Generically, having more money in the bank gives you more options, being cash-constrained means you have fewer options. And, also generically, when the future is very uncertain, it is important to have options for how to deal with it.
If how the world currently works changes drastically in the next few decades, I’d like to have the option to just stop what I’m doing and do something else that pays no money or costs some money, if that seems like the situationally-appropriate response. Maybe that’s taking some time to think and plan my next move after losing a job to automation, rather than having to crash-train myself in something new that will disappear next year. Maybe it’s changing my location and not caring how much my house sells for. Maybe it’s doing different work. Maybe it’s paying people to do things for me. Maybe it’s also useful to be invested in the right companies when the economy goes through a massive upswing before the current system collapses, so I for a brief time have a lot of wealth and can direct it towards goals that are aligned with my values rather than someone else’s, thus, index funds that buy me into a lot of companies.
Even if we eventually get to a utopia, the path to that destination could be rocky, and having some slack is likely to be helpful in riding that time out.
Another form of slack is learning to live on much less than you make—so the discipline required to accumulate savings, could also pay off in terms of not being psychologically attached to a lifestyle that stops you from making appropriate changes as the world changes around you.
Of course “accumulate money so you have options when the world changes” is a different mindset than “save money so you can go live on a beach in 40 years”. But money is sort of like fungible power, an instrumentally useful thing to have for many different possible goals in many different scenarios, and a useless thing to have in only a few.
Side note: “the amount a dollar can do goes up, the value of a dollar collapses” strikes me as implausible. Your story for how that could happen is people hit a point of diminishing returns in terms of their own happiness… but there are plenty of things dollars can be used for aside from buying more personal happiness. If things go well, we’re just at the start of earth-originating intelligence’s story, and there are plenty of ways for an investment made at the right time to ripple out across the universe. If I was a trillionaire (or a 2023-hundred-thousandaire where the utility of a dollar has gone up by a factor of 10 million, whatever), I could set up a utopia suited to my tastes and understanding of the good, for others, and that seems worth doing even if my subjective day-to-day experience doesn’t improve as a result. As just one example. In any case, being at the beginning of a large expansion in the power of earth-originating intelligence, seems like just the sort of time when you’d like to have the ability to make a careful investment.
Generically, having more money in the bank gives you more options, being cash-constrained means you have fewer options. And, also generically, when the future is very uncertain, it is important to have options for how to deal with it.
If how the world currently works changes drastically in the next few decades, I’d like to have the option to just stop what I’m doing and do something else that pays no money or costs some money, if that seems like the situationally-appropriate response. Maybe that’s taking some time to think and plan my next move after losing a job to automation, rather than having to crash-train myself in something new that will disappear next year. Maybe it’s changing my location and not caring how much my house sells for. Maybe it’s doing different work. Maybe it’s paying people to do things for me. Maybe it’s also useful to be invested in the right companies when the economy goes through a massive upswing before the current system collapses, so I for a brief time have a lot of wealth and can direct it towards goals that are aligned with my values rather than someone else’s, thus, index funds that buy me into a lot of companies.
Even if we eventually get to a utopia, the path to that destination could be rocky, and having some slack is likely to be helpful in riding that time out.
Another form of slack is learning to live on much less than you make—so the discipline required to accumulate savings, could also pay off in terms of not being psychologically attached to a lifestyle that stops you from making appropriate changes as the world changes around you.
Of course “accumulate money so you have options when the world changes” is a different mindset than “save money so you can go live on a beach in 40 years”. But money is sort of like fungible power, an instrumentally useful thing to have for many different possible goals in many different scenarios, and a useless thing to have in only a few.
Side note: “the amount a dollar can do goes up, the value of a dollar collapses” strikes me as implausible. Your story for how that could happen is people hit a point of diminishing returns in terms of their own happiness… but there are plenty of things dollars can be used for aside from buying more personal happiness. If things go well, we’re just at the start of earth-originating intelligence’s story, and there are plenty of ways for an investment made at the right time to ripple out across the universe. If I was a trillionaire (or a 2023-hundred-thousandaire where the utility of a dollar has gone up by a factor of 10 million, whatever), I could set up a utopia suited to my tastes and understanding of the good, for others, and that seems worth doing even if my subjective day-to-day experience doesn’t improve as a result. As just one example. In any case, being at the beginning of a large expansion in the power of earth-originating intelligence, seems like just the sort of time when you’d like to have the ability to make a careful investment.