Getting Paid To Flip Million Dollar Coins
A foolproof way to get engagement is post this thing on Twitter every couple months. Sometimes my mood is to hate on such dredging but in this case, screw it, let’s take this sucker apart and see how many things we can learn from it.
There’s no dissonance here. The red button guarantees an entirely new life to most of the world’s population. The green button means they still might have to set an alarm for work tomorrow.
The joy of wealth has diminishing returns. I just found $40 in a pair of pants I hadn’t worn in a while (plus a covid mask). If that happened 25 years ago, it would have been a serious enough discovery that I’d hoof it to the local bank branch with a deposit slip.
Economists talk about the “utility” of wealth. They will demonstrate the concept with a sub-linear function to relate “utils” to the quantity of wealth. It’s typically a logarithmic or power function. The sub-linear part means “if your wealth doubles your happiness increases but not by 2x”. The empirical shape of the function is something academics will split hairs about.
The function is reasonable — happiness increases at a slower rate but maintains that more wealth is always better than less (which I’d describe as a “no-arbitrage condition” — if it wasn’t you could just give money away).
