Can money buy oranges? Well obviously, in an indirect sense. With money, you could travel to a place where you’ve heard oranges grow wild, search to find such a plant in the wild, dig it up and try to ship it home, see if it you can make it thrive there, and if it does, take some oranges as your reward. This might work, but success depends not just on the money you pay; it also depends much more on your effort, abilities, and other context. In principle, you might be able to execute this plan without any money, but typically more money will make such a plan a bit easier. So, yes, in this weak sense, you can “buy” oranges with money.
I think that some people pursue money and then spend it all on status signals, and that this is not a good life. I also think this has been generally acknowledged that this is a sort of addictive vice like drugs or gambling. Therefore, people are motivated to talk about how you shouldn't do it, the same way they say things like "crack is wack" or "crime doesn't pay". So one explanation for talk about what money can't buy is part of this genre of warnings about a vice. With that in mind it's surprising to me that the list you reposted includes "47. Class." I would have thought that the whole point of this list was to warn against pursuing money to spend on status symbols, which is sort of like spending it on class.
Measuring someone's internal emotional state seems particularly vulnerable to corruption to me, at least on the face of it. i.e. relative to other things we want to measure, with internal emotional state it seems particularly hard to find reliable signs of that state which are hard for the person in question to fake. Due to the fact that they are all mediated by the person in question. (Though of course we might be able to find some signs for which faking is costly enough to stop it....)
But I'm probably missing something. What are some examples you have in mind of other things that are equally easy to corrupt the measurement of and yet which we successfully measure?
"I look pretty crap all day but I'm still happy" --> would be interesting indeed for such beauty and happiness agents to find synergies in their respective expertise and probably share the data and make packages with appropriately discounted rates."when I work out, I'm practically in pain" --> what about *after* you work out? The scientific literature I read says you produce certain levels of hormones like endocannabinoids, so let's say the happiness agent adds constant hormone production monitoring to their data stream...
There are things the super rich know that ordinary people do not. One of the most important of those things is each other. If Peter Thiel is visiting Turkey, and he wants to know how to meet President Erdogan, he just asks a fellow billionaire. Maybe Melih Abdulhayoğlu. Why would this be surprising? If it works for meeting a Turkish President, why not for finding the perfect Turkish hammam?
Let's stop pretending that the super rich are somehow just like ordinary people. And let's stop pretending that buying happiness is something ordinary like buying oranges. It is not a commodity. It is bespoke. I think that's what you mean by hiring a happiness agent.
Not everyone knows how to hire the right agent if they want to buy a privately held company. Not everyone knows how to hire the right agent at a white-shoe lawfirm to represent them in their legal affairs. Not everyone knows how to hire the right agent at a jewellery shop in Milan to buy a diamond that was the heirloom of a dead princess.
But that doesn't mean that suddenly KKR and the list of magic circle lawfirms and Buccellati are somehow state secrets.
Neither are the world's top wellness spas, where those with means go to buy a little happiness.
I'm curious: do you have some reason to believe that rich people don't hire happiness agents at the world's top wellness spas? Or is this not really about finding out the answer to where to hire such an agent, but more about making ourselves feel better that perhaps it is not possible to buy happiness?
Seems you are saying that there's no point in arranging more direct ways to buy happiness, because rich people just know how to do it even without such assistance. They just buy the right things, and just know they are the right things to buy. Because they are rich and just know. Guess that's one of the perks of being rick.
With oranges, how do you know to go to a grocery store and not a barber shop? By analogising to such a widely accessible commodity, you are presupposing that buying happiness - like buying oranges - is something accessible to a vast economic cohort. It isn’t.
Buying happiness is for people who don’t buy oranges. They have “people”, or in your parlance, they have agents who buy their oranges. And they never see anything but a perfect orange in their fruit bowl. That orange probably costs 25 times more than an orange in your house - the classic Principal-agent problem.
Maybe you don’t believe that buying happiness is insanely expensive. There are poor people, I hear you say, who are happy. So money is not necessary to be happy. True. But money is necessary to *buy* happiness.
Never confuse the secret to happiness with the secret to buying happiness. One is a do-it-yourself. For the other, there are agents.
And through the magic of the Principal-agent problem, you’d be shocked at how expensive happiness is when you rely on others to get it for you. Saying that money can’t buy happiness is like saying money can’t buy a superyacht. Of course money can buy a superyacht. You just don’t have that kind of money.
And supreyachts - like happiness, or privately held companies - are not sold at the grocery store or at a barber shop. But if you are rich enough, and in the market, there are agents that will get you the right target company for acquisition, or the right superyacht for your lifestyle. Why do you think it isn’t the same for happiness?
Take this example from the New York Times ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/sports/chelsea-yoga-premier-league.html ). These people - who are worth $7.6b - are very cagey in the article about where they found their expert. But when they did, they plucked him out and brought him back home with them. Such experts are worth their weight in bitcoin.
How can you believe my claim? You shouldn’t! It is free. And we don’t know each other.
How do people know to go there? Same way Warren Buffet knows who to give his money to for the greatest philanthropic impact. He asks another super rich person.
