Yep. It’s much better to focus on your quality of life right now, while keeping an eye on the back of your head for the future but I saw so many people just sacrificing everything to get that extra 20% salary, without realising inflation catches up to it faster than you get raises.
I want the salary that allows me to be independent, take care of my family and have time to spend with them, and that doesn’t involve crushing my soul. Living life as happy as possible right now is more important than whatever magical number you think will solve all your problems. Personally I’m trying to achieve that by being a freelance in a passion field.
It depends where you live but it was figured out to be about 110k a decade ago on average in the US. Where I live that sounds pretty close maybe 140. However, I am biased since I truly don’t want to own a house. Would rather rent.
Take 1 trillion dollars from the billionaires in total, now distribute 1K to each person each month? Sounds great but you run out of money in only 3 months. Then what?
Sounds great but you run out of money in only 3 months. Then what?
We won’t because billonairs don’t hold the knowledge to run factories, they just monopolize infrastructure and collect a toll. We won’t run out of money because the production is still there.
Then maybe our source of money should be that production, and not the personal wealth of billionaires?
Like, if you make a car that runs on diesel, and there’s a gallon of diesel in the world, you’ve made a car with 1 gallon of fuel.
If you make UBI that runs on the contents of billionaires’ bank accounts, and there’s three months’ worth of money in those bank accounts, you’ve made UBI that works for three months.
Enjoy the fruits of liberated market. /s Honestly though you assume that the only value of liquidating assets from billionaires is getting their dollar amounts moved from on bank to another. There is a reasonable assumption that freeing up that capital to be enthusiastically invested or utilized to meet demands would provide more economic growth than it sitting in large hoards being spent in most risk adverse ways or in near total whimsy.
There is also a reasonable assumption that taking away people’s money would result in a decreased expected value from future money, leading to a decrease in the motivation to produce that we currently enjoy.
Let’s say a person goes from having nothing to having $1M in the bank. How does a person do that? Well, in a free market they do that by providing $1M worth of value to other people.
Should that person, who we know is capable of providing serious value, go on to try to have two million? It would be good for our society if they did, so we’d better hope they do.
But if our history includes a day when all the billionaires had everything taken from them, this means that they now have to ask themselves if there’s any danger of going over the threshold, become “evil” in the eye of society, and stripped of their rights.
Suddenly being rich is quite dangerous. It alters the incentives. Assuming a very straightforward connection between potential reward and motivation, it could be very bad for the economy to liquidate the richest people’s accounts.
It’s a fairly ahistorical assumption that wealth accumulattion is done mostly through wealth creation. Anticompetitive practices, rent seeking, and maximize value extraction are all common practices for incumbent market leaders.
You basically create precedent to give away excessive wealth in order to influence it’s effects on the world instead of reinvesting it purely in mechasms of control of wealth.
Bills plus car fuel and maintenance plus the cost of good quality food plus full coverage of medical insurance plus deductible (yay America) plus mortgage payments plus 10-20% on top of that.
Basically, cover the cost of very comfortable living and take the financial worry out of being alive.
Edit: echoing other comments, this would not make me happy directly. It would open up more possibilities to pursue the things in life that bring/grow happiness.
USD. I am using the 4% rule that states you can withdraw 4% of you investments annually and never run out of money. This assumes an average 7% market return and has a buffer for inflation and fluctuations. 400k per year is about double of what my wife and I make, so it woild allow us to have a cushy lifestyle.
Even a million would be enough for me there. That would give me average yearly income of 70k. That would maintain my current level of living and I’d probably just keep getting wealthier still.
Putting that much money into circulation would cause hyperinflation and then a gallon of milk would cost 10 quintillion dollars and you’re back to square one.
Honestly? If I won the lottery today I would still work. I really really enjoy my work. It keeps me focused and motivated. My problem is having my livelyhood tied to the wims of a chaotic prideful coke filled VC
I enjoy laboring. I do not enjoy working for others.
I’ve got endless amounts of side projects that I never have enough mental energy for because the job saps it all.
When I got laid off last year I had about a month between jobs where I got to just do whatever I wanted. After about a week of decompressing I started working 5ish hours a day on side projects, because I wanted something that was more mentally stimulating.
I want to live in a Star Trek Federation post-scarcity world. No need to work unless one wants to, no need for a salary. And that applies to everyone around me too.
