Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might think that, but many/most humans care more about relative differences than absolute. We are social creatures which calibrate our satisfaction to our circumstances. We can be happy with little, and equally happy with plenty. In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless, largely becau…
I agree with pretty much every word. But what those words are identifying is (1) there is an emotional response at play and (2) it is a heuristic for something else that in the modern age is no longer an reasonable heuristic (ie, your instincts don't understand capitalism and the benefits of having vast amounts of capital on hand, they are calibrated for a hunter-gatherer society with maybe some light farming and a f…
In my opinion, attention on the monetary differences exagerates the difference in experience and comfort. That is to say, Wealth inequality is much less relevant than difference in consumption and utilization, to the degree that either matter.
Musk might have 1,000,000x the net worth of the median American (200B vs 200K), but he is not eating one million times as many hamburgers, living in a house 1 million times larger, ect. People struggle to understand that "net worth" is simply a name on a paper associated with resources someone else is utilizing. It is not proportional to spending or consumption.