You can have more yachts, jets and homes than you know what to do with with well less than a billion, to the point where acquiring new ones becomes a cognitive burden (“which yacht did I leave that on?”), so you hire people to manage your status symbols, and they become more of a token than a source of joy.
Beyond a certain point (perhaps in the tens of millions, perhaps in the low hundreds), it becomes impossible to spend your wealth on your own desires and joys, and the only uses of it are to jockey for status by wasting it on impractical things (“the other guy just bought a 1km-long yacht, I’d better buy a 1.5km one. Can’t let him outdo me”) or, by buying up labour and political decision-making, diverting society’s efforts from objectives thrashed out by its members (however imperfectly) to your own fantasy projects.
You can have more yachts, jets and homes than you know what to do with with well less than a billion, to the point where acquiring new ones becomes a cognitive burden (“which yacht did I leave that on?”), so you hire people to manage your status symbols, and they become more of a token than a source of joy.
Beyond a certain point (perhaps in the tens of millions, perhaps in the low hundreds), it becomes impossible to spend your wealth on your own desires and joys, and the only uses of it are to jockey for status by wasting it on impractical things (“the other guy just bought a 1km-long yacht, I’d better buy a 1.5km one. Can’t let him outdo me”) or, by buying up labour and political decision-making, diverting society’s efforts from objectives thrashed out by its members (however imperfectly) to your own fantasy projects.