“The richest person in the world in the 1830s was Nathan Rothschild, whose personal net worth was around 0.6 per cent of national income. Despite this vast fortune, Rothschild died at age 58 in 1836 of an infection that $10 of antibiotics could likely cure today. Similarly, the richest people in the world today, such as Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, presumably have a marginal utility from additional consumption spending that is zero. Nevertheless, their utility still increases when new goods (smartphones or LLMs) are invented. These examples suggest that more consumption of a fixed set of goods eventually hits a marginal utility of zero while the invention of new goods or higher quality goods continues to increase wellbeing.”
As seen on a Students For Liberty comment on a Facebook page I follow. The quote was cited by this chap: Karthik Tadepalli, of the Becker Friedman Institute For Economics, University of Chicago. I don’t have the original link. There are some super-smart young classical liberals out there, and many seem to be coming from places such as Eastern Europe, India, etc.
The point about marginal utility reminds me of a comment from Perry Metzger on this blog on 2014, debunking the Thomas Piketty book that purported to claim that wealth rises faster than the overall economy and that the “rich” will eventually swallow up the world unless restrained by wealth taxes and so on. Perry M got in a reference to Douglas Adams, which is always the mark of a good article, IMHO.
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