> Look at the number of owners of super and mega yachts, and tell me how they are frugal... I mentioned frugality only to hint that these folks must have non-e

> Look at the number of owners of super and mega yachts, and tell me how they are frugal... I mentioned frugality only to hint that these folks must have non-economic motives for working. I claim that the motive is signaling. And the megayacht owners - what else might they do with their Veblen goods than signal their status? Does Paul Allen need 50 bathrooms on Octopus (just guessing here, not sure about the exact number) to address his physiological needs? > Look at billionaries like the Koch brothers, or the DeVos family.. In my opinion signaling is a manifestation of a deeper motivational mechanism that I call the modeling instinct. Basically we have instinct to build perfect world model in our brains and one of the way we test its quality is by creating goods and services. The difference between the Koch brothers and - say - Buffet is that they test different aspects of the world models - that part, which is interesting for them the most. We all carry unique, but incomplete and distorted world representations and therefore tend to test our model-building effort in various domains. Signaling plays however an important role - it is a measure of how successful is our modeling effort. > I don't know what you refer to when you say "one billion people ... a trillion USD/year in value There is actually a research done in this field. See for example Salamon, L.M., Sokolowski, S.W., Haddock, M., 2011. Measuring the Economic Value of Volunteer Work Globally - Concepts, Estimates, and a Roadmap to the Future (2011). Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 82, 217–252. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8292.2011.00437.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8292.2011.00437.x In personal communication one of the authors confirmed that also FOSS development has been included in the estimates. > Re Carnegy. Let's not focus on frugality. hopefully what I write above elucidates this point sufficiently. > Re hunters - gatherers. The takeaway from this should be the fact, that a stable human society can exist that is economically equal, if it maintains potentially unequal "merit" signaling. This by the way nicely fits to the idea of how a just society should look like according to Rawls. > How does "economic transparency"... The HG economic system fell apart once people lost ability to see what material goods their neighbors acquired - simply put. This transparency must be restored in order to build economically equal society. I believe technology will play central role in re-instituting a HG-like economic system. The loss of privacy in social networks, the (wiki)leaks of confidential information, the cameras in our cities - that is a part of the pendulum swing toward a more transparent society - which is a prerequisite to a more fair world. Maybe I should conclude the main point of what I am trying to communicate here - people can be completely happy (and economically productive) even if they are economically equal, if their ability to signal their naturally unequal abilities is unrestricted. Thank you for the comments.