I remember reading somewhere that Bill Gates makes so much money that it's not even worth his time to pick up a $100 note from the ground. I always thought that was a bit silly, as it's not like Billy G makes money via commission and is losing money whenever he's not making a sale. He gets paid a salary, so he's still earning money while bending down to pick up that note. And even if you were to think about whether his time would be better spent in a meeting or something, he's obviously not in a meeting if he's out finding $100 on the ground. He might be on his way to a meeting, and I'm sure they can wait the extra couple of seconds it takes him to bend down and pick it up.
And even then, if it takes a couple of seconds, and you assume Mr Gates makes more than $100 every 2 seconds, that means he makes over $3,000 per minute, which makes his hourly wage, $180,000 per hour, or $4,320,000 per day, or $7,200,000 per week, or $374,400,000 per year. That's a crazily astounding number. And yet... according to paywizard.org (sounds legit), he earns an annual income of $2.6 billion USD.
Which works out to be over $7 million per day. Which is more than I estimated for picking up a $100 note from the ground. So I was wrong, it really isn't worth his time to pick up a $100 note.
Well, just so you don't think I'm massively overpaid for the work that you all think I do, it is well worth my time to pick up a $100 note from the ground.
The reason I'm writing about this now is because I was telling D about how happy I was that I won $10 in a bet with Person. D remarked that I need to keep going with my $400 a month experiment if $10 is still a lot of money to me, as it seems that I haven't learned my lesson. I don't really understand that logic. I got $10 for almost no effort (and from my opinion, a non-existent risk).
Of course, that lead to a discussion with Jal about how much money would be enough money to make it worthwhile. He slightly changed the question to be whether you'd find it worthwhile to pick up a note if it was on a different floor of the building (i.e. you had to take some stairs / the lift). Everyone seemed to agree that it was worthwhile to pick up $100. Once we got down to $50, about half the people dropped out, saying it wasn't worth the effort. I seemed to be the only person willing to do it for $10. Nobody was willing to do it for a $2 coin. But everyone said they'd pick up a $2 coin if they saw it on the ground.
Jal proposed a money-distance relationship: the further away the money is, the higher the value has to be before you're willing to make the effort to pick it up. But then he added that if he did find a $100 on the ground in the office, he'd feel obligated to hand it in to the concierge / lost and found, because he thought it would be unethical to just take it - even though he thinks there's a high probability that the concierge would just pocket it. I find that really admirable.
This would normally be something that would trigger an experiment, but I don't have that kind of budget! I guess for most people, it would have to be a significant amount of money before they'd be willing to go somewhere out of the way to pick it up. $10 is still a significant amount of money to me (though I did spend more than $10 on lunch today, but that was because IP and Special K wanted to go somewhere nicer for a lunch before everyone leaves for the Christmas break). And I ended up buying lunch for everyone, because I convinced my siblings that we don't need to buy presents for each other this year, so I'm well under budget for the month.
But tomorrow is Star Wars day! I'm excited.
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