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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> After a million dollars or so in salary, the absolute amount that a person is paid has no real impact on their life. They can't eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes

There is more to life than food and shoes? This is one of the dumbest things I’ve read.

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The point still stands. Beyond some amount the absolute amount of money really stops to matter

Not in the minds of the people competing for the job. They can get a bigger house with more money.

The ability to exert power and influence over things you value continues to scale with money. There's more to life than consumption.

Money is power.

Of course, the people who think that's a super brilliant great idea are those with a lot of money or those who somehow expect to get a lot of money.

I think genuinely most people don’t want to exert power over others, so the value doesn’t increase for most

> Beyond some amount the absolute amount of money really stops to matter

At national monetary scales, sure, because more spending would be inflationary thereby decreasing one’s spending power. So call it a trillion dollars or so. Not a practically relevant cap.

AFAICT, the most expensive yacht is the History Supreme, which is only 100ft but is built from, among other things, 10 tons of gold and platinum. $4.8B.

Then there's the 155m Streets of Monaco concept (https://archive.curbed.com/2013/7/15/10219720/inside-streets...) which I would not touch with a 40ft motor lifeboat. $1.1B.

Elon Musk famously found a way to spend $44B on Twitter, which pretty impressive.

Only if you think the point of money is consumption or saving for future consumption and not dry powder for class mobility (investments / housing / schooling for children / social signaling).

No it doesn't - what if you had a trillion dollars. You could spend the money on saving the penguins, or developing a Linux distribution that's just the way you like it, or clean up the ocean, or start a Manhattan project for breakthrough battery tech, or teach kids math in Africa, or convert a large number of people to your religion, or fund the arts, or fund an expedition to Mars, or any number of things.

Human needs are infinite. There will always, always be more good and worthwhile things to buy.

According to whom? The research I've seen on this confirms Bernoulli's intuition that happiness scales with the logarithm of income.

Sure, the logarithm is slowly varying in the limit, but that seems like a very unusual definition of both "beyond some amount" and "absolute amount stops mattering."

The logarithmic decay could be more about more and more people hitting their satisfaction level, than about what the wealth can purchase. In other words, very few people actually want to be billionaires.

Or more simply: most people want to retire.

And that point happens, at minimum, after you have enough money to no longer need to work another day in your life.

Try to generalize, you might come up with something like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility

It does apply to many things. You can only wear so many pairs of shoes, and only one pair at a time. You can't eat more food than will fit in your stomach. You can have X houses, but you can only live in one at a time.

If money isn't the bottleneck anymore, something else becomes the bottleneck - time, space, energy, interest/passion, etc.

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