That won’t stop population growth. Remember… the stress of work is gone. Now we all can have big happy families if we want without ANY pressure to ever juggle all those stressful conflicting priorities that take up familial resources. Voluntary contraception would not keep population stable or provide a sustainable ecosystem. I personally would have at least six kids. My wife would want more than that. You are free to be childless if you so choose of course, but statistically proven biological imperative drives us to procreate as-is, it’s literally human nature.
The biggest problem will quite literally be real estate. Unless you can picture a fully urbanized earth where everyone lives in tiny little cubby holes and not much else as being some kind of utopia. Even then the land on earth is finite.
Eh? Why does birth rate drop in countries with top economies versus those that don’t?
Developed countries tend to have a lower fertility rate due to lifestyle choices associated with economic affluence where mortality rates are low, birth control is easily accessible and children often can become an economic drain caused by housing, education cost and other cost involved in bringing up children. Higher education and professional careers often mean that women have children late in life. This can result in a demographic economic paradox.sauce
In order to maintain that high quality of life you have to work a shitload and to get those high paying jobs you have to spend years of your life upskilling and competing for better jobs.
Remove the economic factor and give everyone that astounding QOL and boom… we can breed without worries of providing and we don’t even have to stress about maintaining our QOL. We can all be stay at home parents who just raise our kids if we choose to.
I can’t afford a 4-6+++ bedroom house in the Greater Boston area where my friends and family are without having soul-crushing long commute times. I need a commute because I need to work to put food on the table and pay for rent. Remove the barriers and keep at least even QOL and I will not work, i’ll instead devote my time to doing literally anything else.
Missing a lot of other pieces from that same source:
In developing countries children are needed as a labour force and to provide care for their parents in old age. In these countries, fertility rates are higher due to the lack of access to contraceptives and generally lower levels of female education. The social structure, religious beliefs, economic prosperity and urbanisation within each country are likely to affect birth rates as well as abortion rates,
Also:
fertility rates of immigrants to the US have been found to decrease sharply in the second generation as a result of improving education and income.
Quite a bit there that contradicts your thesis of people moving to improved economic situations suddenly wanting 6+ kids and the population growing out of control. If people don’t need kids for labor, don’t need kids to support them in their old age, and women are educated and in control of their own bodies, there is reason to think the world might not even reach replacement rates.
We’re talking about a potential utopia where education is available to everyone, not restricted to first world countries. If you bring everyone UP to western world QOL and they are educated, you have to consider it in that aspect.
The immigrant fertility rate thing is because they come from a place with low expected QOL so they don’t think they need the american dream with air conditioning, going out to eat or having nice things and instead go with more kids because they were raised that way. The second generation gets used to say american QOL and wants to have those same nice things the neighbors have- after all they grow up in the american school system meeting other kids right?.. so you need to work to get those high QOL things and suddenly you’re in the situation I have described: needing more professional attainment to keep up the expected QOL and delaying children.
Does that make sense?
Do you have any kind of evidence showing that free of all financial constraints people will not have children in a mid-high COL area?
Do you have any evidence that free-from-labor and wholly financially stable people would want 6+ kids?
Billionaires basically live in a utopia now and they don’t (generally) have 6+ kids. Musk is considered a weirdo and probably racist for wanting so many “genetically superior” offspring.
Salary? No. Stipend, yes. Give me enough to comfortably live on and pursue interests and hobbies with no requirement for work. That’s the closest money would get to making me happy.
Once your basic needs are met, the equation becomes: Salary = Expenses + Savings. So, the questions becomes, how much savings makes you happy?
If you are happy to work in your job until “retirement age”, a small savings rate will do, in theory; that is if the salary is adjusted for cost-of-living and tax.
Are you happy working this job for the rest of your life? Full time (whatever that means in your work culture)?
Yes, I’m lucky enough to have a good salary, but I can tell people there is no top limit. Once you have your needs met then you’re exactly right, it’s about retirement planning and savings, and there could always be more. The fact is that the only true money amount that will make someone happy is the amount that allows them not to work anymore
Universal basic income and universal healthcare so I (and everybody else) don’t have to worry about a job, being able to work, retirement, disability, and employers will have to offer meaning, increased quality of life, and actual respect to attract employees.
These social safety nets would be a huge win for worker’s rights too. If you can tell a job to go fuck itself on the spot, they can’t operate without treating people right.
A question like this could be an intro to a shady MLM pitch. Break the ice, get the conversation going and gain a sense of the range of numbers to make up for earnings examples.
I’m already in the area of diminishing returns, where none of my daily problems are really money related. To have any significant impact I’d probably have to double my salary, so I could afford exotic cars and stuff like that.
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