Re: How important is money?

Max More (maxmore@primenet.com)
Tue, 24 Jun 1997 17:39:11 -0700


At 04:32 PM 6/24/97 -0700, you wrote:
>
>If you are making money, you are by definition doing what you
>can to achieve whatever your goals are. There is no such thing
>as "enough" or "plenty"; they are menaingless abstractions.

Yes, I can't imagine having "enough" money. Bill Gates is now worth over
$30 billion. If I had that much (and even if it were all liquid instead of
mostly tied up in stock) I certainly wouldn't think it was enough. Bill
just gave $200 million (that's not at typo!) to help libraries buy
computers and get more people on the Net. A worthy project, but with that
much money I'd also be funding major amounts of life extension research,
among other things. $30 billions really isn't much at to promote some of my
goals, including getting control of aging in a hurry, bringing about
nanotech, creating good neural-computer interfaces, setting up many good
private schools, influencing third world governments (actually *all*
governments) to move to free markets, researching more efficient space
transportation systems, understanding the brain, etc.

I've always thought a pretty good test of intelligence was to ask someone
what they would do with $X, and keeping increasing the value of X until
they can't think of anything else to do with it, except buy 50 Rolls
Royce's (as a certain guru did not long ago). I suspect most people on this
list wouldn't have any trouble finding sensible ways to spend their first
trillion dollars.

Max

Max More, Ph.D.
more@extropy.org
http://www.primenet.com/~maxmore
President, Extropy Institute: exi-info@extropy.org, http://www.extropy.org
EXTRO 3 CONFERENCE on the future: http://www.extropy.org/extro3.htm