1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

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jacob
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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by jacob »

@7wb5 - My Copperhead exercise was intended to point out the futility of applying WL7+ lessons to WL3-. I'll go one further to suggest that it would also be a very inefficient use of Mr WL7's time to focus on teaching Mr WL3- how to adult.

Maximum impact for the system of knowledge as a whole is when each an every member focus on delta-1 targets because that's the distance of maximum inspiration (what hippies would call "resonance"). Another issue is that given how there are far fewer members at WL7 than there are at WL5 or WL3, it is also better for the system that WL7 not spend their rare time teaching WL2 stuff to WL1 members even if they can. Better than have a WL3 providing whatever it is that WL2 needs and so on.

All covered in the latter half of Stoa2.

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Jean
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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by Jean »

I think what people consider privilege is any form of inherited capital. Social, cash,abilities.
It might seem unfair that they exist if one consider individuals in a vacuum, but if you consider people as part of a lineage, inheritance is the only way to reallisticaly climb socially. It is very rare to go from underclass to elite in one generation.

zbigi
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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by zbigi »

(offtopic musings)

Going from underclass to elite is most likely in some sort of social upheaval. For example, Poland has been through two revolutions in XX century.
First, the communist government took over in 1944, and installed its people (loyal communists) in positions of power. If you were a nobody, but you belonged to Polish communist party pre-1939 and were an active member, you were automatically part of country's elite post-1944. Also, people who were willing to work in Communist secret service (not for the faint of heart) were also automatically part of elite, to the degree that people in late 1940s were affraid of strangers in nice clothes, as there was a good chance that he's from the secret police (ordinary people couldn't afford good quality clothing). The scale of social advancement was so huge that, in some cases, illiterate local criminal was being nominated to become local police chief (and was giving tickets in form of drawn pictures, since he couldn't write them).
Second revolution was in 1989, with first democratic election, and change of economic system from state-owned to private property. Now, whoever had some sort of connections around the state enterprises and the rapid process of privatization, was in a prime position to set himself up for generations. That's how the class of Russia and Ukraine's uberwealthy oligarchs came to be. Pretty much all of them were lowly civil servants (often in secret police) pre-1989.
Third great example was conquest of England by William the Conqueror and his lads. Whoever was close to William back then got a huge chunk of land (pre-existing English elites were murdered to make room for new elites) and there's a good chance that his family is still enjoying that land in 2025.

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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

jacob wrote:Maximum impact for the system of knowledge as a whole is when each an every member focus on delta-1 targets because that's the distance of maximum inspiration (what hippies would call "resonance"). Another issue is that given how there are far fewer members at WL7 than there are at WL5 or WL3, it is also better for the system that WL7 not spend their rare time teaching WL2 stuff to WL1 members even if they can. Better than have a WL3 providing whatever it is that WL2 needs and so on.

All covered in the latter half of Stoa2.
Yes, I grok that this is your pedagogical philosophy. I just don't know if I believe that it is valid. For example, I'm pretty sure that if a WL6-plus has the rare time available to build a rake and an atomic clock from scratch, track and improve every possible health metric, travel to 3 different continents, and/or lounge about in pajama dress reading cozy mysteries and eating pudding, they could maybe also spare an hour or two to teach a few poor kids sports, math, or gardening skills.

OTOH, I also think the model I was towards half-hazardly constructing above is a bit flimsy. For example, it does not adequately address the Super Orange problem. The Super Orange problem results from recognition (for example) that both Joe Dominguez and my Multi-Millionaire Friend grew up quite poor, but Elon Musk and Vicki Robin grew up affluent. It might be stated as "Why do some people keep piling up the money at Level Orange/Modern while other people move on through Level Green/Post-Modern to Level Yellow/Meta-Modern?" The best answer I can come up with is some degree of exposure to Level Green at a relatively young age (for additional example, both MMM and you grew up in more Level Green realms than the median U.S.) and/or slight tip in innate personality towards XNTJ rather than INTJ.

