[dusted]

An interesting point of view. Practically, I agree with you, that FU wealth is probably the most realistic way to achieve the freedom required for some personality types to achieve happiness.

I am unfortunately one of them, intellectually, I've conclude the same for myself many times over, and have been unable to change my view on this, as much as I'd love to find peace in my sitaution and enjoy life (tm).

What's hard about it is that it's probably impossible for most people to achieve this kind of wealth, after all, in the current socioeconomic situation, you can't be rich in any traditional sense of the word, without someone else being relatively less well off.

Until we have robots doing our work, and almost-infinite access to resources through no or little work of our own, the traditional definitions are valid.

[jimbokun]

> you can't be rich in any traditional sense of the word, without someone else being relatively less well off.

I was with you up until here.

The total amount of wealth in the world is constantly growing, and you can positively influence it's creation, by introducing new efficiencies or new goods and services that didn't exist before.

In many ways, the wealth of the average person living today is much greater than kings and emperors living centuries ago.

[dusted]

Don't miss my very last paragraph. :)

To elaborate:

The total AMOUNT of wealth is growing, and its uneven distribution makes my point even more obvious.

Explain to me how you'd expect to get the following services in a "everyone has FU money with no robots doing the work": Car repair, lawn mowed, anything built, groceries checked out, actually, anything at all.

The only reason these things work is because there's enough unequal distribution that _someone_ has to do something they don't really want to do, in order to give someone else something they'd like to have.

The traditional job is something that nobody wants to pay for doing, but almost everyone want to pay for having done.. In order for anyone to DO that job, they have to be poor enough to accept trading in their time for money.

I'm super lucky, as I'm almost doing the same thing at my job as I'd be doing in my free time, but I still take money for it, because, after all, I'd be writing slightly more interesting (to me) code if it was my hobby. It's just that my hobby won't make me rich, because my hobby is not in trying to turn a profit on my hobby.

[silly-silly]

>In many ways, the wealth of the average person living today >is much greater than kings and emperors living centuries >ago.

I dunno man, I'm average and can't afford N wives, have someone do my dishes, clothes, own and tend thousands of hectares of land for me, father 12 children.

Maybe i'm reading about different kings than you do.

[jimbokun]

But I bet the quality of health care available to you exceeds the imagination of those kings and emperors.

The probability of fathering 12 children, if anything, is probably inversely proportional to your wealth, these days.

Not sure owning and tending thousands of hectares of land has much utility in and of itself. It was a proxy for generating wealth, like someone owning a lot of equities today. But the question is what utility was available to purchase with that wealth?

Granted kings and emperors in some ways were better off in some ways than the median wage earners today, but not in others.

[dusted]

>But I bet the quality of health care available to you exceeds the imagination of those kings and emperors. This raises the question of what should be included in the definition of wealth.

That king probably had one or more personal doctors, people they more or less owned, whose sole purpose and responsibility was their well-being.

Even if the efficiency of that person might have been low, it's certainly a lot more than being able to rent an hour of a doctors time.

Also, I have a color TV, which no king at that time have, but is that technological progress really wealth?

By that definition, starving people with cellphones are still wealthy.

[ghaff]

>That king probably had one or more personal doctors, people they more or less owned, whose sole purpose and responsibility was their well-being.

(Assuming we're talking a couple hundred years ago or longer.)

Who didn't have access to antibiotics, vaccines, or any of a plethora of other modern drugs, germ theory of disease, anesthetics, etc. etc. I'll take an hour of a modern physician's time and access to hospital/pharmacy. Thank you very much.

Quantity doesn't always beat quality.

[dusted]

> Quantity doesn't always beat quality.

I even implied as much. What I'm trying to say is that being wealthy has nothing to do with the technological level of your country at some given point in history. It may have some correlation to how good access you have to whatever the highest technology available at your point in history is.

[kranner]

> you can't be rich in any traditional sense of the word, without someone else being relatively less well off.

Even if that were true, all of your gain in wealth doesn't have to come out of a single individual's pocket. If you make something (e.g. an app) for which a lot of people pay a very small amount, presumably because they get some value in return, it seems a fair deal and leaves everyone else very marginally poorer, and not unfairly. If you consider the value they have gained from using your product as a form of wealth, then no one is poorer at all because you have created wealth.

[dusted]

Look at how much money people in silicon valley earn on average, then check how much it cost to live there, they're all rich by my standards, because I live in a rural area in another country.

What they can do with their wealth where I am is _VASTLY_ different from what they can do where they are. They're basically median wealthy among themselves, and they still have to go to work like everybody else, the numbers they're pulling seem impressive only at first.

I'm not talking about being fair or not, only that for the current economic system to work, you need equality of resources. I'm not saying it's a good thing, just, it's how it works. I'm all for changing that, I totally expected it to have been figured out already by the time I reached adulthood, but there are no flying cars (1)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Where-My-Flying-Car-Memoir-ebook/dp/B...