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Billionaire-scale conspicuous consumption is certainly overrated. But Gates's own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of

by bfe 15y ago

Billionaire-scale conspicuous consumption is certainly overrated. But Gates's own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like working to eradicate various infectious diseases from the human experience. Just to get started, as long as we don't have clean water, plenty of food, proper healthcare, good education, meaningful personal freedom, and a well-functioning legal system for every human being in the world, cheap carbon-neutral energy, strong environmental protection and sustainable ecosystem conservation throughout the world, a cure for cancer, a complete genome and proteome and extended phenotype encyclopedia for all life on Earth, telescopes that can image Earthlike planets in other galaxies and the first stars to ignite in the extremely early Universe, robots crawling around under the surfaces of Europa and Enceladus and screaming through interstellar space toward Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani, and human colonies on Mars and the asteroids and in the clouds of Venus, there will be plenty of interesting and valuable things to do for someone with tens of billions of dollars to throw at an ambitious project.

hugh3 15y ago
But Gates's own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like working to eradicate various infectious diseases from the human experience. Maybe. But it doesn't particularly make me want to be a billionaire. If the main satisfaction you get out of having $100 billion dollars is giving it all away again, I'd rather let someone else make those $100 billion dollars and give 'em away. I figure Bill Gates made $100 billion and gave it away so I wouldn't have to. Thanks Bill!
- ehsanu1 15y ago
  The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent, not in "giving it all away" indiscriminately. Indeed, someone else might choose to just keep their billions in the family, for the sake of obnoxious levels of luxury. I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. Anyways, the whole problem with trying to become a billionaire is that it's really a lottery. Sure, someone determined could probably earn a few million through effort alone, but becoming a billionaire requires a special mix of smarts, hard work, and luck. Mostly luck, disproportionately so. You can't just will yourself to earn billions.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - ramblerman 15y ago
    > I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. Steve jobs?
    - Technophilis 15y ago
      or Yuri Milner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/yuri-milner-house-russian_n_843182.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/yuri-milner-house-r...
  - femto 15y ago
    An interesting point. Is it more interesting to do the work, or to pay for the work? I'd come down on the of doing the work, though I guess if you pay for the work, you can be present for the fun bits and absent for the hard slog (the majority). The problem with doing is that it can be hard to make end meet while doing interesting work with long term payoffs. The options I can think of are: 1) Get an interesting job. 2) Fight tooth and nail to the top of the career/academic heap in a boring job and hope you make it to a position of being able to set your own interesting work while you still have brain cells. 3) Find an angel or patron who is prepared to pay for an interesting long shot. 4) Say hang it, and do interesting work while keeping your lifestyle within the modest remuneration you can scape together. 5) Part time work, with interesting stuff making up a full time load. Can anyone suggest other options that might work with dependents?
    - chad_oliver 15y ago
      Start a business that generates a passive income source, in the same vein as patio's BCC. This would obviously require a large amount of work up-front, but within 10 years you should be sorted. I was really surprised to realise that my living costs are only about $130 per week, or $20 per day. If I could earn $20 every day, I could do whatever I want in the other 23 hours.
  - bluedanieru 15y ago
- PakG1 15y ago
  Well, counterpoint to that is whether the billionaire is giving to things with which you agree. If you're the billionaire, you get to choose where the money goes. :)
