There's no upper limit and the right edge of the income distribution looks almost exponential. Mere multimillionaires feel like paupers next to the billionaires.
Millionaire is actually just a x100 factor from a middle class saving account.
Each time, the real difference is not the physical goods anyway. From middle class to millionaire, it's the logistic that changes the most. You can live free of many constraints.
From millionaires to billionaires, it's more a matter of impact in the world. Having 100 luxury cars must be fun, but I can't imagine it changing your life that much.
> Having 100 luxury cars must be fun, but I can't imagine it changing your life that much.
But it's the gap from flying first class to owning private jets. Or renting a large yacht or owning a small one to owning a super-yacht with two helicopter pads and a sub (like e.g. Paul Allen's "Octopus" [1]).
Again, all that doesn't change your life much. The difference in quality of like is nowhere close to the gap you bridge when you can stop trying to make a living and doing daily chores. You hit diminishing returns.
But being able to influence politics, the economy, and knowing personnally many people that can, is a huge difference in what life you can experience.
I do agree it hits diminishing returns, but I do also still think the difference is quite stark. Each level up it affects which things you have the freedom to just do vs. which things you need to plan. You still hit those barriers where you have to plan and budget as a millionaire for things that are relatively within what regular people might dream of.
At some point additional wealth stops buying you significant comfort, but starts buying you significant power.
And to be honest, I think the area where that happens is a problem. I'm fine with people enjoying a life of comfort, I'm not so fine with people buying significant over others, over the society in which we live, simply because they have more money. It's a danger to democracy.
Any kind of concentrated power is a danger to democracy, but you can't setup any system that can counter that, because it will just concentrate somewhere else.
The only way to avoid this problem is for the people to actively, on their day to day live, think and act toward the society they want to co-create. Power to the people implies responsability for the people.
And we are nowhere near that. People don't want the responsability. They have enough on their plate already with their personnal life issues. They don't want to have to choose every day what to buy, what to read, what to watch. They don't want to include the entire what they think society should be in the process of choosing education, home or a job.
So they vote to delegate the power and responsability once in a while and call the resulting oligarchy a democracy. Semantics is way easier than implementing the real solution.
It's all obscene. IMHO we're headed for guillotine territory if things continue the way they have the past ~40 years or so in the West. And climate change is only going to make it more likely to go up like a tinderbox.
Marx predicted that it would take capitalism no longer having more markets to expand into causing further competition to hit labor costs to start throwing capitalism into crises. Whether or not he was right about that part, he also severely under-estimated how long it would take for capitalism to fully expand into every corner of the globe. Continued expansion has allowed for offsetting a lot of cost-cutting.
It's not so much that the system has incredible resilience, as it is that the after-shocks of feudalism and colonialism are still incomplete: we still have dozens of countries shacking off the post-colonial conflicts and building basic infrastructure that allows for rapid initial growth in commerce.
We'll find out once the last groups of developing countries start seeing growth drop back to the levels of developed countries. That is likely to be decades still, as many parts of Africa in particular just entered the steep growth over the last decade or so.
Eventually, any kind of growth is limited in a closed system, so it makes sense that it will be the dawn of capitalism, provided we don't escape in space before.
But I'm surprised, almost disapointed, that we need to reach this extreem. I was expecting injustice, greed, health issues and the ponzi scheme aspect of our economic system to be the kicker. It never happened.
I’ve worked with a few billionaires and a bunch of multi-millionaires and having had this conversation, can tell that the inflection point is where your lifestyle untethers from your finances.
For example, if you just had twins and live in a big city paying for those kids education/uprbringing is going to cost maybe ~$2-4m (NPV) even if you have $10m, that is really meaningful number to you, and less so at $30m, $300m, $1b etc.
Once you hit that inflection point (which is different for everyone) the conversation changes from how do I aforrd to [pay for my kid’s education] to what do I want to do with my life, what do I enjoy doing, what is my legacy going to be....