I also think there may be a good deal of confusing The Princess with The Dragon with The Quest for any/all of us. There is pretty good evidence that the trait of "frugality" is to some extent genetic in origin and also gender-linked. Twice as many men identify as "frugal" than women* . So, there can be a bit of "here is this tendency I have" -> "here is what I can do with this tendency"-> "here is why I do what I do" circularity. OTOH, as any "type" gains experience/knowledge/wisdom towards self-development their ability to fluidly manifest additional traits/tendencies also increases. We can become "fun-loving" and "frugal" or "frugal" and "fun-loving", etc. But, this level of self-aware growth towards flexibility does not really show up until Level Green/Post-Modern. And I think it is possible that simply dismissing others or their behavior/philosophy as "stupid" may be indicative of some degree of avoidance of further "flexible stretching of empathy exercises" at Level Green. What can that grubby stupid little poor kid teach you about yourself within your humanity?

*The fact that there are approximately the same number of women and men on frugal discussion boards can be explained by fact that more women like to "discuss in a group."

Henry
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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by Henry »

Philosophical systems originate at the point a historically embedded philosophical system designates something as a competing philosophical system. It is also at the point that that the members of the opposing philosophical system cannot deny that they are part of a philosophical system. There are papal decrees that comma consumerism/materialsim in the same sentences that reference Islam, the Enlightenment, Protestantism etc. as competing ideologies that threaten not only the doctrines of Roman Catholicism but the spiritual well being of it's followers. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know whether a small d small r democractic/republican capitalistic society can thrive without consumerism, but I do know the US's capitalistic system cannot. It seems obvious why it would be easier for an immigrant from a non-consumer culture to remain a non-consumer than a native born US citizen to renounce consumerism as the native born might be so saturated in consumerism that they are not able to particularize the dirty water they are swimming in and that they have access to other pools into which they can dive. The one group that I am aware of that is able to separate individual consumerist impulses from advanced capitalistic impulses is the Hasidim who cordon off as much of US culture as possible and are able to as they share religious/cultural bonds that pre-date the US consumer society by thousands of years.

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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Mon May 12, 2025 6:55 am
Yes, I grok that this is your pedagogical philosophy. I just don't know if I believe that it is valid. For example, I'm pretty sure that if a WL6-plus has the rare time available to build a rake and an atomic clock from scratch, track and improve every possible health metric, travel to 3 different continents, and/or lounge about in pajama dress reading cozy mysteries and eating pudding, they could maybe also spare an hour or two to teach a few poor kids sports, math, or gardening skills.
This spare hour or two would have a bigger impact if it was spent teaching a few affluent consumers that a few tweaks to their budget will give them the same lifestyle for $50,000/year as they're currently paying $100,000/year for.

I appreciate that people are passionate about different things and different people. This is why rake building, etc. is also part of the list above. Thus I do not object to people building rakes, teaching poor kids basic math, or holding up signs to protest billionaires. However, insofar the goal is to somehow affect ecological reality at large, what matters is I=PAT or in short form for a given group: impact = number of people * their spending. The elephant (or whale) here is the middle class. While billionaires may spend some $25M/year each, this waste just doesn't add up to much in total because there aren' that many of them. In the US, there are about 750 of them, so the total impact is ~750*25M=18.75B/year... the size of one relatively small government department.

Poverty is the other way around. While they tend to spend money inefficiently as well, they don't spend a whole lot. In the US, there are some 35M living in poverty defined as spending less than $15,000/year/person (without loss of generality, I know the exact calculation is slightly more complicated but only slightly), so their impact is 525B/year... less than 2% of GDP.

Now, the middle class. That's the remaining 300M in the US. They spend on average $60000/year for a 2.1 person household. Multiplying that up, the impact is 8571B/year. This is therefore where to focus if the purpose is to reduce wasteful spending/improve ecological efficiency/... And if you want to zoom in, the upper middle class is the bigger fish in terms of size * affluence.

