I think we can put a specific maximum for a comfortable western lifestyle. You can certainly argue that a comfortable western lifestyle is already far and away better than most of the people on Earth will ever see. This is something of an arbitrary point where past this, most of us are going to agree that it’s excessive.

It’s USD 10 million.

Why? Let’s start with the Trinity study:

https://thepoorswiss.com/updated-trinity-study/

The original looked at a standard retirement portfolio and asked how much you can withdraw over a thirty year retirement. It took market data from 1925 through 1995 (the updated version linked above goes to 2023) and then checked a thirty year window over that entire period with various withdrawal rates.

What it found is that if you withdraw 4% of the portfolio the first year, and increasing it by inflation each subsequent year, it’s highly unlikely the portfolio will run out in the 30 year window. The time period covers has market ups and downs, high inflation and low, and this 4% stays.

The updated study above says a 3.5% withdraw had a high chance of lasting 50 years.

Lets play it ultra safe and put it at 2.5%. With $10M, we’ll have $250,000/year to play with, and our rules adjust that for inflation.

(Median household income in Manhattan is $128k)[https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/NY/Manhattan-Demographics.html]. We’re pulling almost twice that. I feel comfortable saying a person can live nicely in any city on this income.

So there you go: $10M. If you want a 100% tax bracket, that’s a good place to put it. Any more money past that is just a game that hurts everyone else.

It’s harder to think about “enough” in places like India (or even the US) where there is so much inequality.

But I would define “enough” as comfortable. Not worried about bills, buying whatever groceries you want, a good living situation and enough cushion that an emergency won’t make you homeless.

The addiction to more, more, more is a disorder like hoarding is.

I think acquiring money can be an addiction, in the sense that it’s a behavior that allows escape (it’s a simple goal that’s easy to define, allowing a person to stop looking around and just go forward). Just like video games provide an orienting direction, hence provide dopamine, hence can be addicting, money can do the same thing.

Because money is a number, it’s inherently gamified. You can just set “more money” as the objective and you never have to change it and it’s always a direction to go that can produce dopamine.

Now, if it’s not the best, most meaningful direction. the dopamine flow decreases but doesn’t stop. Just like the video games getting boring, or your brain adapting to the cigarettes or cocaine. You still get a little jolt of dopamine, but not as much as before, so it’s this tired, boring life.

The thing is, there’s a lot of uncertainty and withdrawal and relearning you have to go through to get away from the repetitive small-hit dopamine cycle and into the more organic, less repetitive, large-hit dopamine cycle of … being a real person doing valuable things.

So yeah. Money as addiction. Source of small dopamine hits, that are easier to obtain and more familiar and hence comfortable, than the messy and uncertain process of seeking dopamine through real-world accomplishment.

ALSO, there’s the problem of how markets work. When a person is relative low in the market structure, their only way of getting profit is to really produce a lot of value. The higher a person gets in that structure, ie the more they advance financially, the less value they’re adding. The ultimate asymptote they approach is when they have sufficient money to live on the interest, and it’s totally automatic, and their contribution to economic value is zero.

This means that as a person follows the path (one of many paths) from worker to entrepreneur to pretty bourgeoise to elite, they steadily lose the natural, organic meaning that comes from actually providing value to others.

The person who used to love and be sustained by the smiles and appreciation of their coffee customers, probably isn’t getting much juice out of sitting there looking at spreadsheets of their 5000-coffee-shop empire.

But along the way, they’ve already switched their dopamine source to be from a combination of value provided and money received, to be just the money.

Which is like sitting there lighting up a cigarette to stave off the discomfort for another hour, or to prevent having to think about something that makes you anxious or uncertain. Just light up a smoke: dopamine.

Just like me with this damn website. Addicted. Small dopamine hits, comfortable stand-in for actual meaning.

Greedy people are more likely to end up wealthy. Greedy people are also more likely to end up doing ethically dubious things.

Of course, any wealth at all is unethical if you’re being honest with yourself. There’s a famous passage in the Bible.

Jesus was out teaching his disciples or healing people- whatever he did. And a rich man comes up to him and asks

“Jesus, I want to follow you and go to heaven. Please tell me what I should do”

What did Jesus say? Jesus told him to a) sell all of his shit b) give that money to charity c) physically follow me around

What did rich guy do? Have an epiphany about morality and living the good life?

No, he cried. He cried because he didn’t actually want to let go of the good things he had for morality.

All of us in first world nations are guilty of this to some extent. The way our world is shaped you essentially have to be unethical to survive. There are levels to it, of course. But I think your perspective is too black and white and needs a little nuance. Seem like a teenager.

