6 ms·

What is the point of accumulating wealth over this short life if I can’t leave anything to my children?

• marssaxman 8y ago
  What is the point of accumulating wealth over this short life?
  • agent008t 8y ago
    For one, society benefits from it. You generally get wealthy by providing goods and services to others. The more you satisfy people's wants and needs, the wealthier you get. The wealth means that these people now owe you. If you accumulate wealth instead of consuming it, you never take them up on it. You are basically acting altruistically - instead you use their IOUs to provide even more goods and services for others (not yourself) by managing your wealth instead of consuming! I think it is actually an amazing feature of our civilisation. Wealthy people generally don't use their wealth to build massive monuments to themselves - they tend to invest it into economically productive enterprises that make society wealthier overall.
  • Kaiyou 8y ago
    Improving the life of your children, but not - and this is of utmost importance - improving the life of your neighbors children. Because life is a competition.
• dcow 8y ago
  Indeed, why even have children?
  • vixen99 8y ago
    If you haven't a positive answer for that then it's all to the good that perhaps you don't - have children, that is.
    • dcow 8y ago
      It’s a rhetorical question.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• HankB99 8y ago
  Power.
• guelo 8y ago
  What is the point of your children accumulating wealth?
  • lurcio 8y ago
    What is the point of children..?
    • Kaiyou 8y ago
      What is the point of life..?
• zanny 8y ago
  If you don't exist in a society with preposterously gross amounts of wealth inequality in the modern age your children won't need to roll the genetic lottery of luck to be your kids to live a life without suffering and misery. People only value the capacity to transfer wealth inter-generationally to such a degree so long as its required to guarantee your children don't live a life of endless toil for meager subsistence wages.
• onion2k 8y ago
  You can spend all that money improving the society they live in.
• gjm11 8y ago
  1. There's something fundamentally strange about this question. Suppose the answer is "there is none"; is that meant to be some sort of absurdity? Perhaps we should spend less effort "accumulating wealth". It might be healthier for us and/or for society.[1] 2. I suspect that no one in this discussion (even those whose words suggest otherwise) want it to be so that you literally can't leave anything to your children. So there's some point in accumulating whatever amount you can leave to them. 3. By and large, I think people accumulate wealth mostly in order to have it. I'd rather have $3M in the bank and know that barring really major upheavals I never have to worry about being poor, than have $0 in the bank and live precariously from one payday to the next. This would be true even if I had no children and no prospect of ever having any. It would be true even with a decent "safety net" ensuring that even if I completely ran out of my own money I'd never be, e.g., at risk of starvation or homelessness. [EDITED to add:] Wait, there's more. 4. You might accumulate wealth in order to use it for some expensive enterprise. Consider e.g. Elon Musk, who (at least the way he tells it) got rich in order to save the environment and give us the ability to escape to Mars if we need to. I don't know what Warren Buffett's original motivation for getting rich was, but his present alleged intention is to give away almost everything he has for charitable purposes, and he explicitly says he doesn't want to give his children too much. (Though it may well be that "too much" in his sense is much more than 99% of parents could possibly give their children.) The advantage of this sort of use of wealth is that it doesn't suffer from diminishing returns as much as spending the money on yourself does. There's not much I could do with $2B that I couldn't do with $1B, but $2B will save approximately twice the number of lives that $1B will. 5. You might want to turn your wealth into power. Lots of lobbying. Carefully targetted political donations. Make yourself a household name and run for president of the US. Give funds to academics and other potential public intellectuals who happen to have views you want to be more widely heard. With a couple of billion used carefully you can have a big impact on your country, or even on the world as a whole. [1] Or, of course, it might not; it could be, for instance, that the smooth running of a modern economy depends on a level of acquisitiveness that could never exist if people were getting money only for their own use and not their children's. (As it happens, I think that's unlikely.)
• Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  I'll bite; Living comfortably, safe, well-fed and long; enjoying luxuries like vacations, media consumption, knowledge accumulation, etc. Being able to give your children a safe home to grow up in, an education so they can build up their own life instead of depend on you and your own accumulated wealth. I had all this, thankfully, even without my parents being rich. They grew up in a time and area where they could still buy a decently sized house and have children on a single income. They struggled, but they made it. Thanks to living in a (more) socialist country, taxpayer money paid for my education, allowing me higher social mobility than my parents. Ten or so years into my career, I've paid what was invested in me by the other tax payers a few times over already.