You wouldn’t have the entire human condition enslaved by obsession with it, with the top leaders of any consequential hierarchy being absolutely obsessed with maximal accumulation of it. Money is simply not that interesting.
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To make a comparison, language is like money in many ways, a global tool of coordination, computation, and communication. But we’re kinda sane about it. We don’t revere large piles of words. Librarians of the largest libraries aren’t treated like Bill Gates is with money.
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Here’s a small glimpse of why I dislike what large concentrations of money does to humanity. Say you gave a 3rd gen failson sitting on 100 million with no ideas. So, he sounds on yachts, booze, prostitutes, whatever. You could argue that the “dumb money” gets smart 1 degree out
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1 degree out, the $ goes to yacht designers, bartenders, etc. So damage seems low. One person living a life I would not want for myself. But who am I to judge. Except it’s not just one person. Hundreds of people are living lives shaped by the logic of 1st order failson spending.
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Would they do something else more fulfilling with their lives if their best option hadn’t been pandering to unimaginative failson’s miserable idea of a good life?
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The economy is often compared to a large distributed computer (correct). It is often assumed to be an efficient computer under some narrow conditions (also kinda correct). What is not often talked about is — who programs it and for what. And the answer to that is not pretty.
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It is programmed by the stewards of the largest, slowest piles of money. Each dollar you hold is like a right to one cpu cycle. Even governments can’t alter this landscape wholesale. Only reshape it in certain known ways.
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It’s like if your family had one tv and the tantrummy 5 year old insists on controlling the remote and will only allow the tv to play his favorite kid cartoons on endless repeat. It’s a powerful device but can do only a fraction of what it is capable of.
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That’s what even an ideal efficient market controlled by large capital piles is like.
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I don’t mind spending a reasonable fraction of my time thinking about my personal finances. Cost of doing the business of living life. But i grudge every minute I have to devote to modeling and predicting consequence of existence of large piles of tens/hundreds of billions.
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If I’m consulting for a company that makes widgets its because I am interested in widgets. Not in the psychology of a dozen bores who own the PE company that bought the widget company and don’t give a shit about widgets.
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I hate that any sufficiently important and interesting project turns into a “money psychology of boring people” project if you give it long enough. Kinda like how any social media product turns into a messaging app if you give it enough time. So everybody has to think about that.
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One of my weird influences is Alberto Moravia’s Time of Desecration, which I randomly read as a teenager because it happened to be around. Not the sort of book I’d pick myself. But the theme of desecrating money stayed with me. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1980/08/14/moravias-victims/ …pic.twitter.com/htlluIydMV
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