- bfe 15y ago
  Imagine though if we had a thousand Bill Gateses who each had a hundred billion dollars, and the brains and determination that got them that money, to throw at one or more of the projects mentioned above. Can there be such thing as too much resources being deployed for the advancement of the human race?
  - heelhook 15y ago
    If that were the case, thousands of people with bill gates's wealth, either you would have an accumulation of capital at the top that would be unsustainable, or more likely such a devaluation of the currency that having a hundred billion dollars wouldn't make you rich, think Zimbabwe.
    - bfe 15y ago
      That just assumes that accumulation of wealth is necessarily due to extracting it from the general economy rather than by generating wealth for the economy at large. Without debating the relative merits of Microsoft's contributions in particular, and assuming you accept the capitalist premise that someone can deserve to become wealthy by generating more wealth for society than they take home for their own benefit, why should there some intrinsic limit to how many people that can be true of or of how much value they can collectively create?
      - heelhook 15y ago
        The problem is simply that we can't all be rich. We can all be billionaires, but we can't all be rich. The intrinsic limit comes from the fact that wealth itself is relative. Using your example, Microsoft's creation of value to such a large consumer base couldn't have happened if there had been thousands of Microsofts equally successful (e.g. not thousands of companies can have a 90% market share in the same market at the same time, for company A to have 90% of market share of a market it means company B doesn't have it. Opportunity cost). When you have thousands of people at the very very very top (.0001% cf 1%) that thousand of people would have to either extract wealth (not value, that's different) from the rest of the economy. There is only so much wealth to go around, regardless of how you represent it, whether its US Dollars or Friedman's island's stone money. Accumulation of wealth is relative.
bluedanieru 15y ago
You can't have a telescope with that resolution. The data is simply not there, not in a manner that can be reconstructed with a telescope smaller than several solar systems at least.
- frossie 15y ago
  In that flight of fancy s/he is at epsilon eridani, so that won't be a problem (it's not the size you need, it's the baseline) :-) Anyway who cares about earth-like planets in other galaxies, this one will do fine. The flaw in the argument is that you need one person with billions of dollars to throw at an ambitious project; of course we could also just decide to do those things collectively, and in fact have managed to do some amazing things that way.
  - bfe 15y ago
    You certainly don't need to have that scale of resources accumulated under one individual's ownership to launch massive, heroically selfless projects for the betterment of humanity. Rather, from the perspective of an individual, there are lots of heroic projects you could attack where there's no foreseeable limit to how much more awesomeness you could accomplish given more and more resources.
- bfe 15y ago
  I've done published research where we started by using data from a gravitational lensing search for black holes, and used data they had collected but disregarded on very distant stars. A mere 100 years ago, there was not an astronomer on Earth who could have conceived of gravitational lensing. My point is not necessarily that we will make even more ambitious and unexpected use of gravitational lensing itself, but rather, what will we invent in the next 1,000 years plus that we have no way of concieving of right now?
- chadgeidel 15y ago
  For a "layman's explanation" of the physics, I found Phil Plait's article about the iPhone 4 (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/resolving-the-iphone-resolution/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/re...) really instructive. See "1) What is 'resolution', really?"
jorangreef 15y ago
The trouble is no amount of finance will cure mismanagement. Throwing money at something is not necessarily the best solution. There are problems that money cannot solve, and it is often these problems that we need solved, if we are to tackle the major challenges.

