= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Tem42 comments on Money threshold Trigger Action Patterns - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (44)
This is only related, but not exactly to the point:
I don't get the math people here (in the US, where I'm living) use.
People will frequently cite 2M to 4M as a good stopping poing to never work again. This is a LOT of money. It's a completely unbelievable amount of money for 99.9% of humans in history. In a completely stagnant economy, this could sustain you for 200 years in present day Brazil, having a good time.
Then people say they don't eat out because it's expensive. Say you eat every day, for a counterfactual difference cost of 5 dollars per meal, accounting for lost time and cutlery costs. That's 400x5 2000USD per year. In the next 40 years, this amounts to a mere 80.000. This is so much less than the difference between 2M and 4M.
Then people say they don't sign up for cryonics, which costs like 1000 per year.
Then people use lift and uber to go places which on a daily basis could cost half a million dollars over a lifetime.
Anyway, I think the world is somewhat financially mad. I also think I know two classes of Americans, one which earns 100k plus (many of which programmers) and one which earns 17-28k (most of which students or researchers). And I mix their data up in my mind, and come up with a very peculiar idea of the American reasoning about money.
Another factor -- I don't eat out because it is too expensive. But not because I couldn't afford the difference cost of 5 dollars per meal; I certainly could. But the additional utility of eating out is less than $5 -- in some cases, the utility is actually negative (that is, there are cases in which I would spend more money to make my own meal than to have to go out; I have certainly turned down free meals!) I really like having control over what I eat, and I don't like a lot of things that restaurants think I should like. I hate waiting around for food; if I must wait, I'd prefer to spend that time cooking. I do not enjoy the environment of most restaurants.
Whether or not this sort of thing is what your friends mean when they say it's too expensive, I don't know. But it's hard to believe that it is not at least part of what they mean; after all, most of us can identify a simple way to save $5 that we don't take, so we must be weighing the value of the goods and services differently. It is also worth noting that it is not uncommon for people to consider going out to eat, but find that they are not particularly motivated by any of the choices -- a clear indicator that the value of going out (in those cases) is not that they are motivated by the food served.