There’s an interesting exchange at Scripting.Com between David Winer and Jamie Vornov over the value of money. Winer wrote the other day advising people to, “probe your dreams at a deeper level and see if you can’t find a way to do the things you want to do with your life, even if you have no money. You can save yourself a lot of years, learning the old adage, money doesn’t buy happiness.”
On the other hand from a strictly economic point of view, Vornov points out that there is no such thing as having too much wealth since unlimited wealth has unlimited utility.
As a writer, I’m a big believer in Dr. Ben Johnson’s adage that “nobody but a fool ever wrote for anything but money,” but on the other hand I agree more with Winer than Vornov. Vornov is certainly correct that unlimited wealth has unlimited utility. All other things being equal, it would be far better to have unlimited wealth than to not have unlimited wealth.
Unfortunately from a purely economic point of view one can indeed have too much money — you just have to not forget about the opportunity cost involved in obtaining wealth.
If I could obtain unlimited wealth by simply waving my hand, then certainly I’d want it. But the reality is that the creation of wealth typically requires a number of other inputs, the one that concerns me the most right now being time.
Wealth can only be converted into time in a very roundabout way. Certainly my ability to buy a faster computer or an appliance like a dishwasher allows me to do more things within the time I have, but it doesn’t allow me to manufacture more time. The general exception to this is medical advances where having enough money to afford say a liver transplant should I ever need one would directly translate into additional time. But for the most part, I doubt highly that a person making say $100,000/year is able to convert that into significantly more time than someone making $50,000/year.
And here’s the kicker — I’ve seen what people have to do to make $100,000/year, and I want no part of it. I’ve seen people wanting to climb the corporate ladder put in 70 hour weeks on a regular basis. Their entire lives were pretty much the company. They made a lot more than I did but I definitely did not envy them.
Regardless of what money can do, I suspect for most people time has far more utility than money once they reach a comfortable living standards. All of Bill Gates’ money, for example, can’t do anything to increase the amount of time he is able to spend with his child on a daily basis.
A few weeks ago I had a talk with my current boss that I’ve had with the last few people I’ve worked for — why the heck are you working here, they ask? Based on my resume I’m way overqualified for the current job I have now, but I clearly have absolutely no ambitions to move up either. Why? Because at the moment spending time with my family is much more important to me than making more money.
This doesn’t mean, by the way, that it’s necessarily wrong to decide what you really want out of life is to make a lot of money — unlike some people I actually think that’s a pretty admirable goal. Just be aware that you are explicitly making that choice because sometimes the pursuit of wealth does interfere with other values people hold more dearly.