I’ll leave this here.

The happiest nations of the world aren’t obsessed with chasing money and hoarding it because they’ve been supported by their neighbours from birth to where they’re working and supporting their own neighbours. So many of the things that Americans hoard money to try and prevent are just … handled … by everyone’s neighbour, anonymously. The knowledge that this coordination and ‘smoothing’ of stressful troubles is done anonymously, regularly, and unilaterally, serves to reduce a lot of the effects of food insecurity and health insecurity and shelter insecurity. They have a system that works, and it’s shown to be reliable, and people are more calm.

So I’m not going to say how they achieve that, except “find the objectively-ranked happiest nations of the world and either move there or convince your government to do what they’re doing” and I’ll move on. It’s not hard, but you’re going to go through stages of disbelief (nah, that can’t work because people will cheat), bargaining (can I cheat please?), etc, and either you’ll be ultimately frustrated at the fact that your locale just can’t get there, or you’ll be moving to the locales where they’re doing it.

Money only amplifies who you are and what you’re able to do. I’m quite comfortable, but I like to build things and make companies grow, and solve technical problems. I don’t really want to sit back and just do nothing - in fact I’d love a partner to help me do a bit more relaxing - but when left to my own devices I am always learning some new skill or refining some process or generally trying to make the world around me a little better.

I don’t know, but I wonder the same. I’m in the US and work for a guy that has tens of millions of dollars. He still spends all day in the office 6 days a week. To be fair, I don’t think he does it for the money, exactly, but I can’t understand why he keeps working at all.

When i am convinced that my children will each have at least enough money for a good education and a home of their own. If my next twenty years are as successful as my last twenty years, then I’ll have enough money only after i can also fund my grandchildrens’ educations.

It’s kind of a shit world that we’re leaving for the next generations. I’ll try to look out for mine before i fuck off to the great beyond.

Part of the problem is that most people will spend most of their time around people of a similar wealth level. They will therefore always be around people richer than themselves and generally see less people that are much poorer (at least in a personal context).

This means that ‘rich’ people don’t feel rich. (Unless they are self aware enough to realise it). It also means that your references for morals etc are now other rich people rather than ‘normal’ people (although it’s normal to them!)

Therefore, they always want to acquire more money, and their references for how to go about that are the richer people who have already done similar things.

When I am immune to the thoughts of questioning my finances

I have wondered the same thing many a time. I don’t think it’s naive to wonder honestly. I find it genuinely confusing, not from a moral judgy standpoint but more of an effort to reward standpoint.

If you or I sold tobacco in exchange for a quantity we’ll call a “shit-tonne” for the purposes of discussion. It would change our lives considerably. As you said, you personally would do it, and I think odds are pretty good I would too. But if that 1 shit-tonne of cash doesn’t significantly change the recipient’s life or capabilities or long term security, I don’t understand why they’d bother with it. I think my confusion diverges from yours in so far as I don’t think the point of getting rich for the vast majority of people has to do with acquiring the luxury of a moral compass. It might be for some, but I’d say for most it’s at best a side benefit and for many irrelevant. However I do think that most of us without the requisite shit-tonnes of cash like to imagine the purpose for acquiring it is to avoid having to expend the effort required to acquire anymore thereafter. In this framework, which seems so obvious and relatable to me, you’d think you couldn’t hook wealthy actors in to shilling tobacco because basically, they just couldn’t be bothered, I mean why bother? You might keep acting if you find it fun but surely there’d be funner gigs than ads?

This is a more cynical way to look at it, but no less inaccurate than your theory of acquiring wealth to buy the ability to be moral. In the case of wealthy actors however, I think they’re maybe not the best example, the richest ones are very rich but their material desires are sometimes able to scale with their wealth. Nicholas Cage was a good example as he managed to get himself in to ridiculous debt ostensibly from insane spending on ridiculous things. Presumably he liked having those things and was able with some effort to actually spend enough outpace his unbelievably high earnings. In that context you might well take lucrative acting gigs for scummy companies to help you out of debt or to help you buy one more private island.

There’s a whole other tier of offensive and obscene personal wealth where you see people like billionaire CEOs. These people trash my model of the ‘purpose’ of acquiring wealth and by the actions we see them do, yours as well. These guys probably couldn’t spend all their money on material objects if they actively tried. Their motives are very obscure to me. I definitely judge these guys but I leave them just a little bit of slack in so far as it seems generally observable that acquiring this much wealth seems to make you want to keep acquiring more wealth. I may not know why, but it almost seems like some kind of a fundamental law or drive so it could almost have some exculpatory power, though not much and in any case would only lend credence to the idea that society as a whole ought to avoid the accumulation of quite so much personao wealth since if my observation is at all accurate it would tend to mean, that much like we hold it to be true that all drivers will be impaired after a certain amount of alcohol so too does wealth tend to corrupt the decision making and motivations of people who have too much of it.