I think this is a fascinating concept. If history has shown one trend, it is that progress is accompanied by an ever-multiplying selection of goods for purchase. If you are correct about this (and, perhaps, if you are also incorrect about one or two important things in "The Age of Em") then perhaps this is one more market that will develop as we reduce the number of people who are needed to do other things and the level of wealth in the world rises -- especially the upper echelons of wealth, where the future comes first, perhaps we will start to see agents like these. I think it would be quite interesting.I'd argue that Starbucks is already selling something more than coffee that includes some hard-to-measure things like these that people are obviously willing to pay for.
I agree with both points: beauty is indeed in us, and others can notice our happiness. However, the agents we pay to boost our happiness simply can't measure our happiness—just like they can't measure our inner beauty—like they can measure our external appearance, which is pretty objective, as you said.
The methods you outlined, such as using video and audio feed, can be misleading. I mean I look pretty crap all day but I'm still happy. As an another example, when I workout, I'm practically in pain; yet, working out is my favorite part of the day—though it doesn't seem like that to an external observer.
We successfully measure many things in our world today, even though they also are tied to incentives. Why assume corruption problems are so much larger here?
As with my story of oranges, money helps with most things. The question is how much knowledge is required on your part to succeed. Even if this spa succeeds, how do people know to go there to succeed? How can I believe your claim? The point of buying more directly is avoid such doubts.
I agree that you can ''buy'' beauty, because beauty is based on someone else's perspective; that is, it's rated by others. However, happiness is not. Happiness is within oneself; others can't rate how happy you are. Therefore, increasing happiness, or ''buying'' happiness, isn't equivalent to increasing beauty.
Go spend a few weeks at any one of the world's top wellness spas ( https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/travel-guide/g13797039/best-luxury-spas-in-the-world/ ) and you'll meet folks with all the money in the world, spending that cash on buying happiness. There are baseline metrics on day 1. Goals are set, and progress is tracked. These are literally happiness experts - agents paid to learn and practice - and then help you achieve happiness. And it ain't cheap. But it works.
Comment: I agree with your assessment, but the obstacles aren't trivial. Simple advice is an unreliable lever, and giving more control to an agent isn't for everyone. Measurement would often be an expensive upfront cost limiting the minimal contract size to a few thousand dollars, at which point gaming the measurement is incentivized for both parties. The cost to refine the measurement and protect it against manipulations must be less than what could be gained by gaming it. Thus, many things would have a large overhead cost. For most things on this list, it makes more sense to simply buy advice than to directly buy it as proposed, unless the stakes are abnormal (movie star fashion) or you are filthy rich.
Sidenote: "convicts to Australian" and "Especially re what other agents" seems to be a typo.
I think that some people pursue money and then spend it all on status signals, and that this is not a good life. I also think this has been generally acknowledged that this is a sort of addictive vice like drugs or gambling. Therefore, people are motivated to talk about how you shouldn't do it, the same way they say things like "crack is wack" or "crime doesn't pay". So one explanation for talk about what money can't buy is part of this genre of warnings about a vice. With that in mind it's surprising to me that the list you reposted includes "47. Class." I would have thought that the whole point of this list was to warn against pursuing money to spend on status symbols, which is sort of like spending it on class.
Measuring someone's internal emotional state seems particularly vulnerable to corruption to me, at least on the face of it. i.e. relative to other things we want to measure, with internal emotional state it seems particularly hard to find reliable signs of that state which are hard for the person in question to fake. Due to the fact that they are all mediated by the person in question. (Though of course we might be able to find some signs for which faking is costly enough to stop it....)
But I'm probably missing something. What are some examples you have in mind of other things that are equally easy to corrupt the measurement of and yet which we successfully measure?
"I look pretty crap all day but I'm still happy" --> would be interesting indeed for such beauty and happiness agents to find synergies in their respective expertise and probably share the data and make packages with appropriately discounted rates."when I work out, I'm practically in pain" --> what about *after* you work out? The scientific literature I read says you produce certain levels of hormones like endocannabinoids, so let's say the happiness agent adds constant hormone production monitoring to their data stream...
There are things the super rich know that ordinary people do not. One of the most important of those things is each other. If Peter Thiel is visiting Turkey, and he wants to know how to meet President Erdogan, he just asks a fellow billionaire. Maybe Melih Abdulhayoğlu. Why would this be surprising? If it works for meeting a Turkish President, why not for finding the perfect Turkish hammam?
Let's stop pretending that the super rich are somehow just like ordinary people. And let's stop pretending that buying happiness is something ordinary like buying oranges. It is not a commodity. It is bespoke. I think that's what you mean by hiring a happiness agent.
Not everyone knows how to hire the right agent if they want to buy a privately held company. Not everyone knows how to hire the right agent at a white-shoe lawfirm to represent them in their legal affairs. Not everyone knows how to hire the right agent at a jewellery shop in Milan to buy a diamond that was the heirloom of a dead princess.
But that doesn't mean that suddenly KKR and the list of magic circle lawfirms and Buccellati are somehow state secrets.
Neither are the world's top wellness spas, where those with means go to buy a little happiness.