This, in other words, tells me where to focus. Clearly, if I had a choice of maximum impact at the individual level, I should spend my time tutoring billionaire offspring on the chance that I can influence them to grow up living like Warren Buffett. That just might be worth a $24M value-add conversion right there. If my choice is more randomly selected (as it is when I'm shouting into the internet), I should focus on the affluent, MMM-style, talking people back to $50,000/year from $100,000/year. If I can reach a few of those, that's half a million dollar less wasted.

When it comes to my "pedagogical philosophy", it distinguishes between 1) setting an example or helping people "1 on 1" or "1 on many" (like with the internet); and 2) teaching teachers and having second-order influence.

The second-order influence is potentially much more powerful. If I spend the hour or two where I'm not otherwise occupied building rakes on teaching a future teacher AND/OR coming up with new ideas that most other people can't come up with on their own, then I can leverage those 1-2 hours into the hours that those teachers provide and apply. That's the second-order effect. IOW, if I can show 10 people how to inspire others, I'm now leveraged up from 1-2 hours to 10-20 hours.

As for the third-order and higher orders, now consider that these teachers in turn inspire yet others, who in turn inspire... until a point far removed where teaching or showing a good example stops because the message lost momentum. The greatest extension of cascade of knowledge comes from influencing at the point closest to the root of that cascade. Thus---if you can---this is the schwerpunkt you should concentrate your effort on if you want to make a difference that makes a difference in the [total system] and not just a few children or local friends/family. Focusing on the right idea at the right place and time and you can go from 1 hour to even millions of hours.

(I'm leaving out effects such as auto-sourced knowledge and transmission decay but hopefully you get the point.)

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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by Stasher »

jacob wrote:
Mon May 12, 2025 8:00 am
Clearly, if I had a choice of maximum impact at the individual level, I should spend my time tutoring billionaire offspring on the chance that I can influence them to grow up living like Warren Buffett. That just might be worth a $24M value-add conversion right there. If my choice is more randomly selected (as it is when I'm shouting into the internet), I should focus on the affluent, MMM-style, talking people back to $50,000/year from $100,000/year. If I can reach a few of those, that's half a million dollar less wasted.
This is very spot on in my reading through this discussion. I can't add a whole lot to this thread as I am doing my best to understand and follow along on the concepts but what I can do is share my personal perspective. I have been active here in my journal again as I was frequenting the MMM forums more (which I have been doing since 2013) as I noticed a huge surge of the attitude enabling excessive consumption. So many people stuck to the lifestyle philosophy in the early day of MMM where "face punches" were handed out regularly as members called out one another out on buying dumb stuff and being a wasteful consumer. Now members have done so well saving, budgeting & investing that they are buying boats, cars, big houses and fancy trips etc etc. I can't relate to the enabling as the dirty waters they are swimming in are clouding their judgement loosing sight of the original goals.

So as you say Jacob, if we could just show that crowd alone the $50,000 of waste they are creating through creep and being subjected to the North American consumer marketing machine, we would be so much better off.
Last edited by Stasher on Mon May 12, 2025 11:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

7Wannabe5
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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

jacob wrote:Poverty is the other way around. While they tend to spend money inefficiently as well, they don't spend a whole lot. In the US, there are some 35M living in poverty defined as spending less than $15,000/year/person (without loss of generality, I know the exact calculation is slightly more complicated but only slightly), so their impact is 525B/year... less than 2% of GDP.
Yes, I agree that helping/teaching those living in poverty would not be the most effective means by which to address the problem of ecological-overshoot/resource-conservation. However, likely due to my poor attempt at communication, this discussion has gotten off the track of the point I was initially attempting to make which is that whenever I think about the "how much could every human on planet consume" model which spits out "around $7000/year" as result, I immediately also consider the fact that many humans already live far below that level, so they would actually have to be "lifted up" in spending level to achieve highly idealistic equilibrium. I also recognize that raising the bottom spending level of the global poor up to $7000/capita without reducing the spending level of the global middle class would likely worsen ecological-overshoot (give or take for debates around deforestation by subsistence farmers and education of females, etc.) I also recognize that a good deal of totalitarian unpleasantness would be currently required to force this to happen. I was simply attempting to make the point that if somebody has achieved WL6-plus in ERE or roughly ecological sustainable spending level themselves, they should also have money and/or time on tap which they could in part devote to the entirely different *moral front of fighting poverty, thereby helping to full circle facilitate the idealized model in which everybody is consuming around $7000/year.

