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Comment by pradocchia | Hacker News Reader

You seriously can't think of a rational reason why someone would turn down money for his work? Ok, here are a couple of suggestions in this case:

1. He dislikes what he perceives to be the corrupting effects of money and wants to guard against their influence in his life.

2. He thinks about pure math all day, and this makes him happy. Has solved for his basic needs. Does not want to worry about managing $1M. If and when he needs more money, he will deal w/ it then. Since he is a famous mathematician, it is reasonable to expect that others will help him out, if he asks.

These are variations on theme, actually. He enjoys thinking about math. He doesn't need $1M to think about math. Ergo, he doesn't need $1M.

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>He enjoys thinking about math. He doesn't need $1M to think about math. Ergo, he doesn't need $1M.

The fallacy there is the assumption that he will never need $1M to think about math. He could get hit by a bus next week and need $1M for medical care.

(A quick Wikipedia check says that Russia has public health care supplemented with private providers. Suppose here that his injuries were bad enough that the public system wouldn't completely heal him.)

If he needed help, he could reasonable expect others to come to his aid. Seems characteristic of the profession. Especially for someone of his stature. People would hear of his situation and come forward with offers of aid and hospitality. "Yes, please come to IAS, here's a room, stay as long as you want." Now, he might not want to accept such offers, I don't know. He seems to dislike the academy. In which case he might prefer to suffer alone, than dirty himself w/ prizes and associations.

But the idea that he wouldn't have other resources to draw on, short of the $1M prize, seems wrong.

I guess one can construct rational arguments for turning down money if one doesn't believe in capitalism or economics or money, but that doesn't make the act of turning down money economically non-rational.

His wealth-generating function does not take money as an input, beyond that which is required to sustain his physical body. He happily specializes in the production of theorems, and does not require financial rewards as an incentive.

If he had a family to support, it might be a different matter.

For him, marginal dollars have negative utility. This may be because of morality -- he could consider the act of giving mathematics prizes antithetical to promoting good math research; it may be because of his focus -- he knows that he would have to manage the money if he got it, which would distract him from doing math; it may be because of fear -- there may be people that would kidnap his family to get access to that money.

If you consider "economics" to deal only with maximizing money, it's economically non-rational to decline this prize. If you consider "economics" to deal with maximizing utility, it could easily be rational to decline this prize.

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