I’ve read about the topic a little bit and there’s some concepts that make some sense. People do crave purpose, so if you make enough money to sit on your ass and avoid having to make money people have a tendency to create objectives for themselves to work towards and if they don’t it can lead to unhappiness. In the case of some of those who achieved such wealth they had such objectives on the way up too, so it’s how they’ve always lived their life (theoretically, if they supposedly got their through hard work and merit, big if). This does explain it I guess, but as an explanation it feels vague and weak. I’ve heard ideas around a kind of competitive peer pressure effect too, these guys want to be richer than each other. This is unsatisfying because it’s just so dumb but makes a lot of sense, especially because it kind of scales with wealth as well. Often as people at all walks of life take stock of their position they will assess how well they’re doing in comparison to where they were before and also in comparison to someone else around them so by those metrics you’re always going to want to be doing just that little bit better than a few years ago and your always going to want to be exceeding or approaching the person you’ve most recently set as a desirable standard. All of these ideas seem to explain the behaviour we see but to me all feel too wishy washy to really make sense but I guess that’s because it’s going to be lots of these drives acting in concert along with something that one probably just has to experience and which basically none of us ever will as it comes with becoming richer than god.

Personally I can’t but think that if instead of becoming rich, I suddenly got bequeathed all of Elon Musk’s wealth unexpectedly from his timely death then I’d very likely have far less ambitious and contentious goals than he. Not necessarily because I hold myself to a higher standard but because, I mean, why take over the world like a megalomaniac when it’s so much easier and more fun to do lots of drugs and go traveling and play with all the best toys? If I really crave purpose I can make a movie or something, I wouldn’t even have to be good at it, I could buy everything related to it being made and distributed. If I was talentless and it stunk and flopped, it wouldn’t be my problem and I could afford to spend my time getting good at it as a hobby even if each flop cost hundreds of millions. But maybe one the zeros started trailing on my account balance I’d suddenly start wanting to own everything and influence politics and just generally being a bit of a prick, it seems to happen to people.

There’s no hard line between “not enough” and “enough”. More is always better. It’s just a question of whether the gains are worth the effort.

Consider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If we say that being able to satisfy physiological needs is “enough”, you still need to ask: with that probability and for what duration of time? Nothing is guaranteed in life, but as you gain more money, you get asymptotically closer to that 100% probability of satisfying all physiological needs for the duration of a human lifetime. What if you want to provide this guarantee for your children? Your extended family? Your local community? Then you’ll need even more.

Let’s say you’ve satisfied all levels of needs but the last one: self-actualization. That final level can be a huge money sink. Are you an artist that wants to express your idea exactly as they appear in your mind? You’ll need a lot of resources to acquire relevant material, or to pay others to work with you on these projects. Are you a scientist who’s interested in fundamental research and gaining a better understanding of the universe? Again, you need lots of money for your scientific equipment and for paying other people to help you.

Then you look at how hard it is to acquire more money. If you’re out doing a 9-5 every day and getting paid hourly for your work, that’s a high effort. You probably wouldn’t want to keep doing that if you know with 95% certainty that you have enough money to survive your remaining days. Now think about someone taking a bribe. In many cases, it’s extremely low effort. You’re already working your 9-5 anyway, but someone is now paying you extra to not do your job? Win-win. What about ad reads? Again, you’re already working in front of the camera anyway. This is just a question of what you do in front of said camera. Ad reads are probably one of the easiest options, no matter how questionable the product is.

What each person wants out of life is going to be very different from one another. Maybe you only care about having enough to take care of yourself, but someone else may need to care for many other people. One person may be okay with a quiet carefree life, another wants to fix all the problems they find, and another wants to enjoy all the luxuries life has to offer. How far you go is largely dependent on the effort required to get there.

About 20% more than what anybody currently has at any point in time

IMO: Not having to worry about money.
Bonus points if you could easily absorb being jobless for 1-2 years while not making any compromises.

You get to define your own sense of what “enough” money is. Many people will never have enough.

The philosopher Diogenes was sitting on a curbstone, eating bread and lentils for his supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, “If you would learn to be subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils.” Said Diogenes, “Learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to cultivate the king.”

I like to reference Maslows Hierarchy of needs for a different perspective of personal value.