What more money buys you, now and in 1916, is social status.
It goes well beyond that. With more money, I can pay someone to keep my house clean and maintain my yard, own a more reliable car, buy and eat better quality/healthier food. I don't have to care about how much it costs me to go to the dentist, nor how much I have to pay to vacation for two weeks in South America.
You can exercise money to buy social status, but at the heart of it, money buys ease of life. I bet Bill Gates very rarely thinks about how much money he has or how much something will cost him; your housekeeper thinks about that much, much more often.
My main point is that a $700 smartphone is literally the best smartphone that money can buy, and there has never been a better smartphone in all of human history. I like knowing that the device in my pocket is the absolute pinnacle of mobile devices, and that no-one in the entire world has (or has ever had) a better smartphone.
Another point is about the utility of money. Once you reach a certain level of financial independence, your life is only marginally improved by private jets and private chefs. For instance, if you had $4 million in index funds, you could quit your job and live on an annual salary of $120k. You could hire cleaners, drive a very nice car, eat very good food, have great health and dental insurance, and go on vacation... permanently.
I think more software engineers should be thinking about financial independence, because it's so achievable in this industry.
The grandfather comment's argument was exactly that those differences in quality face vastly diminishing returns very quickly after you go beyond the reaches of the middle class.
And even before that: bourgeois attitudes can make a few dollars stretch a lot more. (But on the other hand, having more money lets you get away with less discipline in spending.)
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It goes well beyond that. With more money, I can pay someone to keep my house clean and maintain my yard, own a more reliable car, buy and eat better quality/healthier food. I don't have to care about how much it costs me to go to the dentist, nor how much I have to pay to vacation for two weeks in South America.
You can exercise money to buy social status, but at the heart of it, money buys ease of life. I bet Bill Gates very rarely thinks about how much money he has or how much something will cost him; your housekeeper thinks about that much, much more often.
My main point is that a $700 smartphone is literally the best smartphone that money can buy, and there has never been a better smartphone in all of human history. I like knowing that the device in my pocket is the absolute pinnacle of mobile devices, and that no-one in the entire world has (or has ever had) a better smartphone.
Another point is about the utility of money. Once you reach a certain level of financial independence, your life is only marginally improved by private jets and private chefs. For instance, if you had $4 million in index funds, you could quit your job and live on an annual salary of $120k. You could hire cleaners, drive a very nice car, eat very good food, have great health and dental insurance, and go on vacation... permanently.
I think more software engineers should be thinking about financial independence, because it's so achievable in this industry.
The grandfather comment's argument was exactly that those differences in quality face vastly diminishing returns very quickly after you go beyond the reaches of the middle class.
And even before that: bourgeois attitudes can make a few dollars stretch a lot more. (But on the other hand, having more money lets you get away with less discipline in spending.)