Re: Politics in software development projects (was: Unattainable Goals that are Silll Worse Pursuing)

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: [hackers-il] Politics in software development projects (was: Unattainable Goals?that are Silll Worse Pursuing)":
> > > goals in
> > > life that can never be fully attained, but are nevertheless worth
> > > pursuing and getting nearer and nearer to them. Like an asymptotic
> > > function in mathematics if you may.
> >
> > Other examples:
> > 1. Getting as wealthy as possible.
> 
> True to some extent, but while I would love to be rich, I don't see myself 
> needing to be very rich.

I guess you studied differential equations in the Technion, right? Then you
should know why exponential growth happens. It happens when the change of
the function over time isn't constant (which would have led to linear growth)
but rather proprtional to the existing value of the function.

Bringing this theory to wealth accumulation, it is a natural phenomenon that
people think about their wealth in proporion to what they already have.
If you have saved 10,000 shekels, then earning another 1,000 looks good.
But after you have 1,000,000, suddenly another 1,000 looks insignificant.
No matter how much money you have saved, the natural tendency is to want
to double your savings, not to add to it a fixed amount. This is why rich
people always want their wealth to grow exponentially, not stopping at
a million, and not even at a billion.

When you have saved 10,000 shekels, it's easy to think that once you
get to a 1,000,000 you'll stop the rat race. But my guess is that when you
do get to that 1,000,000, you'll be even deeper in the rat race: that million
will look less than it did before (sure, I can buy 100,000 slices of pizza
with it which sounded great when I was a student, but it doesn't buy me my
dream house today), it will be more fragile than ever (if something bad
happens, a million won't be enough, etc.), and you'll be tempted to work
towards the second million.

Needless to say, there are good reasons to try to avoid (or at least curb)
this temptation, but it is a temptation nontheless.

My random signature at the bottom turned out to be quite relevant to this
discussion :-)

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