(Tweet here) I’ve been thinking a lot about status versus wealth recently and the reason I’ve been thinking about status versus wealth is because I think deep down all of us want to be free… everybody wants to be free, nobody wants to be told what to do, or how to live their life, according to anybody else… and kind of the easiest path to the freedom [is] to get rid of a certain set of troubles… to get rid of the money problems is money.
So even though most people will say they’re above it or they don’t need it or it’s not part of happiness… I don’t think the world would be a worse place if we made everybody richer… and I don’t mean in the sense that we double the money in their bank accounts that’s just a nominal thing but I mean like a real thing… like if everybody had a nicer house and we could make it environmentally conscious, and everybody had a nicer car and we could make an electric car, and everybody had enough food on the table, everybody had reliable high-quality internet and bandwidth. Whatever they had, if they had 2X of it, the world would be a better place. I don’t think the world would be a worse place. So I think overall making everybody richer… and I don’t even [mean] socialism I’m not talking about redistribution, I’m just saying everybody richer would be a good thing and wealth is a positive sum game.
The reason businesses work, the reason Silicon Valley works, is because we can we can get together create a product or service and create more value, more wealth, than before we found it… so this positive-sum game of capitalism I think gets a bad rap, and so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to be wealthy.
The problem is that people, you know, they signal against wealth they talk about how money is a root of all evil, or you know, they say, “oh I’m beyond wealth” [or] “I don’t want wealth” or they attack income inequality and so on… and a lot of this is people just status signaling… they’re trying to gain status in the eyes of the tribe saying, look I’m looking out for the entire tribe not just a few people who are getting ahead and you know status signaling is needed to some extent, you just can’t have the oligarchs run the world, you have to have other hierarchies besides a money based hierarchy. A money based hierarchy is better than oligarchy… so you know you want other ways to order people other than oligarchy obviously.
There are many more things that have merit but I find that many of the others are zero-sum games whereas with wealth we can all be wealthy… all of us… imagine if the entire world, imagine if everybody in the world was a hardware engineer or software engineer right, hey just don’t ask me how, but we have a magic demon who can come in and retrain everybody, the education demon, and turns everybody into an engineering level, or PhD level, masters or PhD level good engineer in software, hardware, whatever you want… a chemical engineering… pick some hard science but you know the real engineer. I guarantee you that within five years the robots would be doing all the work in the world and we will be living with massive wealth and abundance and we would all be better off… so why not why shouldn’t we go for that?
So recently I’ve been thinking a lot about wealth or status because one of the things that annoys me about status… and status is the currency that politicians and academics and journalists move in… it’s a zero-sum game where for me to be higher status than you, you have to be lower status than me or vice versa. The thing I don’t like about the status game is that one of the ways they seek status is by attacking wealth, and I think it’s great to basically create wealth for all of us, abundance, and one of the reasons why I get on Periscope is because honestly, I want to tell people whatever I know about how to make money in an ethical, honest, positive, you know nonzero-sum kind of way.
So that that is a goal of mine… and I’ve been working on related tweets storm but anyway… someone saying make sure only the people who own the robot see the world, I mean at some point you know something becomes so abundant that everybody has it by default… at some point human society became so advanced that we decided to have roads and sidewalks and now everybody benefits from roads and sidewalks whether or not they’re part of the system. So I would say overall wealth creation if done right if done in a non-monopolistic way you know I can make everybody richer.
So that’s not true, you know you’re trying to make it a zero-sum game. Yes, it’s relative in a sense that I can score it against each other… but you know if I’m a millionaire and my neighbors a billionaire we can both still drive nice cars we can both still eat well you know his or her being a billionaire, it doesn’t take anything away from me.
So you have to get out of that relative mindset because if you get in that relative mindset, you’re always gonna hate people who do better than you, you’re always gonna be jealous, you’re going to be envious of them… and they’ll sense that when you find do business with them.
When you try and do business with somebody and if you have any bad thoughts about them, or any judgments about them they will feel it you know… humans are wired to kind of feel what the other person deep down inside feels.
Don’t think you’re so clever that you can hide it.
So to the extent that you have you know distaste or malice in your heart for someone that you’re trying to do business with, if you resent them they’re not gonna do business with you… and so literally being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy because you will not have the right mindset for it, you won’t have the right spirit, and you won’t be dealing with people on the right level… so be optimistic, be positive, it’s important. Optimist actually do better in the long run.