I'm curious: do you have some reason to believe that rich people don't hire happiness agents at the world's top wellness spas? Or is this not really about finding out the answer to where to hire such an agent, but more about making ourselves feel better that perhaps it is not possible to buy happiness?
Seems you are saying that there's no point in arranging more direct ways to buy happiness, because rich people just know how to do it even without such assistance. They just buy the right things, and just know they are the right things to buy. Because they are rich and just know. Guess that's one of the perks of being rick.
With oranges, how do you know to go to a grocery store and not a barber shop? By analogising to such a widely accessible commodity, you are presupposing that buying happiness - like buying oranges - is something accessible to a vast economic cohort. It isn’t.
Buying happiness is for people who don’t buy oranges. They have “people”, or in your parlance, they have agents who buy their oranges. And they never see anything but a perfect orange in their fruit bowl. That orange probably costs 25 times more than an orange in your house - the classic Principal-agent problem.
Maybe you don’t believe that buying happiness is insanely expensive. There are poor people, I hear you say, who are happy. So money is not necessary to be happy. True. But money is necessary to *buy* happiness.
Never confuse the secret to happiness with the secret to buying happiness. One is a do-it-yourself. For the other, there are agents.
And through the magic of the Principal-agent problem, you’d be shocked at how expensive happiness is when you rely on others to get it for you. Saying that money can’t buy happiness is like saying money can’t buy a superyacht. Of course money can buy a superyacht. You just don’t have that kind of money.
And supreyachts - like happiness, or privately held companies - are not sold at the grocery store or at a barber shop. But if you are rich enough, and in the market, there are agents that will get you the right target company for acquisition, or the right superyacht for your lifestyle. Why do you think it isn’t the same for happiness?
Take this example from the New York Times ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/sports/chelsea-yoga-premier-league.html ). These people - who are worth $7.6b - are very cagey in the article about where they found their expert. But when they did, they plucked him out and brought him back home with them. Such experts are worth their weight in bitcoin.
How can you believe my claim? You shouldn’t! It is free. And we don’t know each other.
How do people know to go there? Same way Warren Buffet knows who to give his money to for the greatest philanthropic impact. He asks another super rich person.
I think this is a fascinating concept. If history has shown one trend, it is that progress is accompanied by an ever-multiplying selection of goods for purchase. If you are correct about this (and, perhaps, if you are also incorrect about one or two important things in "The Age of Em") then perhaps this is one more market that will develop as we reduce the number of people who are needed to do other things and the level of wealth in the world rises -- especially the upper echelons of wealth, where the future comes first, perhaps we will start to see agents like these. I think it would be quite interesting.I'd argue that Starbucks is already selling something more than coffee that includes some hard-to-measure things like these that people are obviously willing to pay for.
I agree with both points: beauty is indeed in us, and others can notice our happiness. However, the agents we pay to boost our happiness simply can't measure our happiness—just like they can't measure our inner beauty—like they can measure our external appearance, which is pretty objective, as you said.
The methods you outlined, such as using video and audio feed, can be misleading. I mean I look pretty crap all day but I'm still happy. As an another example, when I workout, I'm practically in pain; yet, working out is my favorite part of the day—though it doesn't seem like that to an external observer.
Sure, if you set your goal high enough, nothing can get it. But why pick on money then; it is everything that has failed.
We successfully measure many things in our world today, even though they also are tied to incentives. Why assume corruption problems are so much larger here?
As with my story of oranges, money helps with most things. The question is how much knowledge is required on your part to succeed. Even if this spa succeeds, how do people know to go there to succeed? How can I believe your claim? The point of buying more directly is avoid such doubts.
Beauty is "in" you too, even if others see it. Others see your happiness as well.
I agree that you can ''buy'' beauty, because beauty is based on someone else's perspective; that is, it's rated by others. However, happiness is not. Happiness is within oneself; others can't rate how happy you are. Therefore, increasing happiness, or ''buying'' happiness, isn't equivalent to increasing beauty.
The trick to successfully buy happiness is to enjoy the buying, regarless of outcome. But knowing the trick may spoil it all.
Go spend a few weeks at any one of the world's top wellness spas ( https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/travel-guide/g13797039/best-luxury-spas-in-the-world/ ) and you'll meet folks with all the money in the world, spending that cash on buying happiness. There are baseline metrics on day 1. Goals are set, and progress is tracked. These are literally happiness experts - agents paid to learn and practice - and then help you achieve happiness. And it ain't cheap. But it works.
Precision: What is meant by anti-agent?
Comment: I agree with your assessment, but the obstacles aren't trivial. Simple advice is an unreliable lever, and giving more control to an agent isn't for everyone. Measurement would often be an expensive upfront cost limiting the minimal contract size to a few thousand dollars, at which point gaming the measurement is incentivized for both parties. The cost to refine the measurement and protect it against manipulations must be less than what could be gained by gaming it. Thus, many things would have a large overhead cost. For most things on this list, it makes more sense to simply buy advice than to directly buy it as proposed, unless the stakes are abnormal (movie star fashion) or you are filthy rich.
Sidenote: "convicts to Australian" and "Especially re what other agents" seems to be a typo.