Listen now | Mark Nelson is an American ecologist and author based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His research focuses on closed ecological engineering, restoration of damaged ecosystems, and wastewater recycling. Nelson was one of the eight original crew members of Biosphere 2 in 1991.
This documentary was incredible. I watched it a few weeks ago so had to listen to this a second time. That’s one of the reasons I love this podcast so much- there are so many cool interesting people I may not have heard about otherwise.
Ok, taking the bait, I'm going to argue Paul Graham's point in a (limited) defense of allowing people to become billionaires.
Let's begin at the beginning. Like most human activity, money is just a game. We need games as humans. Games are a fundamental unit of culture. We apply ourselves toward social games with motivation and creativity because they create meaning, i.e., other people think they matter and so do we. Money games are just one type, and not inherently better or worse than any other. We all wake up and play different games - status games, respect games, puzzle games, trying to get more love games, trying to be the most spiritual guru games, trying to have the biggest deltoid games. Any of these can be positive or very, very negative for those around you. But there are some fundamental things that make games fun. And putting a max score of 500 Million dollars on the money game would basically spoil a big and important and pretty useful game. Who keeps replaying the final level of a video game that they've already beaten? 99.9% of people will beat the game, and move on. On sum, that could be really bad for society overall.
It's important to note that in the case of the money game, after a certain point, (much lower than 500MIL in the bank), money is almost uncorrelated with consumption. Money is about 1) keeping score 2) accruing the freedom to take more risks. As a hypothetical, let's consider a business in the robotic surgery industry. Increasing numbers of surgeries are now done entirely by or assisted by robots. Let's say there's a person who's the best surgery robot creator in the world, orders of magnitude better than the next best surgery robot creator. By the way, this head and shoulders distinction is often the case among top talent - power laws instead of normal distributions tend to dominate fields where talent matters most. Let's say our robot surgery founder, conquers the world of robotic heart surgery, almost no one dies from heart surgery anymore, and she makes her 500Mil. She enjoys her success for a few weeks, does some interviews. Then she has to look around for what's next. Fundamentally, her options are either to keep working hard and take risks, or relax into some safe options.
Putting a hard cap on the money game could very well determine her choice. Remember - scorekeeping, and freedom to take risks. Having no cap on wealth means that others will recognize if she's won. And having more money means she can play riskier games with less fear. Let's say she her options are to relax, write a book, and have people fawn over her at speaking engagements for the next couple of decades. Or she could risk her reputation and a great deal of her 500Mil of personal wealth on trying to solve the next problem: cancer surgery. She will lose sleep, and she might also lose status by taking on the next challenge. Maybe cancer's harder than heart surgery. Maybe she tries it and loses money, and status, and others catch up with her on robotic heart surgery in the meantime. In that moment of decision, do we really want to have her get stuck at the final level of the money game? Would she stay motivated when the news articles that used to name her as "unequivocally the best robotic engineer of her her generation" start naming her instead "one of the best" or "top fifty" or (gasp) "a leading robot surgical engineer," as all of the other engineers catch up with her level of wealth? As a society, do we want to take the chance that she takes the easy way out? I believe that losing her from her profession would be a loss to the world, even if it would almost certainly be better for her as an individual.
Now this is an extreme example, and you and I might hope that the robot engineer will keep working out of a mission and purpose of saving lives. So let's take the more common and more mundane examples. People who pave roads aren't as obviously heroic as the robot surgery people, but I like roads as do most people. I don't want them to crumble and I don't want to pay higher taxes for them than is necessary. So I'm glad that thousands of people wake up every morning and do the very boring (to me anyway) job of working very hard to pave a road that will last as inexpensively as possible. I can't imagine that the road paving savants are going to keep showing up though if there's not a more interesting game to play than seeing who can pave the best road. BTW, that's effectively, story of the Roche brothers, who've seeded a billionaire legacy and a bunch of modern highways. Leaving aside inheritance for now, these types of mundane businesses, not robot surgeons, are the most common paths toward accruing billions, even if they don't make the news as often as rocket ship billionaires. See Diane Hendrick's who made cheap well built windows, or Jack Dangermond, who made cheap and useful maps. Most big business is boring. It's easy to think that Google is sexy now, but think about working in a garage with another dude staring at a computer screen 14 hours a day, and without the money game, the only point is solving a puzzle where the object is "Create an algorithm that uses statistics on website linking practices to create a ranking of hundreds of millions of websites." Blech. I'd rather pave roads. But search used to suck and I used to run out of storage on my email every freaking day, so thanks Larry and Sergey.
