3 ms·

First of all, that's pretty clearly not actually true, if you bother to think about it. And secondly, even if it were true, I don't see how it's relevant.

• notahacker 8y ago
  If you're already earning far more than you are ever likely to consume and considering putting in 40% extra workload, as the person in your example is doing, you are almost certainly doing so because you deeply believe in a mission or hypothesis, because you want to beat someone to something or because you like the status of being the person to transform the fortunes of $company or found $newcompany, not because you have the instrumental objective of receiving a set percentage of the target $100m pa profit in your personal bank account. If the money's more for keeping score, gross earnings do the trick. You might even struggle to see how the tax rate on your personal income stream is relevant. Work incentives look very different at the extreme ends of the income spectrum (as does the relationship between work ethic and earnings). Someone considering putting in 40% extra workload because their lifestyle is insufficient on $10m a year[1], would be fairly unusual, even for a multimillionaire. It's much lower down the income scale where people work to fulfil their [future] consumption needs rather than despite having already met them that the work disincentive effects of higher taxes kick in. There are other arguments against high super taxes like how easily they're circumvented and how they deter millionaires from parking their money in a particular country in an era of high capital mobility, and in some cases how they dilute efficient owner control, but the idea that the likes of Buffet, Gates and Bezos or even mere movie stars would have lost interest in working hard if their resulting disposable income stream were to be reduced by a [punitively] high tax rate is a little difficult to credit. [1]there's even less you can't buy on $10m a year when overpriced luxuries for conspicuous consumers are depressed by high income tax on the superrich...
  • darawk 8y ago
    > If you're already earning far more than you are ever likely to consume and considering putting in 40% extra workload, as the person in your example is doing, you are almost certainly doing so because you deeply believe in a mission or hypothesis, because you want to beat someone to something or because you like the status of being the person to transform the fortunes of $company or found $newcompany, not because you have the instrumental objective of receiving 100% of the target $100m pa profit in your personal bank account. That's a nice story, but is it true? If you believe that, then you'd have to believe that all of those people would work for free. If they really valued their missions above their own marginal incomes, then they'd simply plow 100% of what they would have been paid back into achieving that mission. No doubt, there are people like this. I know some of them. But they are definitely the exception, rather than the rule. Most people are motivated by a mixture of things, but money is an essential ingredient in that mixture.