Greedy people are more likely to end up wealthy. Greedy people are also more likely to end up doing ethically dubious things.

Of course, any wealth at all is unethical if you’re being honest with yourself. There’s a famous passage in the Bible.

Jesus was out teaching his disciples or healing people- whatever he did. And a rich man comes up to him and asks

“Jesus, I want to follow you and go to heaven. Please tell me what I should do”

What did Jesus say? Jesus told him to a) sell all of his shit b) give that money to charity c) physically follow me around

What did rich guy do? Have an epiphany about morality and living the good life?

No, he cried. He cried because he didn’t actually want to let go of the good things he had for morality.

All of us in first world nations are guilty of this to some extent. The way our world is shaped you essentially have to be unethical to survive. There are levels to it, of course. But I think your perspective is too black and white and needs a little nuance. Seem like a teenager.

I don’t think any amount of money is enough. This is what happens when we live in a society that relies on material wealth as a source of validation instead of a means to fulfill our basic needs.

The rich will never have enough money and we will all suffer to that end.

Personally I think “enough money” it’s more a mindset than about physical money, you can have a lot of money and still didn’t have “enough money” or you can not have any money and at the same time have “enough money”.

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In a sense, money represents all the future goods and services it can buy, and those goods and services ultimately resolve down to someone’s time and effort. Money was conceived as a formalization of IOU’s, after all.

So it’s similar to asking whether there’s a limit to how much time and effort from (i.e. influence over) others one would want.

I think the only way to have “enough” money is to practice gratitude. Being poor is defined by stress, of course; I am not gonna tell you that your problems are all in your head. But when you get a better paying job, it’s easy to thoughtlessly spend more money and still end up feeling poor. So, don’t just excitedly spend all that money. Take a good look at what you appreciate about your current life and what you are proud of, and do what you need to cultivate these good things. Sometimes it is surprising how many of those things are free. Sometimes they need a bit of money to grow.

The other thing is that each time you cross a moral line, it gets easier to do so again. This is why i do not drink and will never drink. I think the same goes for accepting sponsorships from tobacco companies and other kinds of corruption. And of course being rich naturally shields you from the consequences of these decisions if you let it.

I think we can put a specific maximum for a comfortable western lifestyle. You can certainly argue that a comfortable western lifestyle is already far and away better than most of the people on Earth will ever see. This is something of an arbitrary point where past this, most of us are going to agree that it’s excessive.

It’s USD 10 million.

Why? Let’s start with the Trinity study:

https://thepoorswiss.com/updated-trinity-study/

The original looked at a standard retirement portfolio and asked how much you can withdraw over a thirty year retirement. It took market data from 1925 through 1995 (the updated version linked above goes to 2023) and then checked a thirty year window over that entire period with various withdrawal rates.

What it found is that if you withdraw 4% of the portfolio the first year, and increasing it by inflation each subsequent year, it’s highly unlikely the portfolio will run out in the 30 year window. The time period covers has market ups and downs, high inflation and low, and this 4% stays.

The updated study above says a 3.5% withdraw had a high chance of lasting 50 years.

Lets play it ultra safe and put it at 2.5%. With $10M, we’ll have $250,000/year to play with, and our rules adjust that for inflation.

(Median household income in Manhattan is $128k)[https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/NY/Manhattan-Demographics.html]. We’re pulling almost twice that. I feel comfortable saying a person can live nicely in any city on this income.

So there you go: $10M. If you want a 100% tax bracket, that’s a good place to put it. Any more money past that is just a game that hurts everyone else.

There’s no hard line between “not enough” and “enough”. More is always better. It’s just a question of whether the gains are worth the effort.

Consider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If we say that being able to satisfy physiological needs is “enough”, you still need to ask: with that probability and for what duration of time? Nothing is guaranteed in life, but as you gain more money, you get asymptotically closer to that 100% probability of satisfying all physiological needs for the duration of a human lifetime. What if you want to provide this guarantee for your children? Your extended family? Your local community? Then you’ll need even more.