The other reason why I might promote this addendum-to-model would be that it might better motivate those who do get warm fuzzies from helping disadvantaged humans. For example, reducing ones own spending on food from $600 to $300/month and donating the $300 to infant nutrition non-profit might not do anything to directly reduce ecological-overshoot, but it will force the same habits of frugality and therefore serve to spread the memetic word. Obviously, I am not promoting a new concept here, because, for example, reducing human poverty was more to the point of the classic "More With Less" Mennonite cookbook and other streams of Simple Living practice/philosophy.

In any model that assumes scarcity, there is going to be a tension or trade-off between human poverty and ecological health. For simple example, even the preservation of green spaces around affluent cities tends to price lower-wage workers out of the housing market. If this boundary pressure is not directly addressed, the default is always going to verge on something akin to "Let them eat cake." And that is why the counter-response may become something akin to "You told us to just learn how to program. Now you just learn how to work a shovel." Even the currently-best-known-system/game must address the reality of the "losers" it creates or suffer the consequences.


*Although clearly not systemically detached.

Hristo Botev
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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by Hristo Botev »

jacob wrote:
Sat May 10, 2025 6:12 am
(*) I get a reminder of this when one of our higher spending forumites (lets say >$6,000/month) are kind enough to post details of their budget.
I'm glad to be of some use here. :lol:

Hristo Botev
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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by Hristo Botev »

jacob wrote:
Sun May 11, 2025 7:42 am
One of my dreams (feverish fantasies, really) is how some day there will be "professors of stupidity". There's so little research and study done when it comes to bad thinking that even simple stuff like behavioral economics wins Nobel prizes. ERE is not rocket science per se. What makes it difficult though is that it typically happens in an environment where everyone else (family friends) as well as culture and society goes against it. This is why it requires a strong foundation in philosophy. The average human generally do not know or care to know why they make choices. They just do what everybody else around them are doing. They'll do alright if "everybody else" is generally doing the right thing. They'll struggle if "everybody else" is generally doing the wrong thing. Trying to help someone in the right direction if they're surrounded by a memetic soup that continuously points them in the wrong direction is an uphill battle.
(emphasis added)

I'm seeing this with alcohol and teetotaling. What Allen Carr did (is doing, posthumously) with cigarettes and alcohol, it strikes me that, from a practical psychology perspective, this could be done on an individual level with "el stupidos" like me who need to go through the exercise of: (1) doing an honest assessment of all the cons (and the absence of pros) of some conduct I'm engaging in; (2) questioning why I'm engaging in that conduct despite knowing, really, that it is detrimental; (3) realizing there are very large forces working to keep me engaging in that detrimental conduct; and (4) removing the desire to engage in that conduct and to simply say, "no."

I should probably do a little experiment with myself to equate alcohol and overeating with overspending.

Saltation
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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by Saltation »

Hristo Botev wrote:
Mon May 12, 2025 10:04 am
I'm glad to be of some use here. :lol:
Our family too. Currently we are prepaying our vehicle and that alone is .5 J per month. My property taxes and insurance are ~ 1J annually.

jacob
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Re: 1 Jacob Adjusted For Inflation (JAFI)

Post by jacob »

Saltation wrote:
Mon May 12, 2025 5:00 pm
My property taxes and insurance are ~ 1J annually.
Ours too. So we live on DW's 1J.

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