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RE: Would you accept a $1 million gift on the condition that you could never be a wage earner again?
Thank you for your thoughtful answer enjar.
$1 million is indeed not what it used to be and thus I guess that amount would probably appeal more to people with higher entrepreneurial tendencies. You could (maybe) not depend on one million to pay the bills for the rest of your life so you would still be burdened with some level of financial stress going forward.
"supposed to be freedom now turns into a burden" - Yes, it all depends on how you mentally deal with the situation. You are given one million, but have employment taken away from you. Is that a net plus or a setback? I all depends on how much you are willing to sacrifice for owning your time!
I see it as a setback as it reduces options you could have in life. It is hard to tell though right away as the full benefits or consequences are not realized till later in life. Some people spend that money in under a year. Another could make it last 10.
You could have that really amazing company idea and as such, you knew it won’t last for forever so you go for it. Years later you are massively in the hole and the company has failed. Most people think they have the next million or billion dollar idea. In reality, it really was not that great or not as “original” as they thought a bunch of other people enter into the same market around the same time and they were not able to compete well enough due to lack of experience of not being a wage worker for a number of years.
If we really wanted to make that 1 million last. I assume you would want to buy a fixer-upper house on the cheap and repair it yourself. Let’s allocate 100k paid in cash for the house and 1k a year in maintenance for next 50 years of your life so 50k. A new/used car every 10 years that you learn to fix up yourself since you now have the time at say 25k per car (250k for a lifetime) and say you really luck out from saving on labor and it's only again 1k in maintenance.
Even if you could get your electric bill say down to $200 average per months ( 2,400 a year, and 120k for next 50 years.) Many people think they would go solar but that’s a pain in the butt unless you shell out a quite a large amount and even then it breaks down. Your water you luck out and bought the house with a well so maintained cost for that is already included in the house.
Now we are what 570k. Leaving everything else in life for 430k. The reason I’m not going include this last bit because while you could plan everything else if you find yourself with a lot of time on your hands and bored it could easily become “l want to go to the bar tonight, I won't eat a restaurant tonight.” Most people forget when you are a wage worker you really can’t be spending your money while working unless it's for a lunch/dinner cost to travel, work clothing. You are however not going be going out and doing a 2 week trip to Disney or go on a cruise.
Now if you really wanted to make that money last the most logical thing is to move to a country that has a lower cost of living. Where you can live like a king. The only issue there that is air travel can get expensive if you want to visit family and live in another country.
We are forgetting the biggest issue here inflation. That simple rule every 20 years your buying power is cut by half. If you plan to live another 50 years you are going have to see that happen a couple of times. Which blows our budget entirely. Even if I don’t account for that and use something like my own cost of living I could maybe make it 30 years. I also know that just not going be realistic. As without that tether of responsibility of a wage work there are quite a few things I would want to do in life and that will skyrocket things.
Now maybe you invest it and it works out great. But since this is all the money you will be able to earn as a wage worker putting it into BTC not the greatest idea in the world. This would be considered “I can’t lose it” money and there for you are putting it in places just to fight inflation with the lowest chance of losing it.
Now let’s move the decimal place. It’s now 10 million to give up wage work. Done, I’m sold. Sign me up time to have an amazing life.
Now the real question comes down to automation and robots have replaced all the humans as workers. Governments now have a basic income they pay out because they tax the automations. I still have a feeling most governments would not be a able to tax high enough to pay a basic cost of living wage. Now without huamns and there high cost of labor we should see prices in everything come down quite a lot. Will that happened? Companies don't like to make less money on paper even if it was a higher amount of profit. So I doubt they will go much cheaper than they already are. They will just find cleaver ways to increase the costs like paying for there over seas tax heaven companies that hold patent rights to everything they make a higher amount.
Good observation! You are correct that by accepting the offer you will in fact limit your options later in life. That is kind of counter-intuitive since you create constraints in order to achieve a higher sense of freedom.. I did not see that.
UBI is still up for debate. Too early to say if that will ever be implemented successfully. It is not even a sure thing that AI will in fact take our jobs. They will of course make some professions obsolete, but currently we might lack the imagination to foresee potential new jobs only humans can manage in the future.