I have read the article, and I feel is missed one obvious possible thing. Maybe highly intelligent people don't care about being rich?
Certainly reaching a "comfortable" income has value, but beyond that there is a limit. I am an AI researcher in University, so I guess under some measures I might come up as "highly intelligent" (whatever that actually means). I'm fairly sure (based on emails I keep getting) I could go into industry and earn much more money. However, the cost/benefit ratio to me isn't worth it.
Bingo, we have a winner! Speaking for myself, I'm at a point where I'm making enough money and have been making decisions to increase my free time. Things like working 100% from home so that I don't waste time commuting and turning down job offers that would pay more because they'd cut into leisure time. An extra $50k/year (or whatever) wouldn't be worth an additional hour of work per day to me.
For context, I’m not referring to SV software engineer salary just normal big city America.
I know a guy who probably now makes a little more than I do on his main job, is my age, but has been saving and investing much more consistently.
He’s always doing side gigs for $50 - $70/hour. Which is really nothing for a software engineer even in my city and much less than he would be making as a full time contractor.
When an opportunity like that comes up for me to “make extra money”. I always turn them down even at much higher rates. Anything we can’t get with my relatively average salary and my wife working we don’t need. I enjoy my time way too much. I don’t think I would work a contract that paid the equivalent of twice my salary as a side job.
I can relate to your friend more, honestly. $50-70/hr is not an elite high level professional salary, but it’s no joke, and much more than the $0/hr you'd otherwise make farting around on HN or watching Netflix.
When you’re young and able, life is merely a race to turn time into money fast enough to allow you to survive long after you can no longer turn time into money.
Every day I waste now may translate into a week of eating dog food after I can no longer work. Therefore, I generally want to maximize the dollar utility of my time, while I can. If I could guarantee that I’d drop dead as soon as I retired, maybe I’d stop and live a little now. But since I can’t (an don’t want to commit suicide when I run out of savings), well, an extra dollar is an extra dollar!
“Money isn’t everything” -says someone with a lot of it.
Becoming rich and maintaining that requires a commitment that eats into everything else. If one has money in their mind that will taint everything they do. For some this equates with not truly being free. But one can be rich in other things as well, money is needed up to the point of becoming and staying independent and free to pursue other great things
Didn't downvote you and Im not denying that what you’re saying is to some extent true but want to point out that’s mostly the case for the old rich. The new rich get affected quite badly by this money bug. At some point money becomes second and power becomes #1, in other words there’s never enough of it because more is needed to feed the ego/power, worries never subside - worries of a different nature than poor people’s, such as maintain that status, comparing with others at that level, that others are to take advantage of their wealth, power games in the family, inheritance nightmares, false friends, trusting no one, not even the partner sometimes etc. These are demons of money. Sure, there are rich people that are truly illuminated which detach completely from that world to pursue other things but these are usually not first gen.
If you want to make a correct generalization, moderation is the key goes a long way.
Personally, my financial goal is to become self sufficient (decent but modest pension and such) and that’s about it. Amassing wealth and spending lots of money does not interest me in the least.
Yes, but there are people of both kinds. Consider Linus Torvalds who instead of starting a multi-million firm, focused on Linux development instead (in fact, it was expected of him to start something like Red Hat or Novell!).
On the other hand, we have the creator of NPM Software[1] Isaac Schlueter who stepped into corporate shoes and turned NPM into a profitable venture. On the other hand, the income of Ryan Dahl who invented Node.js is meager in comparison to Issac's. There was a lot of controversy surrounding this in the FOSS community too if I recall correctly.
Yes. Good point. This is my intuitive feeling as well. An extreme example of this is Paul Erdős (of Erdős number fame) who did not care about any material posessions.
This is my intuitive conclusion as well (with no data to back it up). My goal ever since I finished school was to hit a certain income number and then find ways to convert advancement into working less, not being paid more. So far so good. I like to think I'm reasonably intelligent.
> I have read the article, and I feel is missed one obvious possible thing. Maybe highly intelligent people don't care about being rich?
A different consideration: maybe there exists a relationship between intelligence and "less tolerance for bulls..t". This explains why I know some really smart people who did not succeed in their academic careers even though they were highly intelligent. I consider it as highly plausible that you need an even higher tolerance for bulls..t if you want to become rich.
Hmm is there any evidence to suggest that highly Intelligent people have atleast reached this level of financial independence? Keep in mind today's house prices and cost of living!
Some of us in the US are preoccupied with money to an annoying degree, but it is often a product of our economically precarious situation - not greed. If you don't have enough money life is very bad here, maybe even worse than other wealthy nations.
Well, when you don’t have a social safety net - no universal healthcare, poor maternity/paternity leave, unemployment benefits are meager, mostly “at-will” employment, high cost of college education, high drug prices, social security is not going to be enough to be significant unless you made a lot of money during your working career and have a paid off house, etc.
You basically have to be more focused on money. I am not suggesting any policy changes (at least not here), but you adjust to the environment as it is.
If this were true, I believe US-Americans would lead a more frugal life and avoid unnecessary expenses in an attempt to save as much money as possible for cases of emergency.
That has nothing to do with America or HN. Everywhere I've went I've seen the same thing: vast majority of people see no other value than financial, in general. It shapes how they think, who they hang out with and what their "values" are. Money comes first, and then everything is rationalized later.
For example, if a rich person does activity X and a poor person does the same, equivalent activity X, it can happen (and it does happen) that they say that the poor person is an idiot while the rich person is a genius. For the same exact thing.
Rich people know this. They know they are buying everything around them, including people. None of the rich people I know are naive in the sense that they think are that funny, interesting, intelligent or attractive, especially to females. The things that I've seen rich people get away with, I guarantee, 99% of HN will not believe. Probably me too, if I didn't witness it. Not talking about crimes here (although that happens, too). Just social things.
It's all a game and everyone involved knows exactly how everything is setup, but for some reason, we look the other way and if we say anything like this in real life, we would be thought of as "bitter" or jealous or something.
Money is indisputably important, but the best marker of intelligence that I have consistently seen is the right attitude and appreciation of money.
And I am saying this as someone well off, who will most probably never have any financial issues in life. So this is not "bitterness" or envy of the rich or something.
Felix Dennis, an actual billionaire, called it the "point at the sky" theory of wealth creation. It's really a form of cargo culting.
On the other aspect, there are a number of what Thomas J. Stanley call "gold collar" workers: young, singles who often live at home but make relatively good money and so tend to buy things they cannot afford like used Lexuses, BMWs, Mercedes, etc. He even wrote a book about it "Stop Acting Rich."
HN is (or at least claims to be) the epicenter of Silicon Valley tech culture - it's owned by a startup incubator and used to be called Startup News after all.
It's not surprising that a lot of people here buy into the mythology that having a high IQ ranks them among an elite class in a technical meritocracy, and that they're just one app and a bit of hustle away from a million dollar buyout.
Certainly reaching a "comfortable" income has value, but beyond that there is a limit. I am an AI researcher in University, so I guess under some measures I might come up as "highly intelligent" (whatever that actually means). I'm fairly sure (based on emails I keep getting) I could go into industry and earn much more money. However, the cost/benefit ratio to me isn't worth it.