Sometimes around like 95 he said he didn’t need more money. He’s given away literally millions to his town (he had a little league field(?) build so his kid’s team could play) and to other notable charities for decades. He said, and has written in his books, that there’s only so much money a person needs and the rest is just vanity. He was taught that as a child and lived it as a multi-millionare (which he never truly was – bc he gave it away).
He and his family lived in the same modest suburban house in the same modest Maine town since the 70s.
And then there’s Jeff Bezos.
sometimes is heart-warming to see that indeed good people still exist
So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
I have posted about survivorship bias and how it affects your career choices: how a Hollywood actor giving the classic “follow your dreams and never give up” line is bad advice and is pure survivorship bias at work.
When I read up on the wikipedia page, I encountered an interesting story:
During WWII the US Air Force wanted to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. The Center for Naval Analyses ran a research on where bombers tend to get hit with the explicit aim of enforcing the parts of the airframe that is most likely to receive incoming fire. This is what they came up with:
So, they said: the red dots are where bombers are most likely to be hit, so put some more armor on those parts to make the bombers more resilient. That looked like a logical conclusion, until Abraham Wald – a mathematician – started asking questions:
– how did you obtain that data? – well, we looked at every bomber returning from a raid, marked the damages on the airframe on a sheet and collected the sheets from all allied air bases over months. What you see is the result of hundreds of those sheets. – and your conclusion? – well, the red dots are where the bombers were hit. So let’s enforce those parts because they are most exposed to enemy fire. – no. the red dots are where a bomber can take a hitand return. The bombers that took a hit to the ailerons, the engines or the cockpit never made it home. That’s why they are absent in your data. The blank spots are exactly where you have to enforce the airframe, so those bombers can return.
This is survivorship bias. You only see a subset of the outcomes. The ones that made it far enough to be visible. Look out for absence of data. Sometimes they tell a story of their own.
BTW: You can see the result of this research today. This is the exact reason the A-10 has the pilot sitting in a titanium armor bathtub and has it’s engines placed high and shielded.
If you want to think scientifically, ALWAYS ask what data was included in a conclusion. And ALWAYS ask what data was EXCLUDED when making a conclusion.
If they have excluded information because “it doesn’t exist” or “it was too hard to get” or “it was good data but was provided by people we don’t like”, then that is a BIG RED FLAG that the analysis was flawed.
Another example of this is originally doctor’s thought smoking protected people from developing dementia until someone pointed out it was because smokers didn’t usually live long enough to get the most common forms.
there’s “open-minded about child’s hobbies” and then there’s *pays $20/hr to hire professional fortnite coaches so their 10-year old doesn’t get made fun of for losing in fortnite*
funeral-biscuit 