Now in some cases you may want billionaires to move on from their money game. But I'd argue that we should probably be working to eliminate those games altogether. Let's deal with the actual issue of exploitative industries (private militias, private prisons, robber baron mineral miners, etc.) instead of tinkering with the rules at the margins for these folks. Other money games, even mundane ones, create enormous value both for the individuals playing the game and for the collective.
From my perspective, keeping the money game lively for billionaires gives the most talented people on Earth motivational boosts from some of the most powerful drugs on Earth for social animals - adoration, reputation, inflated self-perception, etc. Billionaires may become addicted to these massive narcissistic dopamine hits, and there are costs to that. We have to have some checks and balances to keep people hopped up on narcissism from doing a bunch of sketchy stuff (see also, Sam Bankman-Fried). But this problem just requires tweaks to the game design. And when the game they're playing entices them to focus their energy on innovating and creating value, we all benefit.
At the end of the day, there's a more fundamental point. All humans play games, and I'd argue we probably even need them to help create meaning out of our individual agency in the world. The most successful civilizations adjust the rules of cultural games so that the players benefit the collective good as a *byproduct* of trying to win. The fact that our civilization is crumbling is at least in part because our culture has promoted a bunch of messed up game. If you care about boosting your identity as a good person, the best strategy is finding people to cancel on Twitter instead of finding ways to help people who are suffering. If you're a billionaire, parading around on a super yacht with a super model may get you more attention than innovating on your products and services. But honestly, the billionaire game is probably a little less messed up than the identity game at this point from my perspective.
I'm frankly being a devil's advocate with much of this essay, and not sure I believe all of it. Most importantly, I don't know if we can rein in the narcissism inherent in business success and direct it toward societal ends. But I get Paul Graham's point, and I suspect there's a middle ground. I'm pretty sure that taxation should be dramatically reformed to spread the wealth, and that we could do that without ruining the game. Maybe that means we go back to an 80-90% progressive tax rate. Billionairing would still be possible, it's just a longer road to get there. Maybe we put a 1000% tax on luxury goods like expensive wine and yachts. After all, it's wasteful consumption, not wealth per se that's often what's most unsettling about billionaires. And I'm pretty sure that we should tax inheritances from billionaires at 99.9%+, so that we're not rewarding billionaire progeny for the privilege of being born into a rich family. Barely taxed inheritance is a recipe for mediocre guys becoming President by selling shitty steaks using their Daddy's name and money.
But don't hate the player, hate the game. Let's put our energy into envisioning a culture that functions - where people who make real sacrifices to create real value for others are rewarded, where people who have real skills and wisdom are given more power and influence, and where the collective good is served by the games we all wake up every day and play.
Hey Chris, Thanks for your post. I feel ppl need billions more may be because they want more of wat they hv. Or may be as others said to control others. Or may be to start some pet fancy project or maybe just to make others jealous or envious 🙂
Yeah, I'm not worried about mine. They have lots of stuff wrong. It was for Stanley Krippner's. If you're up for it, please send me an email and I'll put you in touch with Stan's friend, Phil, who was looking for help with that. I don't know when/if Cacilda and I will do another one. We both are pretty protective of our privacy on that front.
Having half a billion dollars gives me control over the double digit multi milllionaires who think big of themselves and look down on the common people. I am hoping to some day make it and reach single digit billions. Then I am above most of the BIG business owners who are always expanding their operations to my area(!!!) But for now I’ll be working for some 7-10 years into the future to reach a solid position. Then I’ll live free, invest wisely, spend time with family, maybe travel a little. 😎
I guess my argument for no cap on $$$ is that who’s to say there should be a cap on it in the first place? I liken it to athletes: why/ when should an athlete say ok that’s enough talent, I don’t need anymore?
What these money hungry people/ athletes need is morals to do good with what they’ve earned and to not take advantage of their so-called superpower. I guess this plays into the inheritance debate, perhaps some restrictions on it would benefit a child of wealthy parents and thus society.
Someone with half a billion dollars works for more power. But no one in that position wants to admit that because they’d be admitting they want to have millions of times more power than any one of us, and power over most of us.
I agree. Chris is thinking of money as the means to acquire comfort and other life perks, but for the mega rich (apart of bragging rights) money becomes control. Why does Sam Altman want a trillion dollars? In order to build a digital god --so he can claim to be the bigger god.
Re. Stan's Wikipedia, good luck with that. Chances are that because of his career his entry is controlled by the Guerrilla Skeptics who have hijacked Wikipedia's narrative with regards to fringe topics.
This documentary was incredible. I watched it a few weeks ago so had to listen to this a second time. That’s one of the reasons I love this podcast so much- there are so many cool interesting people I may not have heard about otherwise.
