Inflation happens at both a national and personal level. A dollar is worth more to someone with no dollars than it is to someone with one dollar. For decades, economists – including Daniel "Emotional Wellbeing Plateaus at $75K" Kahneman and Matthew "No It Doesn't" Killingsworth – have attempted to devise an equation for the changing personal value of a dollar as wealth grows. Nothing has stuck – or made it easier to talk about money across wealth brackets. Now – odd as it may sound – a pseudonymously authored working paper credited to the non-existent "Maverick Institution," may have done the latter. The paper argues the personal value of a dollar depends on what the dollar will be used to do. Initially, the paper argues, dollars are used buy relief from suffering [1], then quality of life, then status, then ego.
The value of the paper isn't the math or the authority (it's sketchy as hell), but the mental model. It's a quick way to understand what different kinds of people are talking about when they talk about money. Not the dollar. The utility of a dollar. For many Oat Milk Elites, that utility is tied to the price of status as well as the price of experience. That's only a bad thing if we fail to understand what other people are talking about. Relief. Dignity. Respectability. Themselves.
