[I_Am_Nous]

I agree with you again. My original question was asking "how many FIRE people can there be before it negatively affects society" so my thoughts and comments are scoped at that level -- how many FIRE people/families/descendents would it take to affect society in a meaningful way.

I haven't done a good job of making that clear at all, and I apologize. There are surely a lot of people trying to reach FIRE goals and if that were to be a meaningful 15% of the population, how would we be affected as a society?

One thing that's interesting in all this is that a common FIRE tactic is to live very frugally your whole lives to achieve and then maintain FIRE. If a meaningful percentage of Americans stopped spending as much money, the economy would feel it at a certain point.

These are the kinds of society-level thoughts I have been aiming to discuss. FIRE makes for some interesting futurism if it becomes the dominant American household financial strategy.

[hotpotamus]

I suppose the whole concept of FIRE is a bit hard to pin down. I believe most peoples' goal is indeed to retire eventually, so who's to say when the appropriate age for them is? If someone takes 50 years to generate enough value to live out their remaining days while someone else only takes 5, then isn't that determined by the labor market and their desired lifestyle? I'm all for a more collectivist "we're all in it together" type of society where retirement is a bit more of a managed concept (I get the impression France is like that where private retirements are rare and that's why Macron raising the retirement age was such a bitter pill), but that is not exactly the way that the US works.