Ok, taking the bait, I'm going to argue Paul Graham's point in a (limited) defense of allowing people to become billionaires.
Let's begin at the beginning. Like most human activity, money is just a game. We need games as humans. Games are a fundamental unit of culture. We apply ourselves toward social games with motivation and creativity because they create meaning, i.e., other people think they matter and so do we. Money games are just one type, and not inherently better or worse than any other. We all wake up and play different games - status games, respect games, puzzle games, trying to get more love games, trying to be the most spiritual guru games, trying to have the biggest deltoid games. Any of these can be positive or very, very negative for those around you. But there are some fundamental things that make games fun. And putting a max score of 500 Million dollars on the money game would basically spoil a big and important and pretty useful game. Who keeps replaying the final level of a video game that they've already beaten? 99.9% of people will beat the game, and move on. On sum, that could be really bad for society overall.
It's important to note that in the case of the money game, after a certain point, (much lower than 500MIL in the bank), money is almost uncorrelated with consumption. Money is about 1) keeping score 2) accruing the freedom to take more risks. As a hypothetical, let's consider a business in the robotic surgery industry. Increasing numbers of surgeries are now done entirely by or assisted by robots. Let's say there's a person who's the best surgery robot creator in the world, orders of magnitude better than the next best surgery robot creator. By the way, this head and shoulders distinction is often the case among top talent - power laws instead of normal distributions tend to dominate fields where talent matters most. Let's say our robot surgery founder, conquers the world of robotic heart surgery, almost no one dies from heart surgery anymore, and she makes her 500Mil. She enjoys her success for a few weeks, does some interviews. Then she has to look around for what's next. Fundamentally, her options are either to keep working hard and take risks, or relax into some safe options.
Putting a hard cap on the money game could very well determine her choice. Remember - scorekeeping, and freedom to take risks. Having no cap on wealth means that others will recognize if she's won. And having more money means she can play riskier games with less fear. Let's say she her options are to relax, write a book, and have people fawn over her at speaking engagements for the next couple of decades. Or she could risk her reputation and a great deal of her 500Mil of personal wealth on trying to solve the next problem: cancer surgery. She will lose sleep, and she might also lose status by taking on the next challenge. Maybe cancer's harder than heart surgery. Maybe she tries it and loses money, and status, and others catch up with her on robotic heart surgery in the meantime. In that moment of decision, do we really want to have her get stuck at the final level of the money game? Would she stay motivated when the news articles that used to name her as "unequivocally the best robotic engineer of her her generation" start naming her instead "one of the best" or "top fifty" or (gasp) "a leading robot surgical engineer," as all of the other engineers catch up with her level of wealth? As a society, do we want to take the chance that she takes the easy way out? I believe that losing her from her profession would be a loss to the world, even if it would almost certainly be better for her as an individual.
Now this is an extreme example, and you and I might hope that the robot engineer will keep working out of a mission and purpose of saving lives. So let's take the more common and more mundane examples. People who pave roads aren't as obviously heroic as the robot surgery people, but I like roads as do most people. I don't want them to crumble and I don't want to pay higher taxes for them than is necessary. So I'm glad that thousands of people wake up every morning and do the very boring (to me anyway) job of working very hard to pave a road that will last as inexpensively as possible. I can't imagine that the road paving savants are going to keep showing up though if there's not a more interesting game to play than seeing who can pave the best road. BTW, that's effectively, story of the Roche brothers, who've seeded a billionaire legacy and a bunch of modern highways. Leaving aside inheritance for now, these types of mundane businesses, not robot surgeons, are the most common paths toward accruing billions, even if they don't make the news as often as rocket ship billionaires. See Diane Hendrick's who made cheap well built windows, or Jack Dangermond, who made cheap and useful maps. Most big business is boring. It's easy to think that Google is sexy now, but think about working in a garage with another dude staring at a computer screen 14 hours a day, and without the money game, the only point is solving a puzzle where the object is "Create an algorithm that uses statistics on website linking practices to create a ranking of hundreds of millions of websites." Blech. I'd rather pave roads. But search used to suck and I used to run out of storage on my email every freaking day, so thanks Larry and Sergey.
Now in some cases you may want billionaires to move on from their money game. But I'd argue that we should probably be working to eliminate those games altogether. Let's deal with the actual issue of exploitative industries (private militias, private prisons, robber baron mineral miners, etc.) instead of tinkering with the rules at the margins for these folks. Other money games, even mundane ones, create enormous value both for the individuals playing the game and for the collective.
