For the Love of Money

Suppose you desire to be a billionaire (and stay one -- it's not that you want to get $1B so that you can give most of it away to deserving recipients, or use it to lobby governments to improve the world).

In particular, you would prefer to have $1B than to have $0.5B in your hands and $0.5B transferred to the world's poorest people.

The thing is, half a billion dollars can do a lot of good. A typical estimate is that you can save a life (i.e., something like a life's worth of quality-adjusted life-years) for a few thousand dollars, if you're happy for it to be a life in what used to be called the "third world" and if you take care to put the money where it can be used most effectively. Let's be conservative and suppose it's $10k/life.

So our hypothetical would-be billionaire would rather have $1B than have $0.5B and (5e8/1e4) = 50,000 Africans' lives saved.

I'm sure it's very nice to be a billionaire, but damn.

Something like this sort of prioritization of one's own welfare applies to pretty much all of us, of course -- would you rather have a car or save a life? would you rather have a slightly larger house or save ten lives? etc. And maybe this means we're all monsters. But, so far as I can tell, the difference in personal well-being between having a billion dollars and having half that is really small, and the difference that money could make to the lives of others is really large, and it does seem extra-specially monstrous to prefer that really small difference to saving tens of thousands of lives.

So I really do think there's something morally iffy about a very strong desire to be dirty, rotten, filthy stinking rich, in a way that there isn't about a desire to be merely rich. Wanting to have, say, $10M seems to me morally quite a different sort of thing from wanting to have $1B.

Of course if you want to have $1B and then give most of it away then, please, go for it. As long as you select the recipients of your largesse with some care. Likewise if you have other plans for your billion that involve having beneficial billion-dollar-sized impacts on the world. Fund important scientific research, bribe politicians to do things you think are valuable, whatever. What strikes me as problematic is wanting to have and keep all that money. You don't need it that badly. Really, you don't.

("You" above, of course, doesn't mean you personally.)

[EDITED to add one more remark (because the above wasn't long enough already). I'm assuming that "want" means something like "seriously intend, to the best of your ability" rather than just "find yourself with some sort of desire". People want all kinds of things and that doesn't have much moral significance until they start actually trying to get them.]

Now how can it be that nurse practitioners don't produce that much value? It is because the relevant quantity is the marginal value of an additional nurse practitioner, not the average value. And why is it fair to pay people according to their marginal value, and not their average value? That is because it incentives the most efficient behavior. An additional software engineer is worth more to society than an additional nurse. The fact that getting rid of all nurses would be worse than getting rid of all software engineers (assuming this was true) is irrelevant, because as people quit the nursing profession, wages will rise.

So the problem is not capitalism, but people's inability to accept that the implications of economics theory: first, that there is no ethical reason to reward people for the average value of a person in their profession, as opposed to the marginal value, and second, that frivolous things like Twitter can be as valuable as medical services (if people are willing to pay as much for either).

Actually, if he doesn't feel like working hard, it sounds like he could retire on a comfortable 6-figure income for the rest of his life. Without interest, naively $6m will yield $100k a year for 60 years, which is more than enough to raise a large family in a nice neighborhood anywhere in the states - especially if the home and taxes are paid for.