part of the “what I learned after four years at MIT” series, I guess?
There’s some oft-cited psychology studies that suggest that once your salary goes above $75,000, additional money doesn’t make you happier. This sounds like a sage bit of life advice if it were true, the ultimate rebuff against excessive greed and materialism and sacrificing other things for a six-digit salary, but it overstates the case a bit. 80,000 Hours’ analysis of money and happiness is probably the analysis I’d trust the most here; I think it would be more accurate just to say that you get diminishing returns of happiness from salaries above $70,000.1 Still, that was enough for me to decide fairly early on that I wasn’t interested in trying to get a high-paying job for its own sake, or in spending too much effort trying to invest my way to a fortune.2 I wanted my job to be personally satisfying and good for the world, while paying enough for me and my family (current and future) to get by, but I planned to treat any additional money after that as little more than a bonus used for breaking ties.
I still mostly stand by that decision today, but over the intervening years I realized there were a whole host of reasons to want money that weren’t that selfish at all.
Money is influence. Over the last four years, I have gotten many opportunities to contemplate how many decisions are driven by monetary considerations, how much organizations will do to suit their donors, how wide-ranging the effects of all this are. This happens a lot in national politics — money alone can’t win you an election, but it sure helps — but also in school politics. I think just about every time I’ve recently wished I had money, I wasn’t hoping to buy or afford something; I was hoping to get people to listen to me and people like me: nationally and socially, about climate change and gender equality and LGBTQ rights and so on3, but at school, about dorm restructuring and meal plans and so many other things. I won’t rehash everything that has happened since I expect most readers for which this is relevant will have learned about it from other sources,4 but suffice it to say that I’m not planning to donate a single cent to MIT unless and until they start treating students and student culture better. Unfortunately, without more money to not donate, I don’t think anybody would care, nor would I expect them to.
Money is freedom. Money frees you to solve problems that the world won’t pay you to solve, the kinds of problems for which there are fancy economics terms and theories because they don’t automatically fall out of people making mutually beneficial exchanges, if that’s want you want to do. I wonder sometimes, not very seriously, if I should go off and start a startup — it seems like a pretty popular thing to do5 — but even putting aside the usual questions of whether I have the resources and the grit to start a startup, I think a lot of problems I’d most strongly want to solve are fundamentally incompatible with a traditional business model. It would be nice to build up some savings and have enough money to, at least, have the option of funding myself to just work on such a problem full-time, without needing to worry about profit margins and market fit and competitors and stock options and all that.
Money is the ability to help others. I’ve spent a lot of words contemplating massive salaries from the point of view of somebody who likely won’t have any trouble getting a comfortably livable salary, but it’s easy to lose sight of how well off I already am.6 According to this CareerBuilder survey, 78% of U.S. workers live paycheck to paycheck. This number is astoundingly high to me. Four out of five workers, one financial accident away from bankruptcy. I also got a perspective that’s a bit more visceral from hanging out on Mastodon, where if you look in the right places you will quickly start seeing dozens of glimpses into people’s rocky financial lives, dozens of PayPal and GoFundMe links for people who are just trying to get by, every month; people who might have hit that one financial accident: a medical bill, a car breaking down, an unexpected price hike on something.7 I donate from time to time. I wish I felt comfortable donating more. Whenever I see these donation links, after the requisite wistful contemplation of the societal problems that led so many people to this point, I cannot help but fantasize about the alternate reality in which I make so much more money, I can just throw $50 at every donation link without hesitating, because spending the time deliberating about whether to donate would cost me more.
All in all, even if you’re not interested in amassing a mountain of wealth and living a luxurious lifestyle, or even if you have sharp philosophical objections to such things, there are many reasons being rich would still be nice. Of course, money is certainly not the only way to achieve any of these things. It’s probably not even the most efficient way to achieve any of them, which is why I still mostly stand by the decision at the start of this post. Still, reflecting on my past selves and their attempts at making career decisions, I should probably have valued it just a bit more highly and felt less bad about doing so.