an awful lot of people with a lot of money seem incredibly bad at spending it on anything they care about
It seems to me that the evidence of spent money is better than general (and as far as I can see, quite unspecified and unsupported) ideas about what rich people might/could/should/would care about.
That I would definitely dispute. Rational spenders, whose buying habits are well adjusted to satisfy their own preferences, are to the best of my experience as mythical as rational voters.
We learn that he commissioned a megayacht. Now, do you want to update towards “He’s interested in boats” or do you want to update towards “He spends his money on something he won’t enjoy”?
Having known a few yacht owners in my time, I very much would update toward the latter. I often think that the point is “having a yacht” and not at all the yacht in itself.
It might sound reasonable, but that’s a very different matter from the purchase actually being an effective per-dollar way to get something that will actually make him happy.
Would knowing that he’s commissioned a mega-yacht make me update in favor of the proposition that having a megayacht would make him feel happy or fulfilled? A little bit, sure, it’s better than nothing. But I would absolutely weight his thus “revealed” preference less strongly on that question than I would the evidence of simply asking him what he thought about yachts, and even that is pretty shaky evidence.
It was a pretty simple observation.
ciphergoth said:
It seems to me that the evidence of spent money is better than general (and as far as I can see, quite unspecified and unsupported) ideas about what rich people might/could/should/would care about.
That I would definitely dispute. Rational spenders, whose buying habits are well adjusted to satisfy their own preferences, are to the best of my experience as mythical as rational voters.
Really? Let’s take a random member of the Walton family who is stupidly rich but about whose preferences we know nothing—an uninformative prior.
We learn that he commissioned a megayacht.
Now, do you want to update towards “He’s interested in boats” or do you want to update towards “He spends his money on something he won’t enjoy”?
Having known a few yacht owners in my time, I very much would update toward the latter. I often think that the point is “having a yacht” and not at all the yacht in itself.
In which case you want to update towards “He’s buying himself a bit more status” which still seems entirely reasonable to me :-)
It might sound reasonable, but that’s a very different matter from the purchase actually being an effective per-dollar way to get something that will actually make him happy.
Would knowing that he’s commissioned a mega-yacht make me update in favor of the proposition that having a megayacht would make him feel happy or fulfilled? A little bit, sure, it’s better than nothing. But I would absolutely weight his thus “revealed” preference less strongly on that question than I would the evidence of simply asking him what he thought about yachts, and even that is pretty shaky evidence.