Let’s say you’ve satisfied all levels of needs but the last one: self-actualization. That final level can be a huge money sink. Are you an artist that wants to express your idea exactly as they appear in your mind? You’ll need a lot of resources to acquire relevant material, or to pay others to work with you on these projects. Are you a scientist who’s interested in fundamental research and gaining a better understanding of the universe? Again, you need lots of money for your scientific equipment and for paying other people to help you.

Then you look at how hard it is to acquire more money. If you’re out doing a 9-5 every day and getting paid hourly for your work, that’s a high effort. You probably wouldn’t want to keep doing that if you know with 95% certainty that you have enough money to survive your remaining days. Now think about someone taking a bribe. In many cases, it’s extremely low effort. You’re already working your 9-5 anyway, but someone is now paying you extra to not do your job? Win-win. What about ad reads? Again, you’re already working in front of the camera anyway. This is just a question of what you do in front of said camera. Ad reads are probably one of the easiest options, no matter how questionable the product is.

What each person wants out of life is going to be very different from one another. Maybe you only care about having enough to take care of yourself, but someone else may need to care for many other people. One person may be okay with a quiet carefree life, another wants to fix all the problems they find, and another wants to enjoy all the luxuries life has to offer. How far you go is largely dependent on the effort required to get there.

It depends on the person.

I think they, for the majority of people, there is a rough number that could be derived from a standard of living they would want and not have to work. It isn’t a common number across people as people want different things.

That said, there are some people for whom there isn’t a number to satisfy them. Wealth becomes a high score to measure against others. For them, there is no good enough.

Part of the problem is that most people will spend most of their time around people of a similar wealth level. They will therefore always be around people richer than themselves and generally see less people that are much poorer (at least in a personal context).

This means that ‘rich’ people don’t feel rich. (Unless they are self aware enough to realise it). It also means that your references for morals etc are now other rich people rather than ‘normal’ people (although it’s normal to them!)

Therefore, they always want to acquire more money, and their references for how to go about that are the richer people who have already done similar things.

When i am convinced that my children will each have at least enough money for a good education and a home of their own. If my next twenty years are as successful as my last twenty years, then I’ll have enough money only after i can also fund my grandchildrens’ educations.

It’s kind of a shit world that we’re leaving for the next generations. I’ll try to look out for mine before i fuck off to the great beyond.

I don’t know, but I wonder the same. I’m in the US and work for a guy that has tens of millions of dollars. He still spends all day in the office 6 days a week. To be fair, I don’t think he does it for the money, exactly, but I can’t understand why he keeps working at all.

Money only amplifies who you are and what you’re able to do. I’m quite comfortable, but I like to build things and make companies grow, and solve technical problems. I don’t really want to sit back and just do nothing - in fact I’d love a partner to help me do a bit more relaxing - but when left to my own devices I am always learning some new skill or refining some process or generally trying to make the world around me a little better.

I’ll leave this here.

The happiest nations of the world aren’t obsessed with chasing money and hoarding it because they’ve been supported by their neighbours from birth to where they’re working and supporting their own neighbours. So many of the things that Americans hoard money to try and prevent are just … handled … by everyone’s neighbour, anonymously. The knowledge that this coordination and ‘smoothing’ of stressful troubles is done anonymously, regularly, and unilaterally, serves to reduce a lot of the effects of food insecurity and health insecurity and shelter insecurity. They have a system that works, and it’s shown to be reliable, and people are more calm.

So I’m not going to say how they achieve that, except “find the objectively-ranked happiest nations of the world and either move there or convince your government to do what they’re doing” and I’ll move on. It’s not hard, but you’re going to go through stages of disbelief (nah, that can’t work because people will cheat), bargaining (can I cheat please?), etc, and either you’ll be ultimately frustrated at the fact that your locale just can’t get there, or you’ll be moving to the locales where they’re doing it.