From my perspective, keeping the money game lively for billionaires gives the most talented people on Earth motivational boosts from some of the most powerful drugs on Earth for social animals - adoration, reputation, inflated self-perception, etc. Billionaires may become addicted to these massive narcissistic dopamine hits, and there are costs to that. We have to have some checks and balances to keep people hopped up on narcissism from doing a bunch of sketchy stuff (see also, Sam Bankman-Fried). But this problem just requires tweaks to the game design. And when the game they're playing entices them to focus their energy on innovating and creating value, we all benefit.
At the end of the day, there's a more fundamental point. All humans play games, and I'd argue we probably even need them to help create meaning out of our individual agency in the world. The most successful civilizations adjust the rules of cultural games so that the players benefit the collective good as a *byproduct* of trying to win. The fact that our civilization is crumbling is at least in part because our culture has promoted a bunch of messed up game. If you care about boosting your identity as a good person, the best strategy is finding people to cancel on Twitter instead of finding ways to help people who are suffering. If you're a billionaire, parading around on a super yacht with a super model may get you more attention than innovating on your products and services. But honestly, the billionaire game is probably a little less messed up than the identity game at this point from my perspective.
I'm frankly being a devil's advocate with much of this essay, and not sure I believe all of it. Most importantly, I don't know if we can rein in the narcissism inherent in business success and direct it toward societal ends. But I get Paul Graham's point, and I suspect there's a middle ground. I'm pretty sure that taxation should be dramatically reformed to spread the wealth, and that we could do that without ruining the game. Maybe that means we go back to an 80-90% progressive tax rate. Billionairing would still be possible, it's just a longer road to get there. Maybe we put a 1000% tax on luxury goods like expensive wine and yachts. After all, it's wasteful consumption, not wealth per se that's often what's most unsettling about billionaires. And I'm pretty sure that we should tax inheritances from billionaires at 99.9%+, so that we're not rewarding billionaire progeny for the privilege of being born into a rich family. Barely taxed inheritance is a recipe for mediocre guys becoming President by selling shitty steaks using their Daddy's name and money.
But don't hate the player, hate the game. Let's put our energy into envisioning a culture that functions - where people who make real sacrifices to create real value for others are rewarded, where people who have real skills and wisdom are given more power and influence, and where the collective good is served by the games we all wake up every day and play.
Hey Chris, Thanks for your post. I feel ppl need billions more may be because they want more of wat they hv. Or may be as others said to control others. Or may be to start some pet fancy project or maybe just to make others jealous or envious 🙂
Hi Chris,
Thx for replying.
Understood.
Happy to help Dr. Krippner.
My legal first name is also Stanley, but have gone by Sian for decades.
kohalakayak@yahoo.com
Hi Chris,
U mentioned a Wikipedia edit.
Not an editor by trade, but am a donor, so could do it.
Still shows Cacilda as your spouse.
When's that interview ?
Yeah, I'm not worried about mine. They have lots of stuff wrong. It was for Stanley Krippner's. If you're up for it, please send me an email and I'll put you in touch with Stan's friend, Phil, who was looking for help with that. I don't know when/if Cacilda and I will do another one. We both are pretty protective of our privacy on that front.
Having half a billion dollars gives me control over the double digit multi milllionaires who think big of themselves and look down on the common people. I am hoping to some day make it and reach single digit billions. Then I am above most of the BIG business owners who are always expanding their operations to my area(!!!) But for now I’ll be working for some 7-10 years into the future to reach a solid position. Then I’ll live free, invest wisely, spend time with family, maybe travel a little. 😎
But I agree that nobody needs a hundred billion dollars. That’s nuts.
I guess my argument for no cap on $$$ is that who’s to say there should be a cap on it in the first place? I liken it to athletes: why/ when should an athlete say ok that’s enough talent, I don’t need anymore?
What these money hungry people/ athletes need is morals to do good with what they’ve earned and to not take advantage of their so-called superpower. I guess this plays into the inheritance debate, perhaps some restrictions on it would benefit a child of wealthy parents and thus society.
Hey Chris, you mentioned Cacilda again.
When's that interview ?
Concerning making more & more $....
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200807/men-do-everything-they-do-in-order-get-laid-iii
Someone with half a billion dollars works for more power. But no one in that position wants to admit that because they’d be admitting they want to have millions of times more power than any one of us, and power over most of us.
I agree. Chris is thinking of money as the means to acquire comfort and other life perks, but for the mega rich (apart of bragging rights) money becomes control. Why does Sam Altman want a trillion dollars? In order to build a digital god --so he can claim to be the bigger god.
Re. Stan's Wikipedia, good luck with that. Chances are that because of his career his entry is controlled by the Guerrilla Skeptics who have hijacked Wikipedia's narrative with regards to fringe topics.
Super excited for this one!