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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

> His brain should have adapted to the new normal and compelled him to risk his whole fortune in the hope of making even more money

Why do you think this should happen? That doesn't sound very rational to me. If you have more than you could possibly ever need then why would you choose to risk that? This is one reason why we should never reward people with these ridiculous levels of wealth in the first place.

> The best way to redistribute wealth is wealthy individuals overplaying their hand.

This sounds like a very wasteful and unreliable way to redistribute wealth to me. Unreliable because as you say it often doesn't happen. Wasteful because if it does happen it involves wasting enormous amounts of resources on a failed project.

IMO the best way to redistribute wealth is to not allow people to become as ridiculously wealthy as they are in the first place.

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> If you have more than you could possibly ever need then why would you choose to risk that?

Because you don't simply do it for the stuff. You do it for the brain juices which are released when you win.

Bill Gates biggest wins happened in the late 80s and 90s.

His brain should compel him to do better than that to release those elusive juices once again.

The only way to do so is having even bigger wins than the ones in the 80s and 90s

> Failed project

The entrepreneur's failed project is the worker dream job where you get paid for doing nothing.

Kinda like the influencers hired by Bloomberg in his 2020 campaign. Nobody was checking if they were really doing the job and they just pocketed the money.

> Because you don't simply do it for the stuff. You do it for the brain juices which are released when you win.

Well sure, but those motivations exist regardless of any financial rewards. We are talking here about the additional effect of financial incentives. IMO the possibility of making say $1m or $10m is pretty motivating if you don't have much. But once you reach say $1B, financial incentives are unlikely to be as relevant to you. You're made for life, why should you do anything you don't want to do.

> the worker dream job where you get paid for doing nothing.

I think most workers would prefer to be paid to something useful/meaningful, unless they can literally go and do something completely different with no restrictions. But is rarely how billionaire's failed projects go. They usually involve a lot of people working very hard to no end.

> Well sure, but those motivations exist regardless of any financial rewards

The amount of the financial reward measures how much you are winning. The juices produced when you win 20$ and those produced when your leveraged long in biotech stocks make you 750k are not the same.

> They usually involve a lot of people working very hard to no end.

This is just a pessimistic outlook. Most stuff fails but the few thing that stick produce a big improvement.

And it's not just billionaires who face this problem. Government has an even worse success rate, but the home runs are paradigm shifts. The failures burn a lot, think about the CERN failure, that's 20B right there.

The ITER fusion seems to be the same thing and that's 50B

The ISS never recovered the initial investment made, that's 100B.

It's not just billionaires projects wasting money

All of those projects have something in common. They are big and centralised. I agree with you that it's not just billionaires that have this problem, but billionaires are one of the entities that do.

> The amount of the financial reward measures how much you are winning. The juices produced when you win 20$ and those produced when your leveraged long in biotech stocks make you 750k are not the same.

I suspect the world might a better place if we gave fewer people who are motivated in this financial manner, and more people who are motivated by the impact of their work (of whom there are plenty, and they're just as good as the financially motivated ones).

> and more people who are motivated by the impact of their work (of whom there are plenty, and they're just as good as the financially motivated ones).

Nobody does the work for the sake of doing the work.

People work for a combination of financial reward and social status, and they'd use that as a metric to measure how much are they winning compared with the other 8 billion people on the planet

There is only a very very tiny percentage of people who are happy with just citations and the tepid approval of other academics

So if you roll back financial reward all the way down , then you have to pump social status all the way up.

It's going to be even worse. The cult of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Donald Trump would be the normal and would trickle all the way down.

> Because you don't simply do it for the stuff. You do it for the brain juices which are released when you win.

You say this, but you point at evidence saying the opposite.

And in fact, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, the Waltons and all the people who have been populating the Forbes rich list for the last 30 years...they don't look happy.

They seem rather dull and desensitised to anything. Very robotic.

Very similar to the British royals and European old money.

They live in fear of losing their money and relevance instead of having the confidence to double down on their bets and hit yet another home run.

If you look at billionaires then it's pretty easy to pick the ones you'd want to be: Mark Cuban, Donald Trump, Rihanna, Cristiano Ronaldo....etc

Those type of billionaries who are big spenders and also continiously betting on themselves are the type of billionaires also good for society because they make the economy go around and their projects are cash cows for other entrepreneurs looking for easy oversells.

Can't imagine living in fear like Gates, the Waltons and Warren Buffett, they aren't human.

> This is one reason why we should never reward people with these ridiculous levels of wealth in the first place.

Who are we and why do "we" do that?

"we" are society deciding on an economic system and taxation regime.

"we" currently reward people with this amount of wealth generally because of a majority belief in one or more of the following (none of which are true in my opinion):

  (1) They deserve this money, because either:
    (1a) it represents a proportional reward for work put in
    (1b) any money gained under a market system are deserved/earnt, and taxing those earnings is stealing

  (2) That rewarding people in this manner (without limits) is the only way to motivate people to work hard, and that this ultimately produces better outcomes than distributing our economic output more evenly

Are you absolutely sure that you and Bill Gates live under the same economic system? Because I suspect that you describe some other economic system than capitalism.

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