Hoisted from Archives: Satiation?

Sated?: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal from August 15, 2002: At what level of material wealth does one become, completely, totally, utterly sated? How much stuff--how many things--how much power to buy and control does one have to have before one can say "enough is enough," stop playing the game for increased wealth, and start playing some other, different game?

Here is discouraging psychological evidence from publishing magnate and Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. It turns out that--at least as far as he is concerned--wealth in nine figures isn't enough yet to make him not care...

Premium Blend: A group weblog from the editors of Corante: What's your number? How much is enough? It may be more than you think: ''I had a fascinating conversation recently with Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone. Here's a guy who's probably got three or four hundred million dollars--he's got a Gulfstream II and a house here and a house there, and you can't imagine what trappings he could want from the next level. But he's got this gleam in his eye because he's telling me about how he spent the weekend with Paul Allen. He said that Paul Allen didn't have a GII, he had two 757s. They flew over to, like, Nice, and then they got into Paul's helicopter, which took them to Paul's boat, which stays sort of off the coast of southern France. And I could tell that Jann was picturing himself at the next level--the multi-billionaire. And I was fascinated by that because, holy shit, if that's not enough for Jann, why do I think I'm going to be able to get off the conveyor belt?''