by bfe 15y ago

hugh3 15y ago

But Gates's own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like working to eradicate various infectious diseases from the human experience. Maybe. But it doesn't particularly make me want to be a billionaire. If the main satisfaction you get out of having $100 billion dollars is giving it all away again, I'd rather let someone else make those $100 billion dollars and give 'em away. I figure Bill Gates made $100 billion and gave it away so I wouldn't have to. Thanks Bill!

ehsanu1 15y ago
The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent, not in "giving it all away" indiscriminately. Indeed, someone else might choose to just keep their billions in the family, for the sake of obnoxious levels of luxury. I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. Anyways, the whole problem with trying to become a billionaire is that it's really a lottery. Sure, someone determined could probably earn a few million through effort alone, but becoming a billionaire requires a special mix of smarts, hard work, and luck. Mostly luck, disproportionately so. You can't just will yourself to earn billions.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- ramblerman 15y ago
  > I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. Steve jobs?
  - Technophilis 15y ago
    or Yuri Milner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/yuri-milner-house-russian_n_843182.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/yuri-milner-house-r...
- femto 15y ago
  An interesting point. Is it more interesting to do the work, or to pay for the work? I'd come down on the of doing the work, though I guess if you pay for the work, you can be present for the fun bits and absent for the hard slog (the majority). The problem with doing is that it can be hard to make end meet while doing interesting work with long term payoffs. The options I can think of are: 1) Get an interesting job. 2) Fight tooth and nail to the top of the career/academic heap in a boring job and hope you make it to a position of being able to set your own interesting work while you still have brain cells. 3) Find an angel or patron who is prepared to pay for an interesting long shot. 4) Say hang it, and do interesting work while keeping your lifestyle within the modest remuneration you can scape together. 5) Part time work, with interesting stuff making up a full time load. Can anyone suggest other options that might work with dependents?
  - chad_oliver 15y ago
    Start a business that generates a passive income source, in the same vein as patio's BCC. This would obviously require a large amount of work up-front, but within 10 years you should be sorted. I was really surprised to realise that my living costs are only about $130 per week, or $20 per day. If I could earn $20 every day, I could do whatever I want in the other 23 hours.
- bluedanieru 15y ago
PakG1 15y ago
Well, counterpoint to that is whether the billionaire is giving to things with which you agree. If you're the billionaire, you get to choose where the money goes. :)
bfe 15y ago
Imagine though if we had a thousand Bill Gateses who each had a hundred billion dollars, and the brains and determination that got them that money, to throw at one or more of the projects mentioned above. Can there be such thing as too much resources being deployed for the advancement of the human race?
- heelhook 15y ago
  If that were the case, thousands of people with bill gates's wealth, either you would have an accumulation of capital at the top that would be unsustainable, or more likely such a devaluation of the currency that having a hundred billion dollars wouldn't make you rich, think Zimbabwe.
  - bfe 15y ago
    That just assumes that accumulation of wealth is necessarily due to extracting it from the general economy rather than by generating wealth for the economy at large. Without debating the relative merits of Microsoft's contributions in particular, and assuming you accept the capitalist premise that someone can deserve to become wealthy by generating more wealth for society than they take home for their own benefit, why should there some intrinsic limit to how many people that can be true of or of how much value they can collectively create?
    - heelhook 15y ago
      The problem is simply that we can't all be rich. We can all be billionaires, but we can't all be rich. The intrinsic limit comes from the fact that wealth itself is relative. Using your example, Microsoft's creation of value to such a large consumer base couldn't have happened if there had been thousands of Microsofts equally successful (e.g. not thousands of companies can have a 90% market share in the same market at the same time, for company A to have 90% of market share of a market it means company B doesn't have it. Opportunity cost). When you have thousands of people at the very very very top (.0001% cf 1%) that thousand of people would have to either extract wealth (not value, that's different) from the rest of the economy. There is only so much wealth to go around, regardless of how you represent it, whether its US Dollars or Friedman's island's stone money. Accumulation of wealth is relative.

bluedanieru 15y ago

You can't have a telescope with that resolution. The data is simply not there, not in a manner that can be reconstructed with a telescope smaller than several solar systems at least.

frossie 15y ago
In that flight of fancy s/he is at epsilon eridani, so that won't be a problem (it's not the size you need, it's the baseline) :-) Anyway who cares about earth-like planets in other galaxies, this one will do fine. The flaw in the argument is that you need one person with billions of dollars to throw at an ambitious project; of course we could also just decide to do those things collectively, and in fact have managed to do some amazing things that way.
- bfe 15y ago
  You certainly don't need to have that scale of resources accumulated under one individual's ownership to launch massive, heroically selfless projects for the betterment of humanity. Rather, from the perspective of an individual, there are lots of heroic projects you could attack where there's no foreseeable limit to how much more awesomeness you could accomplish given more and more resources.
bfe 15y ago
I've done published research where we started by using data from a gravitational lensing search for black holes, and used data they had collected but disregarded on very distant stars. A mere 100 years ago, there was not an astronomer on Earth who could have conceived of gravitational lensing. My point is not necessarily that we will make even more ambitious and unexpected use of gravitational lensing itself, but rather, what will we invent in the next 1,000 years plus that we have no way of concieving of right now?
chadgeidel 15y ago
For a "layman's explanation" of the physics, I found Phil Plait's article about the iPhone 4 (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/resolving-the-iphone-resolution/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/re...) really instructive. See "1) What is 'resolution', really?"

jorangreef 15y ago

The trouble is no amount of finance will cure mismanagement. Throwing money at something is not necessarily the best solution. There are problems that money cannot solve, and it is often these problems that we need solved, if we are to tackle the major challenges.