiness, you don't have enough money.

For example, what would you do if you had ten billion dollars ? Some people would answer, "I'd buy my own zoo !" or whatever, but the real answer is, "I would never work again; instead, I'd pursue whatever projects I found interesting“. That kind of freedom could enable you to be quite happy.

I'm not sure if this kind of experience scales to lower amounts of money; there's probably a minimum threshold above which wealth becomes entirely self-sustaining, and below which you'd still have to work for a living. Still, even below the threshold, you can still spend your money on automating and outsourcing smaller chunks of your daily drudgery, thus indirectly purchasing happiness.

Comment author: Decius 17 October 2012 02:22:25AM 0 points [-]

I think what you intended to say is "There are a lot of things which would make people happy, except that they are not financially feasible."

Also, when discussing amounts of money which approach the GNP of a small country, you can't just 'get' the wealth without there also coming into existence a small country whose GNP you get. For small amounts of wealth, rounding errors in inflation will mask the effect.

Comment author: Nornagest 17 October 2012 08:11:29AM *  0 points [-]

Well, the world's current GDP is about 70 trillion dollars. $10 billion is about 0.014% of that, which seems like it'd be within the error bars of at least a consumer-level presentation of its inflation.

Comment author: Decius 17 October 2012 04:32:06PM 0 points [-]

$10 billion dollars a year is then roughly 80 minutes of every single person's time, assuming all people are productive 24/365 and all productive time is included in the world GDP; or about 15 minutes of working time for everyone who is included in the world GDP, assuming they average a 2000 work-hour year.